Travel Blues

Vacations are a good topic for English lessons. Before their departure, students have to tell me about the upcoming adventure using the future tense. The real teacher's pets send me a couple of messages from the road in present tense. Then when they get home it's all in the past. And seeing that I've already been most of the places they're going, I can round out the lessons correcting their nouns (people, places and things) and adjectives.

I'm often sad to hear how much countries have changed, but thankful to have seen them when I did. I know others have been to these places long before me, just like I was there long before today's Instagram travelers. I appreciate my older, adventurous audiences silently satisfying me when I spoke of sleeping on the roof of a mud hut in Mali to the sounds of the village kids playing in the midnight moonlight; as much as I felt like the first, I now know I wasn't. I try to give my students the same silent satisfaction, but it's not easy for a know-it-all like me.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about packing up (not packing) my backpack and leaving the world's people, places and things unbothered by tourism. The thought came after a 50-year old student told me about his itinerary on an upcoming trip to Morocco. I patiently listened to his list of overly organized activities and retained my remarks. But when the scheduled event for Day 5 was to taste Moroccon food, my trip advisor comments couldn't be contained.

If you've figured me out at all, you know I'm not adventurous when it comes to food; but even I wouldn't wait five days for an expensive tasting tour to find falafel in Fez. If countries that were once on the U.S. Department of State Travel Advisory list are now filled with tourists searching for the comforts of home, it's probably time for me to start looking for the comforts of home at home.