Ever since I was a very young child I have always had a very deep love for Pike Place and the community that surrounds it. It has a completely different feeling from the rest of Seattle and almost makes it feel like you are in any regular small town at any market. There are of course, an infinite amount of things that make this old fashioned market so special. There’s the golden pig near the entrance that most tourists and young children sit on for good luck, there are the fish tossers (men who basically just throw fish around at eachother while people buy it), the tiny, hidden corridors filled with shop owners from Nepal and India trying to raise money for their temples back home, the old women with the wire wrapped stones, the buskers (of course), the food shop owners, the homemade baby clothes, the old men and their magic tricks, the Russian shop with incredible piroshkis and the old man who always greets me with the always kind “Dobroye utra!” (good morning), the first Starbucks to ever exist, the fresh flowers and produce. It’s beautiful. It is a very small and jampacked family and most of the buskers who play at the market, have been playing since I first started going around the age of ten. The market is truly a small family. A community in which you are always safe. Surrounded by the smells of french cafes, horchata, apple cider, regular conversations you catch the tail end of the sound. A beautiful thing about the market is that it is right on the waterfront of Puget Sound. When you step outside to get away from the business of the stalls, you are instantly barraged with fresh, blue, salty air. You can see all of the tiny bookshops, the ferris wheel, all of the tattoo parlors and the aquarium and everything that has been around for so long. Pike Place is a beautiful location because it doesn’t matter how many years passes, it does not change. It is familiar, the smells are familiar, the people make eye contact with you and smile. Unlike many markets I have been to, Pike Place is full of people who are not trying to get in eachother’s way. That’s not to say that people are not interacting with one another, but the buskers are shy and when I asked them questions a lot of them failed to keep eye contact or seemed shaky/nervous. Most buskers in the Seattle area are there purely for the music. Not even for the money. They are there to spend their time with their instrument and everyone else is just background noise. One of the men who I have seen as a regular busker at the market for as long as I can remember, did not even want me to use his real name. He is so kind and friendly I was pretty surprised when he declined a video and said he was willing to help me with my project, but that he just wanted to “get back to my job” in which he meant busking; which gave me a lot to think about. I began to think about how busking wasn’t just a hobby for some people, but their entire lives are dependent on how many dollars are going to make it into their case today. There aren’t just older buskers, but ones as young as eight years old performing to practice talent, or save money for college/various other expenses. I was able to make it to the market on Mother’s Day and with the help of my mom, was able to get around and take a nice variety of pictures. We went to the french cafe Le Panier and had thick cups of hot chocolate and watched the sun rise with the moon still resting over the sound and watched all of the flower stands begin to set up. I was able to purchase two bouquets for ten dollars because we were there so early. It was absolutely lovely and there was an incredible amount of people. More than I had seen at the market in a very long time. It was also interesting being back at the market because the program that I was in last year had us visit the market on a field trip, so it felt nice to be off leash, to slow my pace and take my time and look around at all of the things I had never noticed about such a familiar place before.
Author: Ruby R.
Due to an unfortunate turn of events I have been diagnosed with a medical condition that makes it virtually impossible to walk and I am currently experiencing the worst pain of a lifetime. This condition has made me unable to go to class and say goodbye to my family of peers and wish them luck and happiness on all of their journeys. This has also stopped my travels to Portland until any sign of recovery is better, and seeing as to how I am in and out of the emergency room every week, I do not have any idea when that could possibly be. I am extremely saddened by this because now my plans will have to wait another two to three weeks (if I’m lucky), and seeing so many pictures of my smiling classmates in beautiful places makes me wish that I could be in my own beautiful place. At least I have had plenty of time for some reading…I am currently on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel: Fugitive’s and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon. As always, Palahniuk never disappoints. He is an incredible writer, one of my favorites actually, so when I learned that he had written a book about Portland I was very pleased to learn this.
