I wonder where and when I got bitten by the travel bug. It certainly ran in the family. My father wanted to run away from home to become a sailor. War intervened and he ended up in chemistry journeying into a different world of elements. He spent his last years in a flat overlooking the river Elbe, following the big ships of his dreams. My mother got her degree in agriculture thinking it was her ticket to do developmental work in Africa. Marriage intervened, but she sure traveled, her last trip before her death in 1983 to Cuba. That was before it became fashionable and sort of easy…

I think, however, I got infected by my aunt Ilse Obrig, a cousin of my mother. She was another one of those ahead of her time, driving by herself in a little car from Germany to Rumania to interview expatriates in the late 1930s and writing a book about it. Not even her roommate, a euphemism for same-sex partners in those times, went with her if I remember correctly. I read the book as a young child, in the 1950s and it spelled ADVENTURE. Tante Ilse, as we called her, became Tante to a whole nation of children – after the war she created the first regular children’s hour on National TV having done similar work on radio before. It was rather boring and conformist, in contrast to her real life adventures, teaching good manners, arts and crafts etc., with the occasional wonderful interruption by one of the emerging puppet theaters that dared to be more experimental.

I was reminded of all this because I read about the perspective of travel writers here:

The Countries We Think We See

The discussion revolves around how much the narrator of a travel report injects his or her own person, how much we construct a country through our own expectations, how much of who we are colors what we hear and see. It got me to wondering about my own perceptions of the countries I visit. I don’t write travel reports, but I do photograph these days and that is an act of selective construction as well. And although I do not read up on the places I visit before I have seen them, bits and pieces of remembered history or cultural knowledge naturally affect my perceptions. And being a woman of a certain age, which translates into invisibility, for the most part, allows me to take pictures that others would have trouble taking, so who I am affects what I see and record. (The opposite, by the way, is also true: I cannot go to certain places that a man could, confirming selectivity.) But travel I shall!