All the trips have become the same trip because all the cities are the same city. Globalization has good things, but also some bad, and from so much uniformity, now we walk through Paris as we walk through Rome or Chicago. From the same hotel to the same Starbucks and from there to the museum on duty to see the same artists as always without anyone lifting their eyes from the same mobile. The National Gallery is not the same as the Louvre, the MoMA as the Tate. The same people with the same face and the same smell of the same air freshener in the same cafeteria with the same window. Later, a walk through a monumental, impersonal and populist square until you reach an Italian place where you can have a decent coffee. Then similar galleries, including those sponsored by 'Lonely Planet' in 'instarameable' places until, finally, it's time to drink without remorse. There is nothing more beautiful than getting drunk in another language.
I want to travel again like before. Go back to having that feeling of being completely lost, surprised, waiting. And live life as we dreamed we were going to live it. At what point did inflation start to matter more to us than music? When did we become so mediocre as to pay attention to what a guy like Patxi López says? How long has it been since we heard what artists have to say? Also, how many do you know? How have we been able to go from talking about dreams, the future and love to talking about Ione Belarra? What could have happened to a society to lose respect and fall so low? How could we have come to this?
We have to look at life again with respect, with intensity. As if we deserved ours. And traveling as pilgrims, as if it were an absolute extravagance, a privilege, an abnormality within a life. If you are able to do it, you will see how the museum once again becomes that fascinating place in which to steal creativity from others and from which you can get out shot to write as if the world were going to end. And then, that small family restaurant in which you have been treated like at home becomes your fixed headquarters and you will return every day that you are in the city. And there you will end up meeting writers who will lead you to painters and, finally, to musicians with whom you can tour the most remote places of the port.
And when that happens, the bar ceases to be a 'commodity' with the same Spotify playlist to become a mythological scenario where strangers who look like interesting people will tell you about the women who left and paid you expensive whiskies. And the Starbucks stops smelling like Starbucks to become a café with a Buenos Aires air with tangos, or fados, or whatever. And there you will meet a waitress who will end up in the hotel stealing everything and leaving a note that you put: “Don't look for me. I'm going with my family."
No one remembers that fiction was our greatest reality factory and, therefore, our reality ended up trying to imitate fiction: to make itself bearable. Fiction is the dream of reality as the butterfly is the dream of the caterpillar. But no one reads anymore and, therefore, no one dreams. And so there is no one who travels, there is no situation of predisposition to amazement, no tolerance for risk, no adrenaline in the face of the unforeseen. And, then, the taxi drivers no longer become secondary to the plot, nor are all the women potential partners in unforgettable stories, nor do the mists transform life into literature.
To really travel again is to spice up the experience and put a black and white filter on the excessive sharpness of a world without a soul. To truly travel again is to truly live again, to baptize the world anew, to win the game over time, to get lost without a joker in your pocket. Being a human, I aspire to no more. And faced with the weariness of this connected world, against the immense disappointment of this mediocre current affairs, against a radicalized and hyper-politicized society, return to real life: notebook behind your back, eyes open, heart haughty, mobile phone at home, renouncing the advantages , paper map. I propose something to you: facing these bland summer trips, have an adventure, develop your sixth sense, pull the alley, talk to strangers again, put on the costume of yourself and think where the guy you once were would go. But be careful. I warn you that if you do, nothing will ever be the same. There are trips that you never come back from. And perhaps they are the only ones that are worth it.
