Tag Archives: travel

Month-Long Vacations for Argentines

Nationality: Argentine-American
Age: 44
Occupation: Director of Residential Services at local health center
Residence: Claremont, CA
Performance Date: April 25, 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“In Argentina, when people go on vacation, they take a whole month of vacation. When people say they are going on vacation, they’re gone a whole month. A lot of people will come to the states to Miami. A lot of them will go to Brazil. That’s a popular place to vacation. Some will go to Europe, like Spain. They don’t joke around with vacation in Argentina. They have the right idea, and I think we need more of that here. Most people have their own businesses, so it’s not uncommon to pick a month, usually in the summer, and take a vacation. It’s impossible to get anything done in the summer in Argentine. It’s a completely different way of life in Argentina that you wouldn’t understand if you haven’t lived there.”

Background Information and Context:

This topic came up when the informant told me that the lifestyle in Argentina is completely different from life in America, and I asked her to explain. She knows this from experience because she was born in Argentina, and she still has family that lives there.

Collector’s Notes:

As the informant said, this different approach to vacations, and the fact that most Argentine’s own small businesses shows a marked difference between the way of life there and that at of Americans. A month-long vacation in America is often thought to be reserved for those who do not care about money, especially those who are already rich. Living in a deeply capitalist society, most Americans do not think to take so much time off work, nor would their places of employment allow it. America is a place where large companies flourish, and financial growth, security, and what it means to have a successful life are often the same.

Souvenir Keychains

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Primary Language: English

Collector: Um, do you have any, like, souvenirs you’ve gotten from any place?

Informant: Yes. I collect keychains from different places.

Collector: Where have you been?

Informant: Florida, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Maryland, London, Germany, Switzerland, France, um…

 

Informant is a freshman at the University of Southern California. She is studying Theater Arts in the School of Dramatic Arts here. She is from Austin Texas. I spoke to her while we were eating lunch at my sorority house. Much of what she told me was learned from her sister or her own experiences.

 

This seems to be a common thing that people collect when they go somewhere. I think it’s a pretty stereotypical traveler or tourist thing to pick up, and there are often many different types, so the appeal is that you don’t get the same thing as everyone else all of the time, These can be taken with people wherever they go, and might represent some special part of the visit.

THEY’RE NOT FROM AROUND HERE

Nationality: Italian-American, Portuguese-American, but a couple generations removed
Age: 55
Occupation: Engineering Professor
Residence: Boston, MA
Performance Date: 3/25/15
Primary Language: English

EXAMPLE:

“They’re not from around here.”

BACKGROUND

“This is a line that sometimes still gets used in our house.

We went out to visit Jimmy (his wife’s brother) in San Diego. Him and his girlfriend at the time. We were going to some fair in the town just north of San Diego. I forget the town, maybe it was Carlsbad. I’m not exactly sure of where.

I was driving the rental car. It was like a big one too because we had to fit us five in the family plus Jim and his girlfriend, Amy. So we get to the fair and there are people there to direct you where to park. You know it’s this big lot and they wave us in, you know, go, go, go. And they are giving us directions, like turn left, go straight, turn right, turn left.

The next thing you know we’re about to exit. They directed me through the lot to the exit. And if I go out the exit, I’m stuck because it empties onto a one-lane highway. So I stop and do a U-Turn to turn around.

Next thing you know the guys are yelling at me saying that I can’t do that. And I’m just like, “I want to park the car.” And then I hear from the back Amy yelling, “They’re not from around here.”

“They’re not from around here!” Even though that had no relationship as to why I didn’t park the car. Me not being from San Diego did not account from those people not navigating me correctly through the lot.

So now my wife and I use it when we get lost or don’t understand something.”

ANALYSIS:

I feel like people can learn a lot about others during travel. Traveling is just one of those times when the best and worse is brought out of everyone. It is in those moments of stress that so many funny things can happen that make for great stories later.

This is one that apparently is told with some regularity to it, with that line being the real gem of it all. To adopt it and say it, of course brings this family back to those days of traveling in a new location, half-way across the country. I think their might even be some unconscious cultural bias here. Amy, I was told is from the west, and is generally remembered as being somewhat ditzy. So that line kind of encompasses that stereotype of dumb blonde California girls.

More than that though, I think it is one of those really funny, organic moments that people tend to hold on, not wanting to forget. That line is a perfect excuse for whenever something does not go your way in a new location, and can also serve as a way to ease the tension and stress. If something goes wrong, just say, “I’m not from around here.”

