Hello and welcome to the 41st issue of Place! In today’s edition Place editors Kylee and Karis consider a great travel debate: the short stay vs the long trip. Is one better than the other? What are the benefits of both? Are there, dare we say, downsides to each? In the spirit of comparative analysis, they’ve each taken a view of one side, and written about their own experience of travelling in this way. Is there a clear winner? Maybe that’s for you to decide. Leave a comment at the bottom of this post and let us know what side of the line you fall on, or if you’re left straddling the in-between.
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Karis on the short and sweet
About two hours after I landed in Prague on a cold and quickly darkening December evening in 2012 I realized that my couchsurfing host’s vague directions had landed me on the outskirts of the city center on a street with identical apartment blocks with no idea where I was and no cell data to figure out where I might be. I wandered to the closest open establishment, which happened to be a bar empty but for a man polishing glasses behind a counter (and a gleaming gold stripper pole in the corner) who let me plug in my phone and use the slow wifi to email my host, who called to me from a window a half block away when I stuck my head out the door.
Less than 48 hours later it was 4 a.m. on the dance floor in a smoky club when I realized I had about two hours before I needed to be awake to catch my taxi to hop on a flight back to the US.
What transpired in between is now simply a whirlwind of memories that collide and flash like a kaleidoscope in my mind. The first crunch of a cinnamon trdelník bought from the cozy Christmas market in the main square, the biting wind reddening my cheeks as I strolled across the Charles Bridge, sitting in a chair in an exhibit at the Kafka Museum as a room-sized scribbled animation of “The Castle” enveloped me in existentialism, a wax figure of Saddam Hussein suspended formaldehyde in the baroque Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace (then the Artbanka Museum of Young Art), the tasteless chicken soup at a restaurant named after Rilke, two glasses of tart white wine I drank in a small bar while scribbling down all my thoughts from two weeks on the road, the writhing black bodies of live carp for sale in plastic tubs at the neighbourhood market, hiking up to the enchantingly grandiose Prague Castle, turning around to see a thousand city windows lit up gold in the dark night, eating french onion soup in the basement of a wood-panelled restaurant, sipping white russians at a bar around the corner named after “The Big Lebowski” where customers chose how much they paid, laughing at tales of drug-fueled nights-turned-into-days out with a group of expat English teachers, choking down a shot of herbal Becherovka at a foosball bar with someone I’d just met, listening to a punk band in a hazy venue that looked like the set of an 80s movie, dancing with my host’s Czech friend in her giant black rimmed glasses, glamorously messy hair and toothy smile.
Quick trips and city breaks get a bad rap. What are you adding to a place but money to already overcrowded tourist-centric businesses, carbon emissions from the cheap flights to expanding airports, annoyances from locals who live their lives, not just their weekends, in this town? How can you understand a culture, learn any bit of the local language, get an actual feel for what makes the city so incredible in the first place? These are all criticisms that I’ve voiced myself as I’ve embarked on my fair share of travels over the last decade. I couldn’t understand why friends would “study abroad” in European capitals only to jet off to a different city every weekend. Can you say that you’ve really seen a place if you didn’t stick around long enough to see it for more than what it advertised?
My own forays abroad were long: four months, six months, a year and now two-and-a-half years in the same country. While there’s something to be said for nesting in one place, the longer I’ve stayed in one place away from home, the more I realize I underestimated the power of the fleeting trip.
Prague had never been on my must-visit list, which made it all the more alluring when I realized it offered the cheapest flights back to Chicago at the tail end of my study abroad semester in Morocco which I capped off with a few weeks in Europe. I made sure that I had some local connection to point me in the right direction and keep me off the beaten path (my wallet and my life experience bank owes a debt of gratitude to couchsurfing), as well as a few must-visit destinations, but otherwise set off to wander. With the clock always ticking toward a departure, I wanted every minute to be soaked in this place, present where I was. It meant I was more likely to say yes to a last minute invitation out, the opportunity to try something new, and keeping my eyes open for whatever the hours offered.
While life is long, it tends to be the quick movements, small experiences and 48-hour sections of time that clarify. A deadline crystallizes time in the way few things can.
I’m not saying that the quick trip doesn’t need a makeover -- improving ferry travel, updating buses, expanding train routes and smoothing out long-haul bike routes would go a long ways in improving the carbon footprint of weekend trips -- and I’m not saying that every short holiday must be a full on blitz of experience to be meaningful. Even hour-long train rides for day trips to small seaside towns and Midwestern state parks have been simple, easy days that I will look back on fondly for years to come.
Ultimately, the reality is that we just can’t see everywhere in the world. But a little bit of me believes that seeing as much of it as possible can’t be a bad thing.
Kylee on the long haul
There was a time that I lived in Poland for some months. In half a year, I only left the city of Warsaw three times. There is no concrete reason for why. I had travelled alone before, and there was much of the country and of Europe that I hadn’t seen. But instead, I chose to stay. Over a dark January and into the spring and summer, I spent my weekends walking around the city, photographing people and objects in the streets, usually alone. I fumbled ordering foods I didn’t know in milk bars, I got lost in hours and hours of flea market shopping, and many a cold night I stayed in watching movies, a viewing list I can still recount with searing clarity.
It was not always enjoyable and I was often lonely. But looking back, the relationship I formed with the city cultivated a way of knowing a place that has stuck with me almost hauntingly. By the time I left Poland, I had only learned a bit of the language and I hadn’t visited many of the country’s other towns and cities that several people had recommended. I remained very much an outsider -- but I understood the topography of Warsaw like the back of my hand. It became like a country in itself to me. I had felt its temperatures. I had watched its flowers bloom. I had witnessed the place transform from winter into summer. Time alone, and my weekend ritual of walking, had made me feel not only a small part in things, but that I had experienced them inherently differently. Slowly, and with hesitant appreciation.
Staying in an unknown place for an extended period of time is, to me, a foolproof way to experience the sublime. Polish rubs off, breath is caught, and a creeping sense of unknown sinks into one’s daily routine. You, the traveller, seeking newness, aching to witness light, begin to notice cracks. Darkness comes from corners you would not have noticed at first. The same ugliness or ordinance you sought to escape in your own life is here too. Some moments, you feel you have been fooled. Expectations are cracked wide, but under that shell of an imagined world lies a vital reality - the understanding that no place is perfect, that there are holes everywhere.
Warsaw revealed to me something about travelling that I still hold very dear -- that in staying somewhere for a withdrawn period of time, or even returning to the same city instead of going somewhere new, one creates space for the power of ritual. We may never belong in the places we visit, or know them like the people who are born there. I think it's a fallacy to claim that if you’ve lived in a place for over ‘X’ amount of time, you ‘know’ it. What constitutes knowing? Or even seeing for that matter?
I have found that ritualistic return -- walking the same streets, going to the same cafe, returning to a park you visited years before -- has allowed me to experience a place in a way that never ceases to both comfort and surprise me. I can be a very distractible person, but by creating habits in and for certain places I can ground myself in the moment, and notice minute differences or details I may have overlooked otherwise. These points of return or repetition begin to act not only as jars of discovery in themselves, but a comparative marker for the changes in my own life.
A drawn out stay in a place does not always lead to euphoria, or joy, or an intoxication that feels like a dream, but what it does bring is a feeling of the sublime - some terror of lost expectation, but mostly, a deep stirring of the ordinary.
Place Recommends
An interview with Arctic photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva,
The imagined places of Studio Ghibli,
And every episode of the Far Flung podcast.
Join us next week for another journey. And thank you for reading Place!