Travel, daily life, and empathy.



These days, more and more people are leaving the world through videos, VR, and books in the corner of their rooms as they cannot travel because of the corona. This is referred to as a ‘room trip’ and in other words, an online trip. He could have gone anywhere he wanted, but now he has money and can’t go even if he decides to. There are many events going on under the name of #Visiting Overseas Travel Challenge.

Surprisingly, however, traveling around the room was not a concept that came out today.  According to the book, The Technique of Travel (Alain de Normal), there was already a separate man who had preoccupied traveling in the room 250 years ago.

I’ll be the forerunner of the corner of the room, Ehem.

The main character is Gjavier de Mestre. He is a 27-year-old Frenchman who has written about his experience of traveling in his bedroom and published it as My Bedroom Trip. *In our country, it’s published as How to Travel My Room.

(According to Alain Common) He was a pioneer who pioneered a new mode of travel: ‘travel to his own room’!

He asserts, “Among those who are staying in the room, not a single person will refuse the new travel method I introduce after reading this book,” and recommends the following people to travel in this room in particular. Those who dare not travel, or cannot travel, especially those who fear storms or robbers, cliffs and poor people.

In fact, in the 1700s and 1800s, travel itself was a special and very difficult time because transportation technology had not yet developed. Once he was about to leave, he needed a mule to load his luggage, an interpreter, a telescope, a compass, a gun, and, above all, a lot of money and courage. But what you need to travel around the room is a pair of pajamas. I think this is the main reason for De Mestr’s trip to the corner of the room, more than any philosophical reason, I think. Haha

This is how his trip to the corner of the room begins. Lock the door, change the pajamas, and rummage through the sofa. After admiring the elegance and softness of the sofa legs that had never been seen before, this time they sit on the sofa and peep at the bed. And then he falls into his own thoughts… I wander for a long time thinking of dogs, lovers, servants, dried roses and so on. (This is the biggest trap of a corner trip!) And that’s how it ends. Because he traveled mainly to his thoughts, readers who had opened up books to explore the corner of the room together lost their way and closed their books with his thoughts and thoughts (as Alain de Normal says).

Later it turned out, he fought a legal left-handed duel with an officer in 1790 and was sentenced to 42 days of house arrest, a record written in his room during the house arrest.  On the last day of his release from house arrest, he wrote:

“They kept me from going anywhere. Instead, they left me the whole universe. (medium) Today I’m free. No, it goes back into the cage. The yoke of daily life will weigh me down again.” (page 148)

New ways to consume daily life

Alain de Botton drew the following insights from his tour of the room.

“The pleasure we get from traveling may depend more on the psychology of traveling than on the destination of the trip. - -Travel Skills쪽 Page 308

According to De Normal, the psychology of traveling is in ‘water solubility.’ With a humble mind, it is to approach the subject anew. Every morning the congested roads may be a terrible traffic jam for the people living there, but for travelers it will be fun to watch cars packed on narrow roads. “This place is like us!” Hehehe.

In that sense, the difference between traveling in the corner of the room and traveling in the real world depends on ‘expectations’. I’ve traveled for more than three years, but I don’t have much to earn from traveling. Most of them go around buying local food, looking at the back alleys, and looking around the market, and then something happens once in a while. That’s the beauty of it. The funny thing about such little things is that when I’m on a trip, I’m fully armed with curiosity and anticipation. Then any experience is interesting and new. It’s new no matter who talks to you, and it’s new to see a crazy person.

But I don’t expect anything when I’m at home. What are the odds that something unpredictable will happen at home?  Everything will flow similarly to yesterday.  If you open the refrigerator, there will be food you saw yesterday, and if you go out to the veranda, you will see the usual scenery. That’s what a corner of the room is. The place with the least change in daily life. So maybe a more stable place.

My Home Trip Diary

Personally, I don’t like both De Mestr or De Normal, but I think I’d like to try out their ideas. What would it be like to explore my room instead of exploring the world? What kind of experience would it be to sit in my room with as much curiosity and anticipation as it would be in a travel destination?

Maybe I’ll change my clothes the most. I’m going to take out a ‘long dress’ that I won’t even wear at home, and I’m considering wearing a hat with colorful earrings and shiny bracelets that I used to wear only at my travel destination. And I’ll take a look through my room. Then, I will carefully look at the map of the whole world attached to one corner, and then I will draw in my head where the main room I am standing on is on Earth with an expression of “This is interesting.” And just as I came to this place for the first time in my life, I will look at the bedding and the bookshelf to figure out the symbols the owner has.  I will look at what books I have, what cosmetics I use, what clothes I wear, what accessories I have, and open the drawers one by one. (Of course I secretly open it.)

But is this exactly what De Mistry was trying to give you?

As if I had amnesia all of a sudden, I have a “very strange view” of myself and my surroundings. I think it would be good to play this kind of amnesia once a month. One morning I woke up, and the owner of the Airbnb accommodation with the same name as me texted me.

Then I’ll go to a completely strange place and live as the owner of the room for a day. What shall I do in that corner of the room?  It feels like something suddenly opens up a ray of possibility. Possibility I never thought of.

For example, if you turn this place into a mess and surprise the owner,

Or, on the contrary, it makes the cleaning feel very good by making it shiny.Or,

Or we can have wine and cheese and surprise them.

Invite a friend to a party or… Camping on the roof or…

Or I’m gonna roll around looking at martial arts all day long.  Something like that comes to mind. Haha

Every day can be a trip if you look at it anew.  Under the circumstances, it seems difficult to travel abroad within this year, so we’d better go in the direction of raising the level of this trip to the corner of the room.  Wouldn’t it be the highest peak of a trip if you could experience your daily life as a trip?

The end of my trip to the corner of the end!