Tag: Travel

The Life and Death of Couchsurfing

~ Sahara ~ Leave a comment

Think about an event you’ve attended and loved. Your hometown’s annual fair. That life-changing music festival. A conference that shifted your worldview. Imagine you’re told it will be cancelled forever or taken over by an evil corporate force.

How does that make you feel?

I can think something that really influenced my life, and then it changed for the worse.  Couchsurfing.

CS was this awesome travel website. It was a way to get to know people in a new place and ask ’em questions, get to know shit that’s not in a travel guide, maybe meet up, and also maybe stay with them.

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No Hollaback Girl Here- 11 Tips for Fighting Street Harassers

~ Sahara ~ 11 Comments

Like many women, I get shit on the street. I get harassed and leered at, and it makes me uncomfortable.  It’s quite disempowering, because I don’t want that attention, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I hate it. Sometimes it happens among my clients at work, a homeless day program where I have a little more leverage and can tell people to knock it off. On the street, I have to be a little more…. careful.

I was going to write an open letter to street oglers, things that I wish I could say to them. But there’s nothing I could say that they would hear. There are only things I can do right in that minute.  Things that would not be aggressive or even perceived as aggressive. (‘Cause that can lead to threats.)

So I took to Google, hoping I would find some suggestions, and curated some favorites from here and here.  I would love your opinions on them.

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No one is so rich as to throw away a friend

~ Sahara ~ 15 Comments

Daily Prompt: Why Can’t We Be Friends? – Do you find it easy to make new friends? Tell us how you’ve mastered the art of befriending a new person.

I have memories of, in my youthy youth, going to the swimming pool with my mother.  We walked in and put our things down on the plastic lounge chairs, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to go make some friends now.”  I jumped into the shallow end and did just that.


I was even cuter than this, I’m sure.

It wasn’t so easy during my adolescence, but I have a better time of it now.

I think part of that is because I know myself and my interests. I’m a social worker that cares about economics and policy. I love to travel and have done a lot of it. I’m a fangirl of such things as Sherlock, renaissance fairs and biking.  Part of it is also that other people who share similar interests or backgrounds are eager to be friends with others; it’s easy to connect with people over these things. Finally, I’m out of the house a lot – cigar bars and coffee houses, friends’ houses and on the hiking trail – I have ample opportunity to meet people.

Inspiration Engine, v.6

~ Sahara ~ 2 Comments

This is a weekly post I do to highlight blogs or bloggers who have inspired me in some way during this week.

1. Rituals from Ginger Sister.  For me, rituals are powerful and even spiritual anchors in life. When was in college, when I went out with an Indian man and learned how to make masala tea, or chai. His sister sent me spices from India, so I didn’t have to depend on a weak stock of stale cinnamon and nutmeg. Every morning started with me over the stove, listening for the boil and smelling the increasingly fragrant steam that rose as the tea heated.  Then, I moved away, we split up, and I stopped doing it regularly.  I found I had a real gap where this ritual had been and felt adrift.

This post is about a beautiful way of transitioning into something new and using ritual to ease that.

3. Finally, there is a delightful blog I stumbled upon this week, Browsing the Atlas, and I found it through the recommendation of the travelogue Take a trip with Andrew McCarthy from the Comfort of Your Chair. I love a good travelogue and I love to find others with a love of traveling. Thank you!

 

Travelogue: Krakow – Best Place I Never Planned to Visit

~ Sahara ~ 3 Comments

10 years ago, my best friend gave me a beautiful gold and red journal that is almost sacred to me, so I don’t like writing just any old stuff in it.  The first time I traveled solo, I took it with me to write about the adventure, and I’ve taken it on every trip since.  Something I haven’t done before on this blog is to pull from those pages, share with you the things I thought, felt, experienced from my various trips, but today, thanks to a prompt about travel writing, I’m going to share one of them

Backstory: I have been part of the travel community Couchsurfing since 2007, and have made many friends all over the world on this site. (It has deteriorated severely since going public and becoming for-profit not long ago, but that’s a story for another time.) In 2009, the fine CSers of Krakow were hosting a couch crash, a several-day series of events and celebrations in one particular city. It’s just an excuse to travel, have fun, get to know cool CSers and a different city in a way you normally wouldn’t. My friend Denise was going to be passing Krakow for it, and, on a lark, I decided to meet her there. These are my notes from that trip. (This post is long, but worth it.):

Day One

Is there anything more delicious than the first shower after a few days? I think not.

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To Hear The Poem of Creation

~ Sahara ~ 11 Comments

Remember the first time I traveled solo.

And I mean solo, really solo.  I had taken a trip to San Francisco by-myself-but-with-others with Team in Training to do the Nike Women’s Marathon, and that was pretty cool. I went with other people to appease worried family members. But, in the spring of ’08, before I started my Master’s that fall, I wanted to go abroad. The problem was, nobody wanted to go with me.  Rather, they did, but they didn’t have the money or the vacation time to do it, and they didn’t really have an interest in seeing what I wanted to see.

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Far Far Far and Away Away Away

~ Sahara ~ 3 Comments

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be an astronaut.  Actually, I wanted to be the first woman to go to Mars.  (I figured that men would already be there, and I already knew, even at five years old, that women had less privilege than men, and I thought it was that much more important that I go.)

In my imagination, the furthest I’ve traveled from home is into space, into a black hole. They are fascinating to a nerd like me, devoid of time, gravity pulling everything to it.  Nothing can escape; not even light. I used to like to draw a black hole and the event horizon surrounding it, the point at which you can’t turn back.

Why haven’t we been sucked into one, yet? Like, why haven’t all the black holes been sucking all the matter in space so much that there is no matter? And where is the center?  There has to be a point of, like, zero gravity, if you will, the point at which the sucking stops.  Where is that? What’s that like? Is there a vacuum bag? Where do all the rocks go, the rocks that are sucked in?

For realz, physically, the farthest I’ve been from home is Krakow, Poland. It was gorgeous and fun.  The Krakovian members of the travel community couchsurfing.com organized a weekend of events, and I went a few days early.  Poland had not originally been on my list of places to visit, but it was totally worth it

Emotionally, the farthest I’ve been from home was probably August 3rd, 1997, a little town in the boot heel of Missouri. The darkest night of my life.