Absurdum / Texts
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OK, my other persona voted already, but the bowie shot NEEDS more votes.
and THAT sort of narrative thinking is why you'll always be prepared when you find that one book in the back of the old shop, or get sucked through the portal to Faery... I bet you free animals you find trapped in thorn bushes and carry old crones across rivers too...
Isn't that cute, those two squirrels are having a wheelbarrow race...
So many opinions, so little time to write exhaustively about them!!!
First to reply to Burn Unit's ideas and Peter's paraphrase of them. There just isn't any way to "experience a destination as a whole". The constraints of time and space are such that you could have 40 YEARS in the same place and still only scratch the surface. Any choice that you make will have an opportunity cost, it's just a matter of which choice you plump for. I fail to see why tasking stops you from "going, seeing or doing" - You're there, you're seeing SOMETHING, and you're obviously DOING something. Why would the things you do be any less a reflection of that location than any other things you could do. You're still interacting with the specific people and geography of the place.
Of course that's true even of those in "tourist hell". I live in one of THE worldwide tourist destinations. I grew up here. I RUN a tourist store for gnu's sake. I'm PART of the local colour that others come here to experience ;-> Tourists are actually kind of neat. When I travel round New Zealand myself it's not so much my contact with other New Zealanders I enjoy (although that's cool too) it's the contact with the VAST variety of tourists I encounter. Israelis just finished national service, Brits traveling the length of the country picking fruit, Chinese language students, Finnish hitchhikers we squeeze into the backseat on the way to see some whales. They're all good people, all fun to meet, and as much a part of the "special nature of New Zealand" as the Maoris in the Marae down the road, or the drunken uni students, dressed in drag, racing around in shopping trolleys.
I also think Doc Harmon hits the nail on the head when he says "If you don't know a place you can't travel there without guidance and expect to experience it". Random wandering is an EXTREMELY inefficient way to "get to know the real nature" of a place. It's also a strain to intergrate the experiences you DO have this way. To my mind the most important part of ANY trip is the "mission" that gives it it's narrative framework. If you don't have some sort of narrative framework to a trip then you can't treat yourself as a protagonist in any useful way.
Now, this narrative framework can consist of anything. It COULD even consist of "I'm just going to wander in a random manner until I find something cool", although that would be a sub-par narrative, with none of the structural causation that makes for truly epic holiday stories. Of course you don't need to SUCCEED in the stated mission. In fact the narrative of failure is often even more epic that the narrative of success, but you can't fail spectacularly if you don't have a mission in the first place.
And guidebooks. You shouldn't knock guidebooks. Thanks to specific entries in guidebooks I have -
Spent 8 days completing the first 13 stations of a 88 temple pilgrimage, encountering many adventures along the way (can't wait til I can free up 3 months to do the whole thing some day). And this was following EXACTLY the route given in the 48 issue magazine series I had collected the year before (well, allowing for getting lost a few times anyway).
Been to a 4 story public baths, where you have to ride the elevator naked from the 1st story changing rooms to the 4th story where you enter the bath complex. NO eye contact, and ESPECIALLY no looking below shoulder height. At the same baths I almost drowned in the electro-shock-treatment bath, and had the opportunity to study ALL the tattoos on a local Yakuza leader (with helpful explanations as to meaning).
Found the coolest bar in the world, down a stinking alleyway, where I ate raw whale with freshly minced horseradish (It's MUCH nicer raw than cooked) with a vegetarian and a paid-up founder member of the NZ green Party, Drank with a member of the Japanese IOC and the highest ranking UN delegate in Japan, and spent an hour teaching 2 transvestite prostitutes bar tricks.
Got stuck at the top of a mountain in monkey infested forests, at night, and had to use a similarly lost girl's cellphone (after convincing said girl I wasn't a mad rapist) to walk the 3 hours back down, on narrow dirt paths, with 200 meter drops to our left.
Cool tourist spots listed in guidebooks are listed BECAUSE THEY ARE COOL!!! Travel snobs often manage to forget this somehow in their quest for some "untouched" ideal that probably hasn't existed for 100 years or so, and quite frankly probably sucked when it did - or at least was no better than the places the guidebooks tell you about.
Anyway. My rant, such as it is is over. The "missions" described on the linked page actually look pretty fun, and I probably will do at least some of them. Certainly I intend to do (at least) two SF0 tasks over the next wee bit while I'm in Japan (though to be fair I'll be in "home territory" when I'm there again this time). I will enjoy the tasks.
This is a great task - especially if you pick a random stranger.
You know, I've seen some guys do that with 2 car doors. The server genuinely didn't seem to notice, and it was funny watching them try and hold the doors steady while winding down the window....
My big pile of votes for Vicki's rendition of hallelujah, though Garnett's mash up probably would have gotten some anyway... Actually, it's so inspired me that I might just send something in if I can figure out how to record my voice onto some sort of machine... Even though I'm not elegable for collab status.
Yay all.
C'mon people, this one is just like creating a treasure hunt for random strangers... What's not to love?
A vote for the mad captain's jacket. Oh, and for knowing where Shimonoseki is...
well, yes, but then a rose is (mostly) a physical object, which follows a natural set of instructions stored in it's DNA. SF0 is purely an artifact of conglomerated human narrative. Names don't change the nature of roses, but they DO change the nature of narratives.