This is the last I was able to post before I had to spend the next month of my life in and out of the emergency room/hospital. I have to walk with a cane and have felt extremely isolated. I look at my classmates with nothing short of complete and utter admiration after this incident (well, even more so). There are so many different types of travel, and whether it’s somebody pushing you in a wheelchair to be able to go outside and smell the sunshine, or whether it’s getting on a plane to Spain with nothing but twenty dollars and a one way ticket, travel is something that we experience every single day, even in the smallest ways. Sadly, I will have to change my musical city to Seattle (a place in which I’ve been raised for a good majority of my life). I know plenty about Seattle and a lot of its nooks and crannies so let’s keep our fingers crossed that I will be able to get to as much of it as I can as I recover. I am extremely grateful to be coherent enough to write this post, however I am also incredibly distressed not only because of my lack of posts, but because I feel that I do not have enough to post about! I know that those feelings are just me invalidating myself but I just wish I could have been able to get on a plane and go make a new, exciting, and temporary life somewhere like my peers were able to. I will admit there is nothing more calming than closing your eyes and imagining your fellow classmates landing all over the world and leaving their mark like falling stars where they land. I am grateful that out of all the cities, I will be able to explore one that I am extremely familiar with, and one that I feel welcome in. I will be exploring Pike Place Market, various parks, but mostly just wandering the streets and looking for the friendliest faces. I am so grateful every day that I have been given the opportunity to recover and get at least a few chunks of this project done. I am sad to know how much I have missed, but I know that once I am back and listening to everyone’s presentations, I will feel as if I were right there experiencing everything new with them. I will be changing my reading list and trying to include videos of buskers and if not videos then pictures if that is what they are more comfortable with. It’s really insane what life can throw at you, sometimes. Throughout my surgeries and time spent in the hospital everyone would always ask what would I do because I was missing so much school? And every time I would always answer that I was blessed because this half of the quarter was dedicated to exploring cities around the world and what they have to offer. I have never been so proud to call myself an Evergreen student and I look forward to posting much more.
As quoted and referenced by de Botton, William Wordsworth once said, “There are in our existence, spots of time / that with distinct pre-eminence retain a renovating virtue …/ that penetrates , enables us to mount / when high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen”. Essentially, that scattered elements and memorable experiences make up the best and most worthwhile parts of life. When de Botton talks about it I believe that he is trying to convey that the bits and pieces that stick with people throughout their life, although they stay, there are so many parts of our life that we are not able to remember. Take the womb, for example. We exist, our little lungs and fingers forming very slowly over a fresh heart, but none of us have any memory of that warm and comforting darkness. So when de Botton talks about our human tendency to get lost in such “spots in time”, I do not believe that he is trying to say that there are moments where we physically do not exist, but perhaps moments where we are so incapsulated in the mundane routine that can become life, we fail to exist for those specific spots of time. We fail to be present within our own lives because we become absorbed within trivial things. We forget to watch the sunset, to call our parents and tell them how much we appreciate them, the list goes on and on. de Botton often conveys through the novel, that once you have truly traveled and made your own journey, be it spiritual or physical, you are able to make these “spots of time” that he speaks of the kind of spots that you carry with you and are always able to remember.
Therefore, the quote by Van Gogh on page 184 of the Eye Opening Art section of the book really caught my eye – ” I believe that life here is just a little more satisfying than in many other spots.”. When Van Gogh said this he was talking about his time living in Arles. Knowing the history of Van Gogh’s crippling depression as well as a harsh and lonely life, I found this quote to be particularly interesting. I never usually hear anything positive regarding Van Gogh quotes. They are usually very melancholy and sad. But to hear him mention a better quality of life, to hear him speak of a place that could make him happy and distract him from his troubles, just for a little while, I find to be extremely special. de Botton talks a lot about how Van Gogh’s art and interactions with the world were so striking and unique because he had such an artistic ability to focus in on the fine details, like beautiful colors or passionate emotions, and to blow them up and express them. This ties in with his comments in the Departure section – that of the healthy mind’s artistic ability to try and dig deeper, to investigate and fully explore and enjoy moments when they come.
