Tag: travel

The Story, My Story.

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“Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who write it?”

-Roxana Robinson, “The Right to Write”, New York Times

I came across this article yesterday while reading other opinion pieces in the New York Times. The question was largely in context of nonfiction writers taking on a topic outside of their personal experience: the writer of a war novel who never experienced battle or a Caucasian woman writing on predominately African American culture. It was assumed in the article that the writers performed extensive research in order to write about each new topic, taking pains to write as truthfully and honestly as they could. But the question remains. Do these writers own their stories and if in doing so, do they take ownership away from those they interviewed and studied, those who had lived the words on the page?

These questions, as a blogger, stay with me. I am now the very proud owner of the domain name www.twelvetoedtraveler.com. This is my public outlet for my personal story. Here in this magical Internet world, I share my thoughts and my experiences with anyone willing to indulge me for 20-600 words. I wonder about my own legitimacy to share my stories and to includes others who may not have asked to be written about or illustrated in detail. I worry about the way my motivation may be portrayed: truthful expression or creative license for exploitation?

photo (16)Austin was incredible; the city is filled with sun, incredible food and wonderful company. One evening Billy and I were seated at the patio outside Uchi (which would go on to be the best sushi experience of my entire life) waiting for our table when a waitress came to bring us drinks. The three of us began chatting and the waitress told us she was planning a solo trip to Europe–one way ticket to Copenhagen–and we immediately exchanged contact information while I rattled off a number of places I knew she would love. I remember feeling incredibly excited for her, embracing another continent to explore the world with some hard-earned cash. I was confident that it was going to be one of her big life changing experience. And then I realized,

she was me.

One month from today, I will be in Geneva, Switzerland starting my own solo tour of beautiful, historic countries I’ve only seen or read about in travel books and Facebooks. I have my countries in order: Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Turkey. I have begun to (roughly) chart my expedition across these foreign lands: the places my parents honeymooned and my friends have beached and bathed. I have one month and I am totally overwhelmed.

 “Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who write it?”

But I think about my alternative. The alternative being not going. The alternative being someone else writing my story.

My motivation for traveling and for writing  is self discovery. It is meant to be neither self-indulgent nor abstract. I write because there are places I’ve been and people I’ve met who deserve to be recognized; these people and experiences have changed me. I write because I don’t want to choose between living my story or writing someone else’s. I want both.

—-

P.S. I want to give a special shout out to those people from Northampton, my old job, and others who have recently begun following my blog. Thank you for your support as I start out of these very exciting and scary chapter of my life. I’ll be bringing each of you with me as I roll my suitcase and write my words.

Travel through Dance

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The American College Dance Festival Association (ACDFA) Northeast Regional conference was held at Penn State this weekend, Friday through Monday. The four-day event invited students from Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey to break from routine and luxuriate in the shared passion of dance. This year, Bucknell University was an anxious newcomer full of excited students and faculty ready and willing join the cause. The theme of the weekend for me was travel, movement within artistic expression.

Each morning, sleepy-eyed dancers piled onto the bus at 6:40am to make the 1.5 hour trek to the expansive Penn State campus. Our schedules were filled with a series of master classes and performances by fellow undergraduate students. First Experience with Travel: driving along Route 45 in the early morning and late evenings, blended images of Amish horse-drawn buggies and fields of grain moving past the windowpane. We cradled our coffee cups and granola bars as the other dancers slept, 40 extra minutes of sugar-plum dreams.

I traveled internally. Compositional Improvisation begin on the floor: eyes closed, lower back resting solidly on the slats of varnished wood. Move your body slowly. Become a traveler within your body. Explore as a tourist, investigating the knees and shoulders and triceps as new and foreign destinations. Tap into renewed physical awareness. Pam Vail, a modern dance professor from Franklin & Marshall, provided the Second Travel Experience: moving within body awareness. How often do we acknowledge our bodies, the vessel which selflessly holds our essential organs, bones and muscles? The most unique and intimate parts of ourselves are held suspended in a living, breathing organism moving through time and space. I thanked my body for its strength and support.

Travel Experience No. 3 was traditional movement as a dancer in space. The packed room channeled Martha Graham herself in deep-seated contractions and explosions across the floor. Head up. Arms out. Our bodies moved in leaps, turns and extensions working to awaken the skin on the soles of our feet and stretch elastic tendons. Dancers dancing long to travel in this way forever.

We travel by observation. As audience members, flocks of pastel skirts, bodies in stillness, and partnering synchronicity confused and excited us. I was transported to moments of love, pain, exhaustion and power. In this way, I moved with the dancers in physical envy, the Fourth Travel Experience. I was a lonely New Yorker, a cocky businessman, a young peasant girl. Art gives us the ability to travel effortlessly through time and place through other’s visions and ideas. Great dance embodies the most basic of human emotion without masks, frills or disguise. It is recognized by a universality of human connection. 

