the travelling sociologist

Events:

Disappeared so thoroughly into goan and karnatakan beach life that I did not notice time passing....looked at a calander yesterday in gokarna and noticed that I only had one week left....how did any of this happen....let me try to explain....

Arrived by night, spent the day alone, wandering.... swam and wandered up the beach by sunset, looking for connections....saw a group of people, looking energetic, rough round the edges what I usually look for and decided to sit down beside them.....was invited to join...talked with them....returned the following day and the day after that for sunset, food, songs....I have somehow ended up in a kind of family here....have acquired some kind of goan beach life yet i have no idea who these people are in there other lives....it is also totally irrelevant in a sense....all that matters is what exists on a beach in india..... decided to go travelling a little further south with one, to gokarna in karnataka....a hindu holy place and with quiet beaches on the brink of discovery nearby.....spent a day discovering the quiet beaches, and another walking into the town, encountering a swami, looking at temples, eating great vegetarian food, being immersed in india again....now back in palolem again for a christmas with this new makeshift family before contemplating a little and moving on again.....

Thoughts:

On beach life and identity:

Was wondering previously how one could characterise travelling life, the travelling experience, how it forms identity.....I suppose I was thinking when i wrote this about how this compares with the bohemian experience of being an exile within ones home society, travelling in a sense without moving, orientalising the european without perhaps going to the orient..... after a week of hanging round with long term habitual travellers i have come to see that they are quite different experiences.....in both cases one is trying to become, or becomes some kind of different versions of the self, however, in terms of the intensity of struggle they are really quite different experiences.... for the traveller, the posession of self comes from that sense of being very far away from old identity and struggle, the sense that it can all go, float away into the ocean and picked up at some other time....all really quite meditative.... bohemian life, on the other hand, because of the intensity and conflict that are necessary when one adopts a different identity, philosophy from others in a society in which one still lives is not an easy letting go at all, rather it is a life full of struggle.... as one seems to have replaced the other in western europe(bohemian life is on the decline, traveller life in the ascendent) it would be interesting to compare the two types of life course these two different phenomena involve.....

On travelling with a man:

Went down to gokarna with a guy.....an interesting experience from many perspectives.....from the feminist one i noticed this..... being attached to a man has immediately rendered me unproblematic and completely invisible..... in the hotel the staff spoke only to him, this morning in a restaurant the staff looked for him to order for me.... some girls at a table opposite us looked at me with astonishment when i put down the money to pay for us both....

thats all from me for the moment....

A happy and safe christmas to all....

love roisin