Colorful Characters
Dec. 12, 1988 CHINA
I met a foreign teacher from Hangzhou University who has been in China five years. She is a middle-aged woman from Lafayette, Louisiana, who has been living around the world for the last ten years. She had one or more PhD’s, but said she had started out as a banker. She had had a lot of money, but wasn’t happy. Now she’s happy in China and is even studying how to do Chinese painting. I borrowed some Christmas paraphernalia to use in my classes. She also introduced me to some Australian students studying Chinese and I arranged for them to visit my classes.
Feb. 15, 1989 BALI
I went over to the high school in Ubud today to see if I could help out with an English class. The principal invited me to his home. He has a homestay like many people in Ubud. He introduced me to a Dutch woman in her 50’s who had been a social worker in Holland, but left her husband five years ago and had been a cook on a cargo ship with 11 men sailing around Africa. Now she lives six months in Bali and six months in Holland. Soon she will open up a restaurant with the principal’s wife. Except for the fact that she smoked constantly, she was fun to talk to. I like meeting people like her because it shows me that being a nomad is just another kind of lifestyle.
Feb. 25, 1989 THAILAND
The Youth Hostel was much more basic than I had wanted, but they did have a dormitory bed available. It was there that I met what I assume will be one of the most independent world travelers I’ll ever meet. Although she was much younger than I, it was hard to tell her age because she had so many teeth missing.
She was from Poland, and had learned English on her own. She spoke it quite well and explained that she had just come from Hanoi which had been hard because it was difficult to get permission to travel anywhere in Vietnam. Her total luggage consisted of a tiny backpack made of old canvas. She borrowed my scissors and proceeded to cut her own hair while she told me about herself. She has traveled extensively in the world, can speak Spanish, and read and write Chinese. As a matter of fact, she had been in China in 1987 and loved it. The special foreigner’s currency hadn’t been any problem to her because she had only slept in railroad waiting rooms and Chinese dormitories, and always bought railway tickets at Chinese prices. She now travels only by boat everywhere to save money, and sometimes signs on as an engineer to repair a ship’s engine en route. She has undoubtedly spent only a small fraction of what I have.
She was surprised that I have no desire to go into Campuchea or some other places she named I didn’t know anything about. What happened to her teeth? She explained that she had an inflammation that she refused to have taken care of because she’s afraid of dentists! So, as she traveled, each tooth had fallen out in its time. She figured it was better and cheaper than having a dentist pull them.
I had gone to a Youth Hostel specifically to make some helpful human contact. But she was a bit much for me.
Feb. 27, 1989 THAILAND
After lunch, the Danish girl and one Japanese man switched to a car to go back to Bangkok, and I was joined by a British Guyanan man from Canada and the U.S. who is presently operating a bubblegum factory in Jamaica. He was another one of the colorful characters that one can only meet traveling. He had found U.S. life too fast paced. He said people were always telling him to move aside so they could pass. So, he had decided to open a chewing gum factory in Jamaica because there wasn’t one. He had lost money the first three years, but had been doing okay the last two years. His wife wasn’t crazy about traveling around, so she stayed home with the four children, ages 6 to 17. His doctor had told him to go away for vacation to cure his headaches and dizziness. And, so far it was successful. I liked him. He was interesting and friendly.
May 8, 1993 HONG KONG
I stayed at the same hostel as before where I am known as “Zima.” Since the staff seems to stay fairly constant there, and since I lived there for a month last summer, it is a kind of home. I even had my old bed again, one of five bunk beds squeezed into a room. I can never return without acknowledging the ghosts of those hearty travelers I have met there on previous stays.
This time I met a young Israeli girl who is about to go into China. We spoke in Hebrew and I did better than I thought I could. When I begin to talk about my experiences to these young travelers, I feel old indeed because so much has been packed into the last ten years.
Then, there are the resident “crazies.” Still there is a young Chinese girl from New Zealand who has been working there many months. She speaks English, and it seems to be fluent until one tries to make sense out of what she says. She is an “inside bag lady.” Surrounding, under, and on her bed are infinite numbers of plastic bags with who knows what in them. She still has the habit of returning at about 11:30 at night and transferring things in and out of the myriad plastic bags for at least an hour and a half. That rustling sound is somehow worse than a clanging bell when one is sleeping.
Feb. 10, 1995 BALI
The physical strength of the waterfall reflected the emotional strength of one of the tourists who once went to visit the waterfall with me. He was a young French musician, and his legs were terribly twisted from polio that had attacked him as a baby. He used two crutches and pulled himself laboriously along the narrow trails. Many travelers I have met over the years have impressed me. Whenever I feel that traveling is a hard job, I remember him and his persistence to see the world.
May 24, 1995 NEW ZEALAND
Unusual people pop into my life from time to time, like an elegant middle-aged Israeli originally from Romania who decided to travel around the world and stay at youth hostels to cure herself of being a snob.
These are excerpts from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.
Tags: China; hostels, handicapped world travelers, Travel, World travelers; American teacher in Hangzhou, youth hostel in Thailand; hostel in Hong Kong
