Convergent Journey

A cuppa tea and a camera

Archive for ‘June, 2012’

This One’s for Dad

By on June 17, 2012

I think of you a lot when I’m on the road. While we bounced along the nauseatingly dizzy Duke’s Pass in the Central Highlands. Or when I was driving tepidly along winding lanes in the Lake District, uncertain of what might appear around the next bend, I thought of the many narrow mountain passes (with frighteningly few guardrails) you drove on our family trips. Since I usually take public transportation, just being in a car at all reminds me of how safe I felt when you were behind the wheel. But now having been in the driver’s seat I know how anxiety-inducing it can actually be.

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Or I think of how hard I made you work during our family trips as a kid. Like when I didn’t want to go hiking so you had to carry me piggyback all the way up. (Oops, sorry. But hey, at least it gave you a good workout!)

Twenty-some-odd years later, I hope it’s not too late to say thanks. For all the work that made those trips possible, both in terms of bringing home the bacon and actually getting us from A to B. I wish I’d appreciated it more at the time. Little did you know, you were planting the seeds of a late-blooming passion for travel!

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One memory that still makes me laugh out loud every time I remember it is from a trip we took to somewhere in the Midwest. Half Dome, maybe? Or some other big rock formation. You had perched your glasses on top of your head to see better through the viewfinder of the old Nikon. A few minutes later, you asked, “Where are my glasses?”

Bro laughed so hard, pointing out that they were on your head.

Five minutes later. Bro perched his glasses on top of his head to get a better view of the big rock through one of those coin-operated binoculars.

Another few minutes pass.

Bro: “Where are my glasses?!”

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Happy Father’s Day :)

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The Keys to Happy Travel: Planning and Remembering

By on June 13, 2012

In the last post, I mentioned a study from two years ago that claimed people experience more of a boost in their happiness levels before a trip than during or after. The argument goes, it’s the anticipation and the planning that gets people all excited:

After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people…. There was no post-trip happiness benefit for travelers who said the vacation was “neutral” or “stressful.” Surprisingly, even those travelers who described the trip as “relaxing” showed no additional jump in happiness after the trip. “They were no happier than people who had not been on holiday,” said the lead author, Jeroen Nawijn.

So how can you drag out those happiness benefits? Well, I recently attended a talk at LSE with Daniel Kahneman, a seminal behavioural economist. I was excited because his research comprised about 30% of my syllabus in behavioural econ this term. The talk was unfortunately not all that interesting but I blame the moderator, who I thought did a really dismal job and barely knew what he was talking about (system 1, system 2, blah blah blah).

One thing that did stand out is Kahneman’s point about how our memories of experiences are shaped. He points out that people tend to conflate memory and experience, even though experiencing a moment and remembering it later are actually quite different. For example, if you attend a concert and there’s a loud screeching noise (or a persistent ringtone) at the end, you might say, “It ruined the experience for me.” Actually, the experience was how you enjoyed the concert during the first hour and a half, yet the memory of that experience is disproportionately determined by a final screech. In other words, we’re overly influenced by last impressions or peak (and, possibly, trough) moments.

The takeaway for traveling well? Remember it better. As this NYT article on “Planning the Perfect Vacation” recommends, try to end on a high note—save the best for last, perhaps—or at least plan a few activities or moments that will stand out in your memory as something special.

The other part that has made traveling even more fun in retrospect is recognizing the places I’ve been in the media. I was watching a rather boring movie called The Cardinal, which really wasn’t capturing my interest at all until! they were on a boat from Vienna along the Danube, passing right by the towns where we’d gone biking, on his way to the monastery!

Or hearing about Hallstatt on the news (this week’s “Wait Wait.. Don’t Tell Me“) because China spent nearly a billion dollars to create a replica of the Austrian village, though it doesn’t come with the alpine beauty and the lakes and the waterfall roaring through the town. (If you watch the BBC video, doesn’t the mayor of Hallstatt look just like Julian Assange?)

 

Something of the rustic, natural beauty gets lost in translation.

 

And I guess you can’t really create a whole mountain range either.  

Or watching the Olympic torch recreating the Chariots of Fire moment on its way past St. Andrews to light up Edinburgh Castle, then on to Stirling and the Wallace Memorial.

The “I’ve been there!” moment is all the more enhanced because these places always do seem to look better in the movies, don’t they? I was watching a film set in New York City the other day, and whenever I watch movies about New York I’m always amazed at how bright and shiny and clean everything looks.

