Comfortable Disorientation

Tokyo

Stumbling on an old friend in a new setting. I seem to bump into copies of Louise Bourgois' Maman all over the place.

Sometimes my job rocks! I'm in Tokyo, a city that has always fascinated me, so much so that I always forget I've never actually been here before. And I'm researching haircare, possibly my all time favourite research subject (when you talk to a woman about her hair you are talking about something that is fundamentally tied up with her sense of who she is; hair is deeply emotional).

In my two and a half day visit I am mostly working or sleeping, there is very little time to sightsee or explore. But that doesn't matter because on this trip I get to visit consumers in their homes as well as so I'm exploring suburbs and parts of the city visitors rarely get to see. So far I've visited: a very wealthy, where the homes are relatively palatial and the current vogue classical european style home decor, and a Eastern suburb hanging out in the apartments of trendy, young, working girls.

My guide round the city is my japanese counterpart Makiko. one of the great things about doing international research is hanging out with other professional people watchers, who generally make amazing cultural interpreters. Makiko has travelled Europe and spent a year at Lancaster Uni, so we are able to swap observations and puzzle over differences. A 15 minute discussion about differences in umbrella behaviour and etiquette is enlightening on a far grander scale than the everyday subject matter would suggest.

I'm very, very lucky to call this work.

What we did on our holiday

I feel a little unsure about posting about this.  I want to, but  I'm internally cringing at the idea of foisting my holiday snaps on people.  I've reconciled myself by remembering that most of my posts are plain self indulgent, and it's not as if I'm forcing anyone to read...

Hanoi

We LOVED Hanoi. It's a perfect place to feel comfortably disoriented in.  It hustles and bustles and assaults all your senses - the word cacophony is irrisistable - yet we felt instantly relaxed and immersed in it.  We kept getting lucky in Hanoi. We'd step into places that didn't look promising from the outside, only to find somewhere that delighted us one way or another.  In hindsight this has little to do with luck, Hanoi is just that kind of place.

Walking around Sapa

   

Breathtaking in every sense.  This area had good fit my preconceived mental image of Vietnam - paddy fields, misty hills, colourful village life. We organised this trip through Handspan and were really happy with it.  The walking was moderately challenging (though had it been wet, it would have been tough), and we were given just the right amount of looking after by our guide and homestay hosts.  We managed to get far enough away from the tourist hordes without feeling like we were intruding in places where we had no right to be.  This is a tension I often feel very uneasy about - one of the reasons I'm rubbish at travel - so it was satisfying to get it right for a change.

Kayaking around Halong Bay

 

Another trip organised with Handspan, and another fantastic experience.  Halong Bay has a landscape that seems more fantastical than real.  Yet the floating houses populated by people subsisting on fishing makes the reality unforgettable.  Kayaking is a great way to get around the bay, the pace and perspective are perfect.

Saigon

Or Ho Chi Min City, if you prefer.  We didn't spend long here, and didn't manage to get much of a feel for it.  We stayed in a smart area with an anonymous 'big city' feel. We walked to the backpacking area, which had a full-on backpacking feel.  In between we saw snippets of the real city, where people worked and lived, but didn't enough time to linger.

Boats and Bikes in the Mekong Delta

 

The Mekong Delta was a different world from everywhere else we saw in Vietnam. Low, lush and wet,  drowned in muddy orange water. This was the first 'great' river I've seen, and the vastness of the mighty Mekong overwhelmed me.   We were a little disappointed with our trip (organised with Sinhbalo) as we felt rushed, particularly while biking. 

Phu Quoc

Our friends Jeff & Ingrid tipped us off about this island. The perfect place to relax at the end of a busy trip.  We feel very lucky to have got to see it when we did. It's on the cusp of becoming somewhere very different.  An international airport is planned for 2010, and there are a number of swanky resorts being developed.

The wonderful Tropicana is a place that has got the right things right. The drinks weren't free, but the beach was idylic and we adored our comfortably shabby bungalow with its rocking chairs and frogs.  Friendliness was promised and delivered in spades.

We re-met American artists Joe and Mary here. We had initially bumped into in Halong Bay.  Joe's going to be in the country for a while and is keeping a blog, Waterland Diaries about his travels and contemporary art in Vietnam. Two weeks was too short for me to get a satisfactory understanding of the people and the place, so I will be reading Joe's blog with interest.

Big Trip

I am off to Vietnam for a couple of weeks. I'm going to do a bit of walking, a bit of cycling and a lot of looking around. I'm hoping to see stuff like this:

Sao Paulo - random observations

Well, it really was a flying visit. I did spend more time in Sao Paulo than in the air, but only just.

