The hotel I stayed at in London aims for the opulent. Marble is its material of choice. It bases its décor off of nearby Marble Arch, a hulking bastion of European aristocracy that still stiffens its shoulders with self-importance across the street from Starbucks and mega department stores and London’s bleached blonde teenagers in Ugg boots. At the hotel, desks are smooth, drapes are thick, ceilings are high, wood is polished into shiny submission, edges are as tamed as the desk staff. Everyone cooes and purrs and smiles and invites. People call you “Ms.” with deference as a necessary gesture of distinction between you and them, placing it before every sentence as if it were a protective screen separating you from unsavoury elements.
The hotels’ floors are plush, deep carpet into which, presumably, one’s thousand dollar heels should sink erotically. I padded along on them in beaten dusty gym shoes trekked from Mexico to go running in the gym, where I had a moment of existential alienation running solo in a room full of expensive unused gym equipment and glass bottles of sparkling water. Boom boom boom boom boom boom went the pounding of my feet on the treadmill, and I watched my ponytail bounce and jerk in the mirror under the carefully dimmed lighting. A Fitzgeraldian feeling crept up. Cool smooth spaces lit in the colors of velvet and fur, detached boozy money seeping from their corners. It seemed easy enough to wind up drunk in a silk slip dress, singing in a sumptuous booth with depressed abandon, tramping Zelda-style through a wasted life. Maybe that’s when I started thinking about luxury.
Roaming the hotel, I felt like I was walking around someone’s fine china cabinet in a dream, trying not to break anything or jostle anyone or move too quickly. The tall woman with the stiffly manicured hair in the elevator whose coat probably cost the equivalent of my yearly salary must be used to moving this way, I thought. I tried to keep my body from interfering with the terrible gravity of heavy, stately objects.
The alienness was like another me, a potential me I examined carefully with little nudges and prods. What made this me in her shoes and her dresses and her ever-so-thoughtfully put together thoughts so bizarre? It wasn’t just the fact that I can typically be found in the Tlacolula market in a thrift store sundress eating barbacoa from a plastic plate. It wasn’t simply a difference in context, in income. It wasn’t just the lamps or the soaps or the pillows fluffed to plumpness on the bed or the TV in the bathtub. Those are not features of any trip I would ever usually take, for sure, but they themselves weren’t what made for the strangeness.
No, it was something else. It was the feeling of being on an elevated plane, shuttled here and there and never quite touching anything. It was the feeling of travel as consumption and not as life. In the stupor of jet lag, sitting on a puffy stool with a view of Marble Arch’s Georgian homes stacked in straight-faced grays and browns towards the park, I thought about just how different this type of travel was from all the travel I’d ever done.
I didn’t realize how separate this travel world was until I was present in it; it had seemed like it must just be the difference of carpets and towels. But no: it’s a distinct way of seeing and experiencing (or not experiencing). It is a view from above, a view from that orbit that wealthy people make around the world, not quite coming into contact with it.
For the first time I realized that for so many people, this is travel. You go to a luxury hotel for the weekend, pop into a city for a day or two, eat a meal and see a show and go home travel-happy. And there is nothing necessarily wrong with that – perhaps they learn as much in a weekend, see as much from the safety of starred restaurants and nice hotel rooms, as a random backpacker does from a drunken gaze off the hostel balcony. But to me, it felt nothing like travel. There was none of the fear or the exhilaration, none of the not-knowing. Rather, it felt like a sharp and expensive cheese you’re supposed to gush on about but that really makes your nose itch.
So let me say : I’m not going to heave myself into a rant about luxury hotels and upscale restaurants and their sameness or their-lack-of-representing-the-local-population, nor am I going to tsk-tsk those who love their quiet rooms with mini bars and weighty robes to go get themselves a falling down pee-reeking craphole of a hostel. But I can say that the feeling developed throughout the trip, a few notes teased out in the beginning building to a crescendo by the end, that this is not the way I want to travel or the way I want to live.
