Pieces of Travel Thoughts

"Let's not crash here" // Personal pic, June 2015 - Over Northern Canada

Have you ever noticed how the mind races and random thoughts float around when you travel, or explore a totally unknown land? As if the unfamiliarity of it all awakened the brain and made us more mindful of everything and anything passing our eyes, and mind. As the yearly E3 show starts for me - which means you are unlikely to hear of me next week - here are a few of these floating thoughts for you today.

• Airports tend to have their own codes. The population is international but somehow similar in many ways. The privilege to be able to fly, perhaps? Duty free doesn't mean anything much any more. Apart from tobacco perhaps, but I don't smoke so I wouldn't know.


• I like window seats on planes, to be able to peek outside whenever I can. How different is the landscape from a region to another, how awesome the clouds as they form over a mountain in the Nevada desert, when they cloak the sky underneath, how they cast shadows on the plain. In twelve hours, deserts and seas and ice and mini-towns with tiny houses and ant cars.


• What are these huge rectangular flat-rooftop buildings down there? Gymnasiums? Did I wonder naively. As the aircraft descended on Los Angeles, I read "Target" and "Walmart" and I got it and I thought (with no ill will) of this George Carlin talk.


• Doesn't everything suddenly seem unimportant from above? These little houses, little roads, little cars, little people busying around. I see my own home from above, my work, I imagine my metro line linking them both underneath. I think of all my daily troubles and I look at this creation of human society and suddenly, that e-mail I forgot to answer to seems so mundane.


• We lost the meaning of awesome, didn't we? The new spring burger is "awesome", but we never look around us, at what really is awesome. These flowers blooming then leaving place for new, green leaves, the fruit budding, the many many clouds, pouring down rain, drops hanging from the leaves, the smell of rain on the asphalt. The sun irradiating a bright blue sky. The palm trees lining around this motorway. "Carpool lane". I imagine in big car hosting a swimming pool.  Humanity created a flying machine and calculated the flight route taking earth rotation into account. We are bipede monkeys and we fly around the world. Twleve hours and I'm on the other side of the world. If the apocalypse strikes now, it will take me years to get back home. 

You'll have to attribute some of these thoughts to jetlag. I hope you like that kind of random list, have a nice week, and see you on the other side of the earth...