So travel, combined with PB&J sandwiches, handfuls of trail mix, and short naps during intermission summed up my ACDFA experience. I was part of a collective identity known as “dancer” and offered my own pointed feet and rotated hips to the organic community. And while my time as a college dancer is coming to an end, the love of dance and travel only grows.

New Life Goal: Free Trip to Japan

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In an attempt to boost tourism, Japan will be offering 10,000 free airplane tickets to lucky travelers from across the world. The program is rumored to begin in April 2012 in order to generate the tourism economy currently suffering from the recent earthquake and nuclear power disaster less than a year ago. The catch? Each ticket recipient must blog about his or her travel experience for the duration of the stay. Bloggers with a strong following and those capable of encouraging others to visit the wealthy island nation are encouraged to apply.

Am I one of those highly influential bloggers the Japanese tourism industry is looking for? Probably not. But my life’s new ambition is to receive one of the 10,000 magical boarding passes. Like Charlie, I will buy as many chocolate candy bars as possible to increase my chances of winning a “golden ticket” to the land of the Rising Sun. Since neither of my uncles had children of their own, I represent the final generation of individuals who bear the family name Tsukada. My name is more Japanese than any other part of my life and I want to learn everything I can about it’s origin and history.

In the two times I have traveled to Japan in the past, my combined visits totaled less than four hours. Both to and from the Philippines, I remained behind the thick glass windows of the Tokyo airport munching on green tea Kit-Kats and picturing the world outside. It was with reluctance that I boarded my connecting flight, whispering I’ll be back, before the island archipelago disappeared from view.

As a Japanese-American, I am constantly reminded of my identity and cultural heritage. Strangers I meet for the first time often ask me where I am from or what my ethnicity is. Many want to know if I can speak Japanese and make sushi on a regular basis. I want to tell them, “I’m as Asian as you!” but I simply say, “No, I am the fourth generation born in the United States. My father didn’t speak the language but I do hope to learn more about my culture in the future.” Nobody wants to know if I can speak Italian or have ever traveled to southern Italy, the home of my mom’s grandparents. So as long as I look Asian, I might as well learn as much about Japan as possible. 

I wonder if Japanese citizens will notice the slant of my eyes and color of my hair. Will they be able to tell I am half-Japanese? It’s hard to say and my distinctly American accent will not help me blend in. Even if I don’t win one of those free tickets to Japan, it is a future destination that comes ahead of most places in the world. So I’ll brush up on my chopstick skills, practice the correct pronunciation of Konichiwa, and hope for the best.

Beginning of the End

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Take down the 2011 calendar. Rip out notes from last semester’s notebooks. Spend $200 on new books from Amazon. That’s right folks– it’s time for another semester. The beginning of the end.

My “seniority” is reflected as I recount my academic stories to new freshmen tour guides. It stares at me during a discussion of the senior piece for the Dance Company’s spring concert. And each time I write the date and year, I am reminded that my peers and I represent the Class of 2012. When did I become a senior in college? It’s a question I imagine most of my classmates are asking themselves tonight, just a day before their last first day of class. The seniors seemed important four years ago. And somehow taller. They had infinite wisdom about the college environment, social norms and ways to reach the best job opportunities. Yet here I am on the verge of graduation just as confused as ever.

The Bucknell Magazine published a small article about me in the Winter 2012 edition that was stuffed into my campus mailbox this morning. I had almost forgotten about my brief interview and photo shoot last semester, posing awkwardly on various parts of campus which included the quiet section of the library. Students got a nice little study break while they watched me attempt a variety of smiles from my position on the large orange sofa. Go back to work, folks. Nothing to see here. 

Bucknell Magazine — Winter 2012

’Ray Bucknell, p.15

STUDENT PROFILE: KATELYN TSUKADA ’12

“Layovers don’t count,” says Katelyn Tsukada ’12, who notes that her father has been
to more than 50 countries, and she would like to match that number.
Tsukada, a tour guide and the outreach coordinator for the Bucknell Dance
Company, started a blog last spring to chart the beginning of her travels and to keep in
touch with family and friends when she entered the sustainability program at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad (DIS) in Denmark.

Along with travel, environmental studies have remained important to Tsukada,
who received funding from the Bucknell Public Interest Program (BPIP) for internships
to focus on environmental law and policy for two consecutive summers. In Washington,
D.C., she conducted research at an independent think-tank, the Environmental Law
Institute. Last summer, at the Law of Nature Foundation in the Philippines, she examined
environmental law and advocacy, while focusing on decreasing fossil fuel and on marine
protected areas for the coral reefs. Tsukada is planning the first environmental conference
in the spring at the Bucknell Environmental Center. Her goal is to invite six to eight
different schools to talk about their campus initiatives with the hope of taking away new
ideas.

