Wednesday, January 18, 2012

World Travel for the Poor

World travel is largely seen as a luxurious extravagance reserved for multi-millionaire celebrities jetting from one tropical beach to another, always paparazzi-ready. It's not something that's available for the regular middle class person with bills to pay.

If you think like that, you haven't seen the way we travel.

We don't fly on a private jet with a personal chef, a bed, and oodles of space to move around.

We fly coach. The seats are so narrow you can't fit your arms by your sides, and so sit with your shoulders crunched forward for the entire flight. There is so little space between your seat and the one in front that you can't get past the person sitting beside you without giving them a lap dance. The aisles are narrow to the point that even a skinny person passing a toddler requires serious maneuvering. If two or more people stand within ten feet of each other in the aisle, you're considered a potential terrorist. You're warned about the possibility of blood clots caused by sitting for so many hours, yet if you attempt to walk around the plane you are berated by the flight attendants and made to sit down immediately. Your seat doesn't lean as far back as the driver's seat in a car. The food tastes like school cafeteria food after the resident anorexic has thrown it up.

We don't buy whatever ticket makes for the easiest flight with the fewest connections.

We buy whatever flight route makes for the cheapest ticket, no matter how arduous.

We don't arrive looking refreshed, freshly styled and wearing cute outfits.

We arrive in stretchy workout clothes (intentionally chosen to allow for maximum body contortion in said tiny spaces) stained by the coffee we spilled when the plane hit turbulence. Our unwashed hair is flat in places and standing straight up in others. The bags under our eyes are carrying groceries. There's a massive breakout in at least one spot on our faces caused by passing out on the palm of a hand that is oily and unwashed due to the only bathroom in coach that hasn't been crapped all over running out of soap 5 minutes into the flight. We smell. Bad. We are so exhausted from lack of sleep that we literally cannot see straight, and then we carry our own luggage and spend hours on public transportation overnight because we spent all our money on plane tickets and can't afford a taxi or an extra night in a hotel.

We don't otherwise live luxuriously.

We agree getting to travel is a priority, and so we scrimp and save in every other area of our lives.

We take very little time to relax on our "vacations," much less spend weeks at a time doing nothing.

We know that the odds of us being able to visit a country a second time are very slim, because there are so many places we want to see and we can't waste money on revisiting anything, so we cram every day to the brim to ensure we see everything there is to see. Or at least a decent sampling.

We arrive home so exhausted, we need a vacation to recover from our vacation. We're so physically drained that our bodies are extra susceptible to whatever illness is floating around the plane, and often end up with colds (or worse).

But it is completely, without a doubt, without exception, 100% worth it. Because no matter how tired we are at the end of the day, no matter how long we have to refrain from spending money on so much as seeing a movie in the theater, and no matter what else happens in life, we will always have the memories, the experiences, and the lessons learned from our travels. And that cannot be taken away.

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