So seeing as this is a place to put things, I want to record a few random observations before they fade into a dreamlike memory. (They're very random, indeed)

photo by 20 buckz on flikr

1. I really like the yellow public phone booths - they're bright and inviting and I reckon you would feel all cocooned up with the person you're talking to
2. All of the women I met had perfectly manicured fingernails
3. I became infatuated with the idea of ginga/gingado - which is used to describe a kind of swing in movement (the greatest salsa dancers are those with the most gingado)
4. The best simultaneous interpreters physically channel the people they are interpreting - it's an exciting performance, both helpful and inspiring
5. Hot cheese bread is amazing - I could happily live on it though I'm sure it would make me very fat
6. The people I met and worked with were all very concerned about my impressions of Brazil and Sao Paulo before and after my visit.  Both those native to the city ands others who were from Rio were deeply upset that I wasn't getting to see the best of what was on offer - the biggest concern was my failure to see a beach
7. I witnessed lots of small acts of courtesy and friendliness between strangers - putting paid to the argument that ignoring each other is a necessary reaction to big city living.  I think this says something about the Brazilian character - there's just a natural, easy,open-friendliness which is really infectious. They have none of the social dis-ease that Kate Fox describes in Watching The English.

Jetlag induced thoughts

I am blessed with the ability of almost always being able to sleep. The time between first closing my eyes and blissful unconsciousness is usually a matter seconds. So jetlag feels like an outrage.

I have been pondering my reaction to Sao Paulo some more. I think being high up and looking down on something so big gives me discomfort because it makes me feel like I have delusions of grandeur. I am the mistress of all I survey, a princess in a tower. It also makes me think of this post titled Look up on John Grant's BrandTarot.

Generally I'm a big city kind of girl, I like scuttling around in the belly of of something so huge. I love the excitement of endless possibilities, the freedom of anonymity, the comfort of proximity to so much. But looking down makes me feel apart from the place.

I think I like Sao Paulo, or at least I could get to like it. From the little I've seen and the people I have spoken with it seems to have an exciting energy. There's an element of defiance that I think comes from being in the shadow of somewhere like Rio and having a reputation for danger. I hope to come back soon.

Sao Paulo

This city gives me vertigo. My visit is going to be too short to make much sense of it. I knew it was vast, but it appears to be infinite. I've spent most of my time, so far, high up tall buildings and which ever way I look it seems to be never-ending. I feel like I am looking out on a computer generated landscape.

I will try to get down on the ground for an hour tomorrow at least.

Getting an inside view

A part of me is deeply ashamed of being rubbish at travel.

I’m just not very good at it, I find it very stressful and don’t seem to get the pay off I feel I should be due.  The main problem is that I feel there is an invisible barrier between me and what I’m supposed to be experiencing – I want an insider’s view, but as an outsider I’m cut off from it. If I want to understand or ‘know’ a different culture or place I feel I get more from reading books, preferably fiction but memoirs & biographies can work too – that way I get a feel for a place from the inside. 

I am wondering if this is another symptom of being an introvert.  I simply get more from internal stimulus than external. 

However, a couple of things have recently come to my attention which offer hope.  It’s becoming clear to me that I’m not alone, and that solutions are emerging.  The first was an article in BMI’s in-flight magazine Voyager which informed me that:

Companies are springing up throughout Europe to put travellers in touch with local hosts who offer everything from bed & breakfasts to day trips and dinner parties.

You can: Meet the Danes in Denmark or explore Like a Local in the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

The second was this post by Grant McCracken. He suggests paying to conduct ethnographic interviews in the city you want to visit. I love doing ethnographic interviews, it’s a great idea. Though I’m not convinced I’ll manage to persuade the husband of it’s worth before our next trip – oh, and we’ll need to think about translators as well…

Angry Dreams

I have been on holiday. Four carefree, blissful days with three good friends. We had a small car that we used to seek out beaches, views and good food, otherwise we simply conversed and rested. It was heavenly.

So why was I having angry dreams?  Dreams in which I was spitting vitriol, raging in a way I have never done in real life (or at least not since I was a toddler) against people who represented some great injustices that were making me so furious.  Each morning I woke up feeling replenished and renewed, yet amused and rather embarrassed about my hysterics. 

I'm assuming it was some kind of reaction against the last few weeks, which have been unusually hectic and often frightening.  I have been on full pelt, knowing I can't keep it up and fearful of letting something important slip (I did, my dad's birthday - I am a rubbish daughter).  Strange though, that it should come out in my dreams this way.

The holiday and the dreams have worked a kind of magic. I feel recharged.