“Travel is all around us,” Tsukada says, as she notes how her travel blog has
evolved from new cities and food to parallels between culture and environmental
practices and to more recent adventures, for example, with the LSAT and with
vegetarianism. Recently, Tsukada read that Japan is offering 10,000 free airline tickets to
boost the tourism. The stipulation is that you have to have a blog. “My new goal with my
blog is to win a ticket. It’s a dream, but it would be perfect to travel and learn more about
Japanese culture and what it means to be Japanese-American,” says Tsukada.

— Kelly Anzulavich

The Last Real Winter Break

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I bought a plane ticket about a week ago. Destination: San Francisco, the home of the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars and the oldest Chinatown in the county. A city where the weather is a solid 60˚F, a welcome change from the upstate New York chill. 

 My loose itinerary includes visiting with family in Vallejo and spending the remaining time in and around Palo Alto, home to Facebook headquarters and Stanford University. I’ll have the chance to meet up with a couple of friends including Hallie, one of my freshmen year roommates and an incredible water polo player. I’ll also get to see my friend Doug, a current law student and friend from my DC internship two summers ago. The city is new, the ocean is near and I couldn’t be more excited.

People: “Why are you going to San Francisco?”

Me: “I’ve never been there before.”

 People: (polite giggle.) “Well that’s a reason.”

And it is.

 My trip will complete a time fondly referred to as “college winter break”. A year from now, I won’t have the luxury of five weeks off without any responsibilities except for an occasional load of laundry and marathons of How I Met Your Mother. The working world not does feel it necessary to provide you with a long restful December/January break. I’ll miss you dear winter hiatus.

Here’s the travel Catch-22. Now, when I am young and ready to see the world, my wallet is empty and there is a great need to prove (to my parents) that four years of expensive college tuition was well worth the time and money. Many of my friends and soon-to-be college graduates are finding jobs and figuring out their daily work schedules in the real world. But after years of hard work and growing salaries, will any of us have the vacation days or personal freedom to dedicate to days or weeks of adventurous travel?

In my mind, waiting until I have loads of money before planning any new trip is futile. For one, I will probably never have loads of money. But more importantly, I can afford to plan cheap and save up if it means I’m seeing the world and having fun. Is holding a job important? Absolutely. But it’s far too easy to fall into a routine where the next travel opportunity is like the horizon–always there but out of reach.

 So long New York. San Francisco, here I come!

A “Journey” To Remember

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There is a machine that is found everywhere in the Philippines: in high-rise apartments, along streets in red light districts and located inside small bamboo huts in the most remote Filipino villages. It is accompanied by family members, recent acquaintances, and even strippers in the major cities. In the words of Lady Gaga’s mom, “We are all born superstars,” and this machine allows those words of wisdom to come true. This machine, my friends, is called a Karaoke machine.

My first experience was at a councilor’s house in Samal just a day after I had arrived. The members of the coral restoration project and I were talking and drinking iced tea, discussing the day’s events.  Dun Dun, one of the men responsible for community outreach and education, walked over to a pavilion in the middle of the property and began belting out tunes one after another. The group joined him and someone informed me that if I really wanted to be Filipino, I had to sing karaoke. Nevermind that I just met these people about 24 hours prior and I don’t like listening to my own voice. Before I knew it,  I was sitting, wide-eyed with a microphone in hand and the lyrics of Don’t Stop Believing appearing on the screen in front of me.

Karaoke Hut

I sounded awful and laughed the whole time. “Sing more,” they chanted and we each did a number of songs before loading up in the truck and driving home. I shocked to see (and hear) other karaoke machines in the homes we visited over the next couple days. Bars and small shacks surrounded by weeds and mud had fully functioning televisions and microphones for use anytime of the day or night

Private Room (TV not shown)My second experience was in Davao City in a private rented karaoke room. After leaving Samal Island, Viv and I stayed two nights in Gene’s house (the same woman who owned the rest house in Samal) and got to see the city with her wonderful daughter Maiki. On our first night, we met Maiki’s cousins and ended up at a small pizza place with a large private room consisting of a bar area, couches and you guessed it…a kareoke machine. We spent the entire evening eating taco pizza, ordering beer, and singing to our hearts’ content. Sing if you’re sober. Sing if you’re drunk. Sing if you have a terrible voice. Sing sing sing. It was fabulous. 

In Metro Manila, particularly near Manila Bay, there are numbers of signs advertising KTV or Karaoke Television. I’ve heard that many of these place have live strippers coupled with televisions and microphones. For the tame, there are family KTVs for more wholesome song singing. Karaoke for everyone.

I’m getting used to having near strangers join me in love ballads, Spice Girl classics, and Jackson 5 favorites. To anyone who hasn’t traveled to the Philippines before: drink some warm tea, warm up the vocal chords and take a deep breath. A microphone and TV is closer than you think.

Maiki, Me, Viv, Viv's friend Miko