travelogue, part 2
on contrast & trying to write your experiences away from home - with a prompt!
If you read my last post, you know that my husband and I were traveling for almost three weeks, mostly in Japan. After the jet lag and the fatigue wore off, we had a quick turnaround to visit my son in Nashville where he has lived for the past ten years. We hadn’t been to the downtown area in a while, and for wont of a way to spend an afternoon, we made a visit to go to the Hatch Print Shop tour and quickly realized that the little city that we had known when my son was in college there ten years ago had exploded into a tourist mecca.
I can’t think of two busy places that are more different. Even in the crowded, electric areas of Tokyo, even in Shibuya with its famous scramble, there was a sort of order, a vibe that was polite and even hushed in the train stations and on the streets. Nashville, on the other hand, was a cacophony. Neon signs announcing celebrity bars flanked both sides of Broadway. Each one had a band playing and, although I’m sure the bands could be distinctly heard inside the bars, outside on the sidewalk, it was an assault of drums and chords. Every inch of real estate around the Country Hall of Fame and the Ryman was filled with restaurants and retail stores, and there were apartment complexes with more retail spaces under construction everywhere we turned.
It made me consider how some words embody different meanings. Both of these places are tourist destinations and therefore are busy. Synonyms for busy fall into both negative and positive connotations. Negative? Strenuous, hectic, tiring, swarming, teeming. More positive? Energetic, active, lively, bustling, vibrant, buzzy. A few that could be either?Astir, thronging, eventful, crowded. (I just re-read what I wrote up above, and —order, vibe and hushed versus cacophony and assault — it’s pretty clear which experience of busy I preferred.) But even the most accurate words sometimes aren’t enough.
This is part of the difficulty of writing about a place that you do not claim as your own. Your biases come through in language, even when you are trying to simply convey, perhaps, a narrative or a description that struck you in your travels. I have traveled a lot, and well-meaning people always say, “It must give you so much to write about!” Not really. I find that I struggle to write in a meaningful way about travel much of the time. I started three pieces of writing while in Japan and decided to do what I do at home—let something in my surroundings serve as an entry point to a bigger idea or theme rather than to write directly about the experience of traveling. We’ll see how it works.
If you want to write:
Pick a place you have traveled to that is significantly different from where you reside.
Choose a single word that could describe both places. Look up all of the iterations and synonyms of that word, including its origin, if you like, to create a word bank.
Use that word bank to write about a topic unrelated to travel but using a sense memory or image from your chosen travel destination. See what happens!