When I started traveling, I rolled t-shirts into tiny balls and rattled along Peru in buses, eating empanadas from baskets on the side of the road. And this has become my travel aesthetic and ethic now – as close as possible to the ground. Quite literally – I hate flying. But I’m also not so interested in high-flying lifestyles. I’m not even sure they’re not representative of a place or not authentic enough, an insult I might’ve hurled at them years ago. If I were going to take a strike at the “authenticity” of monied luxury then I’d say that the distinctness of upper classes everywhere is going to be somewhat watered down by the cross-cultural principles of international finance. The upper classes of London will have the same shoes, the same hats, the same bags as their counterparts around the world (fashionistas might point out regional differences, to which I respond with the old adage about Eskimos and snow). They wear the same genteel watches set to different times. But they are London as much as the Bangladeshi immigrants on Brick Lane; behind their globalized sameness are the decisions and politics and preferences and most importantly, the funds that shape the local culture. It’s not that they are irrelevant or less “real” to the meaning of a place; it’s just that they interest me far less than the people whose lives are shaped by their money.
This is not to say that I wouldn’t appreciate the chance to escape some of the $5 hotels we’ve stayed at, where toilets have fallen over and strange men have hung their undies on our windows. Besides, I can feel my friends in Japan countering, who doesn’t love good sheets? Sure. But there is a point between the forced ascetic torture of hostels and the plasma screen TV in the bathtub at the hotel. It’s comfort. And beyond comfort, beyond the basics that keep me energized, I don’t need much else. Traveling has made that clear to me. I don’t need stuff (by stuff, I’m talking about footrests and throw pillows, not diapers or pans or basic essentials). And I suppose that was what made the luxurious mirage so jarring : it’s a me and a world defined and shaped by stuff, the love of stuff, the protection of stuff, the smug having of stuff. I could see very clearly in London that I don’t need stuff, and for that I felt incredibly grateful. A lot of people try to not want stuff, but they’re tied to half-hearted jobs and sofas. I can understand and sympathize with this. But I hope, I really hope, to have escaped that inertia, and I think so far I have. The quality of my life is defined by experiences : by sun and writing and friendships and beer and dogs. This is the gift travel has given me.
So for as lovely as London was, I was glad to leave the luxed up me behind. I miss the whisky, hell yes. And that bathtub…but more than anything in London and Glasgow I missed my Oaxacan luxuries, the ones that aren’t so heavy and weighted with status and money. The massive tree outside our window. The dog. The dry sweet smell of the air in Oaxaca, grasses and dirt and laurel trees. Geraniums on the patio. Chilaquiles in a clay pot. The freedom to wake up and have coffee and write, a freedom to live without being sucked into a job I hate or stuff I feel the need to accumulate or rhythms I long to escape. That is my ultimate luxury: a life of my own design. And I am grateful for the opportunity to recognize that this is something many people — both wealthy and poor – don’t have. So perhaps the goal of every trip is to remind myself of that – I am privileged enough to make up my life as I go along, to really be present in it and think about it and appreciate it without wanting for basic necessities and without wanting for excess. That awareness transcends luxury – it’s contentment or presence or balance or maybe, just a cup of coffee and some words on the page.
One Brief Illustration of Authenticity
The other day we were walking by Santo Domingo on the cobblestone apron that fans out beside the church when our attention focused on two grubby street kids, climbing up a pile of sand left over from construction and then throwing themselves back down, gleefully. They gave little puppy shrieks and pummeled the sand lovingly as they wriggled up and rolled down. I knelt and snapped a picture.
The picture shows a Dickensian little boy in a torn blue sweater and tattered trousers, barefoot; staring surprised at the camera, his mouth is a delicate ‘o.’ He is directly in the middle of the sandpile, as if he’s levitating before the sand.
“No fotos!” the boy said, snapping to attention. “10 pesos.” He charged down the pile and stood defiantly in front of me.
I had to laugh. Normally I sternly refused any begging from these kids, but this was different ; the little guy was obviously sharp and understood the tourist mentality. I’m cute, I’m ethnic, I have a slight air of conflict and tragedy about me, and this makes an ideal photo. But the trick the photo can’t capture is that it costs ten pesos.
The boy laid out the terms but, being a kid — even a street kid for whom money is real and felt — couldn’t really care about following through with them when there was a big pile of sand to be climbed. And I’d lost the desire for a photo when the dynamics of the transaction had been laid out like that. He raced back to his mountain, I lowered my camera.