Furthermore, reading about de Botton and van Gogh’s time spent traveling or living in France also made me think of the experiences that I had visiting France with my mother — it was absolutely incredible to be so young and experience a place that was dripping with history in every corner. To visit the Eiffel Tower, the L’arch de Triumphe, to experience the richest foods and such kind and beautiful people at such a young age truly changed me. I believe that if I had not been able to have the experience of going to such a beautiful and forgeign country, I would not have the urge to travel as I do now. Seeing Paris only made me want to eat the world and swallow it whole. To see all it had to offer me and all that I could take from it. The memories that my mother and I shared for those few weeks in France are some that I will never forget. Experiencing trains and learning about some of my roots was incredibly important for me as a young child and I am beyond grateful to have had the opportunity. All in all, this created a lot of memorable moments. While de Botton argues that people’s lives are dulled where their experiences of travel are purely on the basis of surface-level tourism, I think that even just dipping one’s toes into a place or culture and visiting its more popular attractions shouldn’t be ruled out as being less than extremely fulfilling and rewarding because of the memories it creates.
“Journeys are the midwives of thought…” This quote was said by de Botton. I believe that he’s trying to say that when you’re on a journey you have to develop an artistic way of looking at the world because you need to adapt to the stress and trivial, irritating things that accompany travel. By developing your ability to condense the striking elements of the world and to cast away the trivialities, you will find happiness or peace within yourself. By looking at the world as an artist, everything around you becomes art. When you are thinking creatively, and as an artist, you are able to grasp concepts of the world easier than most people who look past thing that aren’t of usual interest. On page 13 of The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton, he says, “If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.” I believe that in this quote, de Botton is trying to convey the idea that art is basically a distilled reality. Because art is designed to hold the most interesting or startling perspectives of and reflections on the world, with all the boring bits sucked out, it can end up creating a distorted expectation of reality. Furthermore, when you’ve got an artistic imagination I would say it improves your ability to retain the most critical images from an experience, but as de Botton soon makes a point about, even a human trained to identify powerful images may allow their brain to edit their memories into small, scattered handfuls of single images. I think it’s interesting that he creates this contrast between the beauty of art and the aesthetic appreciation of points of travel that would normally be ignored. That is, while most might try to forget or sleep through the more stupefying parts of the journey, de Botton proudly shows his appreciation for the subtle, ephemeral details – the transitory byproducts of human travel. For instance, when de Botton has started to talk about Edward Hopper (page 47) and his love for the elements of travel and transport: gas stations, hotels, near-empty diners. As de Botton quickly assesses, “Loneliness is the dominant theme here.” Perhaps traveling alone affords one more introspection and opportunity to spend time reflecting on their experiences.
This was certainly the case for Gustave Flaubert. In the first Motives section, On the Exotic, de Botton creates a portrait of the French author of Madame Bovary. I was really impressed at how radical his views were for his time in history. I drew a connection between his total hostility to his own country and love of the exotic to some of the things I hear nowadays, like people who say they’re “colorblind” in an attempt to try and downplay their privilege. It was so rare for someone from that time period to be so dedicated to throwing away pointless affectations and limiting social boundaries like binary sexuality, so I thought his experience was interesting. I wish that de Botton would have included more information about Flaubert throughout the novel, because I found his section to interest me the most, quite honestly. I like to read about strange characters and people who were radical before their time versus someone continually speaking about the same subject using different words. To be quie honest, I am not fond of de Botton as a writer. I find his opinions to be strange and his attitude to be off putting. He does this by using a way of speaking that is hard to understand. The tone of his writing is rude, and it almost feels like he is acting like he has infinite knowledge of everything. I feel that his tone is condescending and because of that it’s hard for me to not become biased while reading this. He uses tiresome language to express extremely facile ideas. This is probably not the most popular opinion of de Botton and his writing, but it is how I feel. I also thought that some sections of the book were consistent, and some tended to meander. The quality of the writing was inconsistent. You could see this inconsistency in the Departure sections 1 and 2. This is mainly where he is describing the details of travel and he is reflecting on it in what I consider to be a rather vapid way.
a festival in new orleans just a few years ago
this is where i will be putting my research questions and research methods
- still have to do:
- create a wordpress travel site
- buy round trip ticket
- buy tickets for the new orlean’s jazz festival
- talk to michael’s cousin about my living situation
- figure out how many weeks i will end up actually staying there
- get a decent camera so that i can capture images of the city
- get a ukulele strap and case so that i will be able to busk on the streets
- go to media loan and rent a recording device that will allow me to record sounds of the city
- pack