Journaling helps preserve the memories too. Blogging especially has been helping me to keep reliving the memories! In short, I know I’m a lucky gal to have traveled so much in a mere ten months. My European travels are almost at an end, but they are hopefully well-preserved in my memory—and on this blog—for all their peaks and troughs and everyday details.

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Versatile Blogger & Beautiful Blog Awards

By on June 11, 2012

Thanks to Canadian Travel Bugs for nominating me for the Versatile Blogger and Beautiful Blog Awards! I’m nothing short of a few months late in responding to the former nomination, but the latter gives me the occasion and the excuse to kill both birds with one stone :)

Without diminishing my appreciation of receiving this recognition, the rules these awards come with do strike me as a sort of round robin email of the blogosphere. But it’s in an entirely generous spirit, so I’m happy to oblige. Here’s how they work:

Versatile Blogger

  • Thank the person who gave you the award.
  • Include a link to their blog in your award post.
  • Nominate 15 bloggers/blogs for the Versatile Blogger Award.
  • Leave a link on their blog informing them of their new award.
  • Tell 7 things about yourself.

Beautiful Blog 

  • Thank the person who nominated you.
  • Post the award on your blog.
  • Nominate 7 blogs.

So with thanks again to Canadian Travel Bugs, here goes!

Nominations

Collectively, I suppose, I should nominate 22 blogs, but that’s a bit aspirational. I’ve got a list of seven eight that I love reading, for their insightful thoughts, entertaining bits, unique perspectives and photos that transport you to the places they’ve been. Here they are, with links to some posts that won me over:

Seven Things about Me

1. This task is inherently a bit challenging because, as you may have noticed, I try to keep my blog fairly anonymous. I don’t use full names, for example, or post pictures in which my or my friends’ faces are recognizable.

2. Truth is, I’m a little paranoid about the Internet… The above might seem overly cautious, but you see, one focus of my studies has been regulating online privacy, and the more you know about what can happen with your data online, the more paranoid you become. See this post for more thoughts on the topic. I don’t mean to sound like a paranoid luddite. The Internet is great! Skype is miraculous! All I’m saying is, it does have downsides for all its advantages.

Alright now, time for the real confessions…

3. Before this year, I thought traveling was overrated. It just seemed like such a pain—all that planning and packing and waiting around at airports and logistical hassle and money and jet lag! And remember that study that said people don’t actually even enjoy their vacations that much? They get more of a happiness boost from the anticipation and planning than they do while they’re actually there. So I thought a staycation would have more mental relaxation benefits. WHAT WAS I THINKING! Traveling is the best thing ever.

4. I was always a bit of an anglophile. I’m a total bookworm and majored in English in college. I’ve dreamed of spending at least six months working or studying in London ever since high school. So, though I’m supposed to be here studying social sciences at the London School of Economics, secretly I’m really here to soak in all the literary heritage and arts and culture.

5. I have a terrible sense of direction. I got navigating NYC down to a science (avenues run north-south; even streets go east, odds go west), so I seldom ever got disoriented. It helps that the city is structured on a grid. But when I first moved to New York and got off the subway all discombobulated, if I thought, I should go that way, I’d turn around and walk in the opposite direction. In London with all its windy roads and alleyways, my lack of skill in this regard can be fairly problematic.

6. Two things I miss most about America. Besides my family and friends of course, I miss good customer service and clean tap water the most. Honestly. Every time my tap water comes out if the dual faucets smelling like sulphur, I just want to hop on the first plane back to the U.S. of A.

7. Two things I’ll miss most about London. It’s just such a beautiful city. Impeccably maintained gardens, elaborate stonework, grandeur in your face in a way that would be completely inexcusable in the States. It’s of course hoity-toity and outdated, and on the whole I much prefer the American go-getter spirit unfettered by the trappings of centuries-old classism. But for a short while, it’s not bad to bask in the gilded glory of what old money can buy. Also, the tea. I will miss cream tea. Adding this to my list of long-term life goals: open a cozy bookstore/cafe serving tea and cake.

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Weather Talk: It’s a Cumulonimbus!

By on June 10, 2012

The other day, I read a BBC article about how to make weather conversations more interesting and scoffed. Of all the things to write a news article about, how to talk about the weather? As if the Brits need any help with that. And if “Cloudy today, eh?” wasn’t a particularly successful conversation-starter, I doubt “Take a look at that cumulonimbus” would fare much better.

But it got me thinking about clouds, because I honestly am fascinated with the clouds here in the UK. They seem much lower to the ground than anywhere else I’ve lived, and are much faster-moving. And then yesterday we went to the terrace of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to this gorgeous sight:

And I was won over.

That’s a fine-looking stratocumulus, wouldn’t you say?

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