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To travel and all it teaches!

March 18, 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Lots of us talk about travelling once it is safe to do so. “As soon as things settle down and there have been enough of us having the vaccine, I want to travel [here, there, anywhere]!” For many of us, dodging some of next winter is a priority by flying south to warmer climes, while pining and waiting for Europe to get a grip and be safe to visit. As the number of COVID-19 cases climb world-wide, that looks further ahead in the future than any of us would wish for. 

Travel to the States? Not so sure. Their new President Biden is all about July 4 being Independence Day from the pandemic with his ambitious funding and plans for vaccinating the majority – or does he say “all” – but the news is that the cases in the USA have risen to over 30 million, which is almost 10 percent of the country’s population and 25 percent of all the cases across the entire planet. Let’s save road trips across the 49th Parallel for 2022.

Grunt.

Gosh, I am so glad to have travelled when it was easy and there was a pleasant half an hour earlier today, when that first trip to Europe crossed my mind and those memories came back like a treat.

It was the September of the year. My husband, Ernest, and I were travelling by ship, a Russian cruise liner, basically taking people back to Europe and the ship back to its home harbour, so we supposed, it was a perfect chance for us, going to Europe with no definite plans, to enjoy a few days of comfort and bonhomie with the very mixed bag of folk on board.

The first things to understand, as new and young travellers, are to have no assumptions and realize there is everything to learn. When we are fogged in by an overbearing upbringing, weighed down by misinformation about other places and the people living there, culture shock comes as a surprise. Better by far to admit our ignorance and travel with open minds, prepared to soak up the cultures that we will meet. Ernest and I didn’t really understand that but we soon got the idea: relatively speaking, we didn’t know much.

Cherbourg, a harbour on the Normandy coast was the first port of call, with good access to Paris for those wanting it. We had time to disembark for a quick walk about the town and laughed and laughed at how much smaller the trucks and the trains were than those in Canada. Our new British acquaintances brought us down to earth and it was the beginning of the joyous learning curve that has lasted ever since.

In due course, our ship sailed north past Belgium and the Netherlands to Bremerhaven, Germany, our landing place. Standing on the dock, waving and smiling was my German Aunt Ursel, for we were coming to stay for a short while with her and my Uncle Dennis Grosvenor, my mother’s brother, who was a soldier with the Canadian army.

I don’t know: everything was special to us. What hit us so profoundly was the living history: buildings and homes sometimes hundreds of years old, the feeling that this town and that city had been there for a very long time. It made a difference to how people behaved, how they felt about themselves and how they had learned, over centuries, to live in close proximity with many other people.

Eventually, we discovered how profoundly damaged most cities had been during the bombings of the Second World War. So, there were also plenty of modern buildings, beautifully designed and constructed with German thoroughness, meant to last a long time and service those who used them well.

In these modern internet times, it may the case that Germans no longer address each other by their last names and honorariums. Mrs. Grosvenor or Frau Grosvenor, that was accepted as normal for my aunt from strangers and acquaintances. Her landlady of many years never considered calling by her first name.

The German for it was: “when we have shared a drink or a meal, then we should call each other by our first names.” Formality is a way of living in the midst of so many people.. Yet, as we walked down the streets of the town of Lahr, everyone greeted every other person – “Guten morgen/tag/abend” [good morning, afternoon, evening]. There were no lowered eyes, no heads turned away: good manners were the keys and we very soon fell into the fold, dashing our normal shyness to one side. 

It was not a simple matter of fitting in; it was a language lesson, learning to be German. Learning to live inside Germany, not bouncing on the surface, never to understand. It was wonderful.

After some weeks, we bought a Volkswagen Beetle and followed an invitation to go to Italy, to Tuscany, and pick the olives on the property of a friend of ours. A story for another time.

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