Before we can go forward with the new, sassy/fabulous and SEO-encrusted Itchy Foot Adventures that I’ve promised my new corporate overlords, I need to clear the air a bit.

I feel really ambivalent about all this Travel… For Women! business.  Especially because, ultimately, it is about the business.  I don’t believe that there need to be special websites for vagina-bearing people who like to leave home and explore the world.  Not to mention special products, services, publications, tours, guidebook publishing imprints….  Women are people.  For the most part, what we want from travel is the same stuff men want. 

So, on the one hand, I’ve accepted membership to a group of travel bloggers who write For Women.  On the other hand, I think that’s a load of crap.

Going deeper, I know that there are a few important differences between traveling as a man and traveling as a woman.   It’s not a matter of how many pairs of shoes is too many, or what to tell your family when they worry about you out there all alone. It’s bigger than that and not as easily monetized. 

I can’t assume the same things as a male traveler can assume; I don’t have the same freedoms.  Even as a woman who thinks most “Traveling While Female” safety precautions are bullshit.  I can’t trust men on the road in the way that other men can.  In countries where the public sphere is overwhelmingly male, it’s difficult for me to delve as deeply into the local culture as a man could.  Sometimes I can’t even do the things I want to do - like hitchhike or visit Saudi Arabia - because they’re either not safe or not worthwhile for me as a woman. 

This is the stuff that the Female Traveling blogosphere doesn’t talk about very well.  This is the sort of thing I refuse to ignore as a travel writer.

The three or four people who actually read this blog might have been wondering at the radio silence.  Oh, who are we kidding - radio silence is the norm around here, and there usually doesn’t need to be A BIG REASON for it (unless the big reason is that I was marathonning through the entire series of Roseanne on Netflix). 

But OK.

Just when I thought it was safe to forget that I had un blog, a certain Lifestyle Travel New Media Communications Network Thingamajig For Ladies appeared on the horizon and offered to make me a contributor/affiliate/person. 

At first I was afraid, I was petrified. 

Wait.  Sorry.  What I meant to say was - at first, I thought, “Ummmmmm, y’all, I work like eleventy bajillion hours a week. In TV studio in shitty industrial Queens.  Under fluorescent light.  This does not really make for a prolific travel blog.”  I mean, on the off chance that I have time to write something or take a pretty picture, either it will be deadly dull (the film industry is actually not all that glamorous) or it will be covered by the confidentiality agreement I signed on my first day under said fluorescent lights.

But then I remembered.  I live in fucking New York City.  I work for a TV Show.  If I can’t find one interesting thing a week to report to a Lifestyle/Travel/Ladyblog, it probably isn’t my job that is dull and unglamorous. 

So here I am.  Stay tuned for more posts about Brooklyn and most likely some adventures in “Personal Branding”. (didja notice the new look?? didja??)  When you get bored of that, please go and check out my new overlords, See Jane Fly.  Perhaps they will even teach me to be a proper blogging lady, in the end.

P.S. Yes, as a matter of fact that is yours truly drinking wine out of a water bottle on a train through northern Italy.  The mean lady in the Trieste railway station cafe would not give us a cup.  Probably because I could not figure out how to ask politely enough in Italian.

Last night, in the kitchen of my Brooklyn apartment in 2011, my first reaction on hearing the news that Osama bin Laden was dead was, “Can we go home now?”

On September 11, 2001, I was twenty years old.  I’d been living in New York for a little under a year.  When I said “home”, I meant south Louisiana, Terrebonne Parish. 

I was a college dropout. I had an asshole boyfriend I lived with in dull Upper Manhattan, where you had to spend half an hour on the Nine train just to eat food at a restaurant with a correctly spelled name. I’d spent a year temping, hopping from cube farm to reception desk, Midtown to Financial District, law firm to dotcom to corporate HQ. I was still vaguely intent on doing something in The Theatre after college.

George W. Bush was the President: a fact that vaguely disappointed me though I didn’t consider myself a political person back then. (Confession: I didn’t vote in the 2000 election.)  The Taliban existed in a haze of undergraduate Othering, their existence learned of in an issue of Newsweek sometime in the Clinton administration.  I had probably never heard the words “Al Qaeda”.  Osama bin Laden was a string of nonsense syllables, sort of like Muammar Ghaddafi or Yasser Arafat, except I’d actually heard of those guys.

These are some words that did not exist yet in 2001: jegging, google, housing bubble, post-Katrina.

Britney Spears was a fresh-faced supposedly virginal pop star. Rudy Giuliani was that asshole who closed the nightclubs and thought he could personally decide what was appropriate to hang in New York City’s art museums.  Hillary Clinton was mostly a former first lady, though the existence of her non-vicarious political career was starting to sink in. Michael Bloomberg was just a really rich dude – in fact, most New Yorkers who did not work in finance had probably never even heard of Michael Bloomberg.

These are some things sane people thought were unthinkable in America in 2001: torture being sanctioned by the government, a black man becoming the next President, people paying money to download digital media.