Bermuda Triangle

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Florida
Performance Date: April 16, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Basic French

So when I was a kid, uh, when I was like 4 or 5 probably, I first heard about this whole thing with the Bermuda Triangle? My brother told me about it, probably. And he told me that basically it’s this place in the Atlantic Ocean where if you fly over it you, like any of the planes that would fly over it would crash, they’d all crash, and like everyone would die. That’s like the 7 year old kid version, I guess. But . . . and then over the years I heard that it was more like there were mysterious disappearances and stuff, um. Wait, who was the famous pilot? There was a famous pilot, uh, uh, uh . . . um, Amelia Earheart, maybe? . . . There was a famous pilot who went down in the Bermuda Triangle. And there were a bunch of maybe World war 2 related things as well, where planes went down mysteriously, like, without any weather or anything, they would just go off radar, and then they would, the plane would disappear. Um, so a lot of people would dispute that it was like aliens or something. Some sort of mysterious energy, like magnetic energy over this triangular area of the ocean that made planes crash, and then the pilots were like abducted or something, or taken by, by the squid people of the Bermuda, I don—something like that.
It was kinda scary, cause we traveled a lot when I was younger. And we would fly over the Bermuda Triangle sometimes, and I would be like, “Uh, oh! We’re going to die! We’re gonna get captured by the squid people!”

The unexplained disappearances and technological failures of the Bermuda Triangle remain fascinating, because in a world where all seems explainable, all of us still feel helpless and ignorant in the face of the ocean, or when in an airplane flying across the globe. American explanations for the Bermuda Triangle tend to be exclusively scientific, or science fiction oriented. American is obsessed with science and the future, but when we were pushing the limits of technology during the time when circumnavigating the globe by airplane was becoming possible, planes, such as Amelia Earhart’s, would at times disappear without a trace. That mankind still did not possess the technology to fully explore the globe by air fascinated the nation. Even now the legend of the Bermuda Triangle is prevalent. My friend is particularly fascinated by it because he traveled as a child and was very frightened of their plane getting lost.
In this case his older brother, who did not believe the story, told him the story to scare him. When my friend grew older, however, he no longer believed the story either. Growing out of believing in stories like the Bermuda Triangle or the Loch Ness monster are signs one is maturing and entering adulthood.

German Folksong: Auf du Junger Wandersmann / Get Up, Young Wanderer

Nationality: German
Age: 65
Occupation: Professor of literature, then a mom
Residence: Santa Barbara, California
Performance Date: March 17, 2012
Primary Language: German
Language: English

Link to audio recording of song: Auf du Junger Wandersmann

Background on German Folksongs:

Q. Do you know how old these songs are?

A. No, and I think that’s part of folklore—you don’t really know where it comes from, it wasn’t written by anyone in particular. My mother must have taught me some, and at school, I imagine I learned some.

Q. When would people sing folksongs?

A. While we were walking places in a group, we would sing. And singing while walking, you know, is kind of fun. You can walk to the beat, and it gives you something to do. And I remember that they were calling on me because I used to know all the words. And I was the littlest one on the group, I was only five years old, but I used to know all the words, so whenever they didn’t remember the words, the older kids would call me, “Eva, what are the words again?” so I would come running and tell them the words, and it made me feel good, it made me feel important because here are these older kids, and I have to tell them the words. Those are some of my earliest memories.

Songs were often sung while working. If you had some menial work to do, and you’d get bored doing that, you would sing. For example, when spinning—women used to do a lot of spinning—they would sing, just to amuse themselves. Or when they were ironing; my mother used to tell me, “this is an ironing song,” because they had to do a lot of ironing, and it’s boring work. And my mother and I would sing when we did the dishes because that, too, was boring, menial work. She would do the dishes, and I would dry them, and we would sing together. And we would harmonize. You sing when you work or you walk, and you don’t use any machines, because machines make noise and then there’s no room for singing…so it’s kind of part of the preindustrial age.

Q. People don’t sing as much as they used to?

A. We sing in certain contexts, like at school in choir, but just while doing stuff, not very much anymore. It’s really sad—it’s kind of a dying tradition.

Q. Do you know if German folksongs are very different from other folksongs?

A. Well, you will see that most German songs are in the major key, which sets them apart from eastern European folk music, which is usually minor.

Informant’s Explanation: “This is a song about the journeymen, the craftspeople that used to walk. Once they finished their apprenticeship—there was a very tough system for craftspeople. They would have three years of apprenticeship, and you start that when you’re young. So you would have three years of apprenticeship, and then pass some kind of exam, and then you became a journeyman. And the journeymen journeyed throughout Europe. So they would come, and walk from town to town, and come into a town, and find a master craftsman in that town and ask them, “Do you need someone?” And they would work for this guy for a while, and then they would journey on. So, this is how they broadened their horizons and learned more about their trade. It’s a great system, really—they got to see the world. And there are songs that these people would sing as they walked from town to town.

“The story is about a young man who goes and carries his belongings on his back and says, ‘Sometimes it’s painful and it’s tiring, but it’s worth it, I’m getting to see the world, I’m in Innsbruck now’—Innsbruck is a town in Austria—’and they have good wine there. And anyone who hasn’t been out in the world, I couldn’t recognize as a journeyman or as a master; you have to go out into the world.’”

Analysis: This song’s rhythmic pattern, in which shorter notes lead into longer notes, gives it a strong beat which certainly makes it well-suited for walking. In terms of tone, the song feels confident and almost heroic. Thus, the melody fits the song’s subject well; we can feel the speaker’s sense of adventurousness and excitement at travelling to new and exotic places.

German lyrics can be found online on numerous websites, including these ones:

http://www.volksliederarchiv.de/text1182.html

http://www.singenundspielen.de/id93.htm