So it goes — even I, who fancy myself the hardened cynic who’ll have none of authenticity this, authenticity that, had been trumped once again by the authentic. I wanted my token photo of the worn and dirty little dude doing something kid-like, going on with his childhood in the simplest way even while his mom begged for money in the Zocolo or sold roses. But he turned that around real fast. So much for precious childhood in rags, gringa, unless you’re willing to cough up a fat ten peso coin for it.
There’s nothing wrong with this kid’s instinct other than the fact that it subverts the nature of our relationship right there, on the spot, and destroys any illusion I have about being the benevolent observer of a tragic but touching and authentic reality. And fair enough. Me and my kind have been a part of that reality for a long time, have in fact helped shape it. This little guy was both immediately and constantly aware of that.
For as much as his response, all tiny wrinkled knees and insubordinate elbows camped in front of me, pulled the plug out of my this-is-Oaxaca moment it also gave me hope. Good for him. Sure, it may not be the best sign that he sees tourists as mere cash machines, but in a way, they are and they prove it again and again and again. But beyond this, beyond the raw capitalist interaction that makes me cringe, is a positive instinct. He isn’t going to sit back and cower and let people come and champion his authenticity. He knows what people want, and he knows how to use that to his advantage. Who’s to say that little dude someday couldn’t be a tourist guide, couldn’t start up some small business?
Now that I’ve been beaten back by the mocking, cynical cries of the peanut gallery telling me, “Are you insane? Still hopelessly naive after so many years in Mexico?” I’ll say that yes, this boy has a very small chance of becoming a tourist guide, of starting his own business. But at least I can find some hope in that instinct, and instead of seeing it as the pin in my bubble I can see it as a sign of growing agency and self-awareness on his part, which may someday lead to something other than life in the street.
On with the story.
The boy’s even littler, pudgy-cheeked buddy in a cheap woolen hat followed his friend’s lead to the tee, posing an elbow on his hip and staring at me for a moment, sizing up just what I wanted. Then he threw himself back into the sand and tried to roll uphill.
I watched them for a moment. Photography has given me the capacity to do this. Stop and absorb a scene and the potential story behind it.
“How ‘bout this,” I said. They stopped climbing, perched at different heights on the pile.
“I get to take a picture, and you can give a treat to my dog.” Scrap the “I’ll observe you as the tourist observes the locals in their local culture” game, scrap the adorable heart-wrenchingness of authentic Oaxacan reality, this is gonna be an exchange, pure and simple. Jorge was standing nearby with the Stella who, with her long, smooth Shepherd body, her pointed ears and her thick black fur was a spectacle right out of the far reaches of a kid’s imagination. They gawked at her. Street kids, for the most part, do not fear the Stella. They do not have the upbringing and the cautious familial/societal membrane of protection around them to worry about things like getting bitten by dogs. They are reckless and straightforward, they want to test the limits of the world around them in ways that seem violent compared with those of other children.
“Sale!” shouted the older one. Meaning in this context, “it’s on, it’s a deal.” He went charging down his little mountainside and stood directly in front of me. Jorge brought up the Stella as if we were setting up an elaborate magic trick.
“Sit, Stella,” I said. She sat, singly focused on the rawhide. The little boy gaped with nervous, barely held together anticipation.
“Put it flat on your hand,” I explained, “lay it flat like that so that she doesn’t get your fingers when she grabs it, ok?”
He nodded. His buddy observed anxiously from the side, his admiration for his friend cemented for life.
The blue-sweatered boy held out his hand firmly and flatly to the Stella, who sucked up the rawhide like a horse inhaling a sugar cube. The boy screamed in delight.
“Now you,” I said to the little guy. He gaped at me with rounded eyes.
“Flat.” He said. “Flat flat flat!” He stuck out his hand.
His coin-sized palm was hardly big enough to hold a rawhide. I set it down carefully and guided his hand towards the dog, who reached out as if to swallow his arm whole and then zeroed in on the rawhide, slurping it up and leaving a trail of drool.
The boy jumped up and down and then went racing into the sandpile, assailing it full-force with his body as if he didn’t know what to do with the thrill of feeding a wild animal.
His older friend followed him and moments later they were hurling themselves down, crawling back up, flailing around the sand as if they’d never met me. We kept going on our walk. I didn’t take another photo.