All New Yorkers could agree that Jennifer Lopez was still just Jenny From The Block.  The Cosmopolitan was the most awesome beverage since the Iced Mocha Frappucino.  Mark Zuckerberg was a nerdy high school kid who had not yet invented Facebook.   Cell phones had tiny monochromatic screens and like three ringtones you could choose from.  Actually, ringtone might be another word that did not exist in 2001. People still used fax machines with a straight face in 2001.

The economy was relatively awesome.  People had jobs and maybe even health insurance.  Geopolitically, we were still living in the Bill Clinton afterglow: communism was over and America was a good guy on a white horse who helped out small countries like Somalia and Kosovo (but not Rwanda!). 

In other words, it was a really long time ago.

 The last ten years is one of those big rubber snakes with a spring inside that is just NEVER going to fit back into that dumb can of mixed nuts. Even if we collectively surrender our iPhones, admit that skinny jeans look stupid on everyone, and call a do-over on that whole stupid Ralph Nader thing.

Shit, do y’all remember when Ralph Fucking Nader was, like, the biggest political controversy going?  We were naïve children back then, for sure.

In a certain way, The War On Terror – as coined by George W. Bush – is probably doomed as a way of thinking about America’s relationship with the rest of the world, especially the Muslim world.  Bin Laden’s death is partly to blame for that, though I’d like to think that the Arab Spring will play a role as well.  And hopefully this will be the end of our military presence in Afghanistan, put the last nail in the coffin that is Guantanamo, and keep us out of Iran.  Maybe it will even keep people like Sarah Palin out of public office and delegitimize Glenn Beck. 

But I still can’t go home again. 

I’m thirty years old.  I know what it means to take to the streets in protest.

I stopped dying my hair and started wearing makeup (OK, just mascara, but still).  I liked boys and then I liked girls and now I’m pretty sure I still like both, but honestly I prefer not to think about it at all anymore.  College came back and then was finished; I have an inexplicable degree in anthropology and an even more inexplicable career in television.

I can watch Oscar-winning British costume dramas on my laptop via the internet, but it’s a capital offense to attempt to bring more than three ounces of shampoo on a plane.  The president is a black guy.  I’m writing this blog post from a café with free wifi and fair trade single-origin coffee in a Brooklyn neighborhood that was in 2001 was mainly known for its race riots. 

I don’t recognize girls, now women, from my childhood on Facebook because they all have different last names now.  Not only does the Nine no longer exist, but a whole alphabet of other subway lines lived and died in the decade since I last used it to rent a video tape from Kim’s on the Upper West Side.  Yesterday I torrented the new Kanye West album to put on my iPhone.  This is a language I would not have understood a decade ago. 

Can we go home now?  No.

Like a lot of other cities people hate, I’m falling in love with Venice. Sure, it’s crowded with tourists. It’s run down. It smells funny. The food is expensive. But so what? It’s Venice.

Kyle and I are staying in a (literally) funky little hostel in the Canareggio neighborhood. It’s all brick and plaster, arched windows with decrepit green shutters, yellow flowers in the window boxes. A balcony. Inside it’s dark and sort of filthy, piled with mattresses. Outside we have our own private bridge over a moat of a canal, with boats passing under it and everything. There’s a little piazza, called a campo here in Venice, with a trippy cylindrical church.

We thought at first that it was a Masonic temple - it looks like a secret uncovered in a Dan Brown novel. Seriously, this building is so weird it has to be fiction based on a sophomoric misunderstanding of a bit or art history trivia. It turns out it’s a seventeenth century renovation of a Romanesque chapel. Still doesn’t account for the mysterious symbols and oddly secular Latin inscription over the doorway, but I’ll take it. Nothing to see here. Moving right along.

People talk about Venice as a dead city, maybe even an undead city (somebody please make a zombie movie in Venice). But it’s full of life. Quiet life, to be sure. They don’t call it “La Serenissima” for nothing. But irks breathing. Little old ladies drink macchiato at the bar in the cafe. Guys with paunches play video poker, little glasses of Birra Moretti. Gutter punks duet on flute and guitar for spare change in the campo. Toddlers whine for toys (“Basta, Sofia!”) and schoolboys race bikes along the canals. Dogs are everywhere. After the zombie apocalypse, Venice will be taken over by the dogs.

How can anyone not love this place?

In a lot of ways, it doesn’t feel like the sixties was all that long ago.  People were mainly dealing with the same problems we deal with today.  Most of our pop cultural references stem from that era, from Mrs. Robinson to the Motown diner theme of the video for Cee-Lo’s “Fuck You”.  Even fashion hasn’t changed all that much; half the clothes in my closet would be at home in 1963.

Flipping through my copy of Fielding’s Travel Guide To Europe: 1964 Edition, though, I’m reminded that the mid 20^th century was a very different time. 

Leaving aside the quaint endpaper maps of Europe divided by the iron curtain and  breathless commentary on air travel and synthetic fabrics, the most fascinating part of Fielding is the packing lists.

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I recently got a bit of a plug from Mariellen at BreatheDreamGo, talking about authenticity and travel to India. 

