Rivers

[shakahislop]

the worst thing of all was that despite all of the above, you'd have to look presentable, all of the downsides of the office worker life, wearing uncomfortable clothes, tidy hair, repressed everything, professionalism, getting up at a regular time in the morning

 

[luka]

there's different sorts of travel people. hippies of course, who seek squalor. theres the people who end up windsurfing instructor, ski instructor, crewing luxury yachts. there's the adventure hikers. there's the international party set. obviously i hate them all

 

[sufi]

the worst thing of all was that despite all of the above, you'd have to look presentable, all of the downsides of the office worker life, wearing uncomfortable clothes, tidy hair, repressed everything, professionalism, getting up at a regular time in the morning

yeah i was gonna ask what on earth were you doing there for 18 months

 

[shakahislop]

there's different sorts of travel people. hippies of course, who seek squalor. theres the people who end up windsurfing instructor, ski instructor, crewing luxury yachts. there's the adventure hikers. there's the international party set. obviously i hate them all

i don't meet younger hippies any more. i feel like that after-echo of the 60s has petered out recently. even those shops, the ones selling dream catchers and that sort of thing, i don't see them around any more. i met an older english hippy in montego bay recently, but that's the kind of demographic now, they're mostly that kind of age. the other thing that you never see now, which is related, is white people with dreads, which was very much i think something that came out of that hippy cultural strand.

 

[luka]

you see it all over the continent still I'm sure. no way Spain has stopped producing matty dreads.

 

[shakahislop]

yeah i was gonna ask what on earth were you doing there for 18 months

yeah it was an office job. for a bit of the uk government that was, quite genuinely, making an earnest attempt to try to make some of the poorest people on the planet, on these islands, less poor, have nicer lives and so on. it cost quite a lot of money and i don't think there was a hidden agenda behind it. it also worked, with caveats, but it worked.

 

[sus]

i'm never quite sure what i think about it all really. i get where this emotion comes from, i used to have it. actually i still have it a bit, when someone tells me they've been somewhere i haven't been, but there's always this thing at the back of my mind which knows that there's a certain hollowness to going to places like what i've done, no-one really needs to do it. and mostly the experiences that you have closer to home are deeper things i find.

the other thing is that if you've got a bit of time and importantly some money (it doesn't need to be much if you're ok to rough it), and probably most importantly no children, it's generally not that hard to go to these far flung bits of the world. so you probably do it if you want. not sure how it looks from the midwest, but you can be in colombia in five hours from nyc.

Yeah, South America seems pretty doable since I speak Spanish. India/China feel tougher. It's also hard with a partner. You have to talk them into all sorts of crazy ideas.

 

[luka]

being vegetarian is annoying in non angloid countries too

 

[sus]

I was pretty isolated in Turkey and I remember it clearly.

 

[sus]

being vegetarian is annoying in non angloid countries too

That's true, especially Latin America, meat and lard in everything, same with Russia. India and China shouldn't be too bad though what with all the Buddhism and Hinduism?

 

[luka]

India is fine but you get diarea and have to stay in shitting all the time. good for losing weight though. not sure about China, my cousin said she just lived on tomato and egg, but she is pretty weird

 

[sus]

BTW I was browsing TikTok last night and who did I see but the one & only LD50

29k likes IIRC

 

[luka]

if you're not an extrovert travelling will probably make you miserable that's my thesis.

 

[luka]

going with a girl will definitely ruin it too like you say. maybe if you had a sort of idiot mate that went along with any harebrained idea you could come up with, that would be probably you're best hope maybe

 

[sus]

if you're not an extrovert travelling will probably make you miserable that's my thesis.

I don't find that at all, I don't interact with the people, but I'm there for the worlding aesthetics. Architecture, graphic design, the national galleries, the parks, the skyline, the transit system, the bakeries, the alcohol. The flavor of the place.

 

[sus]

Gimme that gestalt good-good... get in my belly gestalt!

 

[luka]

i agree that can quite nice for a few days. go to France, eat a croissant, avoid eye contact

 

[woops]

i agree that can quite nice for a few days. go to France, eat a croissant, avoid eye contact

Can't understand this attitude

 

[woops]

But yeah 3 days is as long as you want to stay foreign

 

[luka]

you don't like croissants?