If you had asked me a year or so ago, I would have told you with smug certainty that travel doesn't broaden the mind, it merely raises the blood pressure. I'm not one of nature's travelers. I hate tunnels, fear air crashes, loathe coaches and get sea-sick. I'm also vegetarian, so 98 per cent of the menu in any restaurant is a no-go area. I'm a lousy photographer, have a poor sense of direction, don't do water sports because my swimming's not up to much, and never engage strangers in conversation because ... they are strangers.
The one time I attempted to drive on the right, I displaced the wing mirrors of a row of cars with a choreographed precision Busby Berkeley would have envied. In short, I always felt I was better off at home, or in Tuscany, which is nicer than home in Britain but still sells Marmite.
But then, on a relatively stress-free three-hour flight, I started to think that it wouldn't be so bad to stay in my seat a few hours longer and find a different continent. I began to view travel not as a problem but a possibility. And one night, as my husband eyed a cheap-flight Web site and asked me for the thousandth time if I wouldn't fancy, say, San Francisco for a change, I said yes.
So last month, I found myself hurtling down hills in a cable car and eating fresh raspberries in the middle of winter. But it wasn't the Golden Gate bridge that broadened my mind; it was simply being elsewhere, encountering difference.
In your own country, it's easy to make assumptions about people based on accents, about areas based on architecture. But even in the US, ostensibly very like Britain, I found myself unqualified to make those judgments, and it was rather thrilling seeing things without the usual filter of prejudice or certainty.
I heard a black bus passenger's take on the Dick Cheney shooting: "I would have got seven years in jail for that, accident or no accident!"
A homeless man of no more than 20, with few teeth and track marks on his neck, was so pleased with the pitiful couple of dollars we gave him, he told us all the best vantage points for photographing his city.
Perhaps most remarkable was a conversation overheard between a young woman with Down's syndrome, a young man with speech, hearing and mobility difficulties and their carer, who was taking them downtown on a cable car. Over the clatter of the mechanism, and using an ingenious combination of signing, touching, pointing and shouting, they held a conversation that began, somewhat randomly, with "Do you like butter?" and ended with "I love you." It was a complete relationship in microcosm, taking no more than the 10-minute journey, and with each breakthrough in communication greeted with howls of infectious laughter.
Travel, I belatedly realized, is not just about sightseeing, notching up destinations in a futile, trainspotting way. Away from home, work and the school run -- our routine -- we are bombarded with new information, suddenly alert and alive. You've probably known that for years, but for me it's a revelation.
So the irony is not lost on me that just as I have overcome my fears about long-haul flights, the outlook for air travel has become rather bleak. If an oil depot disaster doesn't ground us, then it's quite possible that plans to restrict the spread of bird flu will.
And even without that, it's hard to see how we can go on flying willy-nilly about the globe with oil supplies politically vulnerable and dwindling, and each long-haul round trip damaging the environment more than driving a car for a year.
Travel may well broaden the mind, but it also hurts the planet, and the more your mind is broadened, the more unacceptable that trade-off seems. On my journey through life I have always been accompanied by fear and guilt. Just as the former has loosened its grip, it seems as though the latter is going to keep me grounded.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US