Her first post on the topic inspired me to comment:

I spent two months in India in 2008, and by the second month of my trip people would routinely assume that I was an expat living fully within Indian culture. This was because I didn’t dress or carry myself like a backpacker and made an effort to learn local customs and connect with the people around me. Most of the backpackers act like backpackers – they aren’t really interested in getting to know Indians on their own terms or really connecting at all with the culture beyond platitudes.

Which in turn inspired a followup post, wherein Mariellen talks a little about her attitude towards the “backpacker scene”. 

I feel divided about my attitude toward “backpacking” culture.  On the one hand, it’s great to have this network of fellow travelers (both literally and figuratively) who relate to the kind of things I want to do.  Young travelers who are brave and thrifty and understand that there’s more to the world than theme parks and cruises and beach-front timeshares.  On the other hand, backpackers can be every bit as stuck in their own culture as cruise-goers and spring breakers.  Just because your ticket is for Laos instead of Orlando, or you carry your things in a pack rather than a wheelie suitcase, doesn’t make you truly open to the world around you.

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This GloboTreks post on why it’s better to travel when you’re young really got me thinking.

After two long international backpacking trips, staying in hostels and meeting other travelers in beach bars and rooftop cafes, I’m really happy I didn’t dash off on a big international adventure the day I turned 18. 

I’ve met tons of younger travelers who’ve inspired me; this is not a post to mock young backpackers, at all.  And I feel I should also remind everyone that I’m only 29, myself.  So when I’m referring to younger travelers, and to waiting till I was older, I’m talking about the decision of whether to travel at 18 or 20 - not advocating that people wait till retirement!

I Knew Myself

There’s something to be said for confidence, self-awareness, and the power of feeling free to make your own choices.  At eighteen, I was still very concerned with fitting in with my peers and, sadly, willing to do a lot of things only because they seemed like the cool things to do.  Waiting until I had the courage to do what I wanted regardless of others made a huge impact on my travels.  I felt more comfortable traveling solo, and I wasn’t too concerned about choosing destinations that were the “hot” places to travel among my friends.  I also feel free, now that I’m a little older, to do what I really want to do when I’m traveling, even if it’s not what other travelers are doing.  Some people are iconoclasts at twenty.  But most of us aren’t, and many of the university-age travelers I’ve met don’t seem to have those qualities.

I Was Prepared

When I booked my ticket to India at 26, very few of the main activities of travel were new to me.  For one thing, I’d been traveling unescorted by my parents for almost a decade thanks to my decision to move to Boston, and later New York, from my home in Louisiana.  I’d explored new cities on my own, without knowing anyone within a thousand miles.  I’d taken some short trips to Europe, so I knew what jetlag and language barriers felt like.  All of these experiences made spending two months backpacking around India seem like a logical extension of skills I’d already built, rather than a big scary adventure I was totally unprepared to face.  Which made traveling to a supposedly stressful country much less overwhelming.  Except for the cows, taking a taxi from the Mumbai airport to my hotel near Colaba didn’t feel all that different from taking a taxi from LAX to my hotel in Culver City.

I Knew Where I Wanted To Go

When I finally had the chance to take my first long backpacking journey, I knew exactly where I wanted to go.  I didn’t opt to do the classic Euro Trip, or to head for the backpacker’s mecca of Southeast Asia, or to build a clone of some trip a friend had taken.  I wanted to go to India.  I really wanted to go to India - I’d had a dog-eared India guidebook on my nightstand for at least a year, I knew the high and low seasons, what parts of the country I most wanted to see, and what the food and culture were like.  I could recognize a good airfare, had a sense of what scams to avoid, and knew how to travel around the country efficiently.

And, thus, I had an amazing time in India.  Where I met scores of miserable nineteen-year-olds who were traveling on a whim, with no sense of what this place was and how to approach it.

I Knew The Value Of Time And Money

I think my biggest backpacker pet peeve is the cliche of the party hostel (or backpacker bar, or, y’know, Amsterdam).  A bunch of glorified teenagers who mainly seemed to be traveling for the excuse to sleep all day and get smashed every night.

Because I had to wait until I could fund my own trips, I knew what that money meant.  I knew how hard it had been to support myself as well as saving for a long-term overseas journey.  I knew that I would likely never have the chance to come back, so I should spend my days experiencing it rather than slouching hungover in front of the TV in the hostel.  And, regardless of how many Australians it annoys, I firmly believe that I’m a better traveler for that awareness.

I Had Time To Get To Know My Home Country

While I was waiting around, becoming more confident, saving my pennies, and figuring out what I really wanted in a journey, I was also coming of age at home.  I traveled domestically as much as possible.  I became politically active, and my understanding of what America means and who we are as a nation and a culture developed far beyond any Poli Sci course syllabus.  I fought hard for my ideals and came away with a knowledge of the world and my place in it that never could have taken root had I spent that time in Costa Rica or Berlin.  Now when I travel abroad, I do so as a far more informed traveler.  This really comes in handy when I have the chance to meet locals because I can have much deeper and more nuanced interactions than I could at eighteen. 

P.S.  That’s me, up there, at 17, looking confident and adorable but definitely not ready for a year-long RTW backpacking adventure.  From the cut and color, I’m guessing it was a couple months before my first trip to Italy?