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The texts we read this semester fell under the wide and vast travel classics umbrella. Differences among them included method of travel (Odysseus’ sea fare versus Ibn Batutta’s terra treks), physical land travelled through (everywhere from the Far East in Marco Polo to the Caribbean New World explored by Columbus), time period (the first century BCE Odyssey to The Tempest, which came over 2000 years later), perspective of travelers (Herodotus’ dry attempt to catalog everything with a versus Cabeza de Vaca’s personal engagement with the reader) and even narrative style (Shakespeare and Homer’s stories versus Marco Polo and Cabeza de Vaca’s first hand accounts). For all the variety found between these travel classics, each contained a sense of wonder, excitement, appreciation and even masked trepidation.
On a personal level, the texts were all about places foreign to me. I have never been to Asia or the Middle East, where Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta respectively travelled. Although I have visited the Mediterranean, Herodotus’ accounts were extremely different from my muddled memory of that culturally and historically rich region. As for Cabeza de Vaca’s relation of the Southeast, the not-yet-trounced terrains of Texas bore no similarity to the (relatively) small Austin, Texas where I lived for two semesters last year. Each of these texts served to preserve not only the place, but also the time of when they were written. It is as though each author metaphorically laminated their experiences and stories, ensuring that today’s reader would be transported to the same time and place as one of their contemporaries. This led me to assess my own time and place. How would someone—a visitor—record his or her experiences as an outsider in New York City? What would they deem important and what would fall by the editorial wayside? Would they too feel the wonder, excitement, appreciation and trepidation recorded by their travel classics predecessors?
Don't Leave Home Without It!
Given New York City’s role as cultural Mecca (hey, Ibn!) of at least the United States, if not the world, it is constantly being reinterpreted through the eyes of its visitors. I’m ending my blog with a short list of contemporary NYC travel narratives that I’ve compiled which I think provides a thread from all of the works read this semester to my life and those of my classmates. Enjoy!
In Search of Jack Kerouac: New York City in Two Days < by A.E. Sadler. This essay is written very much from the traveler’s perspective as a follower. He has a sense of many having completed this trek before him. Nonetheless, his experiences contain that same streak of wonder and appreciation.
This Link is a blog by a Student Travel Association named Ady. The city is one of the places he travels too. His travelling intention is primarily leisure-based, and like Sadler it is evident that he has a sense of many people having gone on this same journey before him.
City's Virtues to Be Sold in New Global Ad Campaign < by Patrick McGeehan. This is not an essay. Rather, this piece is an New York Times article from 2007 that chronicles Bloomberg strategy to make the city an enticing place for visitors.
I thought this was a really
I thought this was a really great post. I read the NYT article, and my concept of tourists in New York has always been of annoying people who walk slowly, three or four abreast, down the sidewalk and get in my way. And they take pictures of everything. I never think of them as active participants in the dynamic of New York. I never thought of the competitive nature between cities for tourist dollars. It's very interesting.