FAMILIARSICK

We have been traveling for nearly 11 weeks now, with another six weeks still left in our journey.  Eleven weeks of new:  new countries, new cities, new languages, new restaurants for lunch and dinner, new maps, new challenges, new choices.   Every day.  There are no week-ends off from the newness.   You go to sleep surrounded by new and you wake up knowing that the day will be spent within “new” – either reveling in it or finding a path through it or typically, both.  Our regular lives, at least during the school year, are the opposite of these travel days.  We are schedule-bound:  we get up at the same time every day, shop at the same grocery store, begin and end work and homework at the same time.  The continuing unfolding newness of these travels is, most of the time, exhilarating and intoxicating and joyful.  But there are times when you long not to have to make a conscious, thought-out choice.  It is not so much homesickness as it is familiarsickness.  You long for a day of easy movement through things that are familiar.  For a day where you don’t have to figure out which restaurants among those lining the unfamiliar streets are decent, or pore over a map to find your way from point A to point B.  We have studied maps for so many places now that I feel like we’re in some sort of cartographer’s graduate program, or the Great Cartographer’s Race in which you arrive in a town and must find a store that sells a map, figure out how to navigate around the city with it, and then move onto the next location just as you’ve finally gotten to the point that you can walk the streets of your current location without your head buried in a map. 

 

Familiarsickness has hit all three of us and we have been prone to grumpiness and edgy exchanges the last day or two.  We’ve also been in hotels the past four days, and the longer we travel the less I find myself liking the time spent in hotels between the house exchanges.   I want to spread my stuff out, and cook my own meals, and get a cold drink or a piece of fruit without having to locate a street vendor and negotiate the transaction through mime and a toddler’s vocabulary. 
 

The house exchanges let you focus more on the chosen area and less on the logistics of being in that area. They are sort of like a “friends with benefits” approach to lodging.  You don’t make a long-term commitment to any one place but you do become intimate with it:   you move in and enjoy the benefits of co-habitation (with your host’s home) but you always know that you’re going to move on soon.  Some house exchange partners hand over their home like it was their daughter’s hand in marriage.  They want to meet you, size you up a bit, make sure you’re not hauling along assorted cans of spray paint with which to graffiti their walls or packing acetylene torches or bringing along a rock band or worse yet – every house exchange nightmare – a bunch of college kids on spring break.  Once they are satisfied that you’re worthy of the gift they are about to bestow on you, it’s smiles and air kisses and bonhomie all ‘round. 

Our most recent house exchange partners should be hired by the Sardinian Chamber of Commerce or used in inspirational hospitality videos.  They appear to be the nicest people living on the planet today.  They met us at the airport in Alghero, leaving their work early and driving about 20 miles to get there.  This was in order to meet us (“good, no spray paint, torches or drunken dudes”) and then to lead us to their apartment, where they showed us the ins and outs and made sure we were set up and comfortable.  They provided maps and guidebooks and they gave us many good ideas about places to visit in Sardinia.  Then they took us to the grocery store below the apartment complex so we could buy some food.  They came and fixed the hot water heater when we mistakenly switched it off during our stay, driving 45 miles round-trip to do so; they met us at the airport at our departure and bought us drinks; and were generally as kind and pleasant house exchange hosts as you could ask for. 
 

Our Rome beach house hosts in Torvajanica were similarly nice.  This leads me to a Carrie Bradshaw-esque moment of pondering.  As she used to say when posing a thorny question, “I couldn’t help but wonder . . . ”  In this case, I couldn’t help but wonder:  do Italians have an inherently different approach than Americans to hospitality, making this a sort of cultural Italian versus cultural American thing, or is it simply a case of our Italian house exchange partners being a hell of a lot nicer than we are?  
 

I’ve always viewed house exchanging as a process in which you get to know your exchange partner as much as is possible via email exchanges, and then leave the rest up to fate.  The goal, as I’ve seen it, is to leave them keys to a clean, comfortable house, a bunch of maps and guides, and a welcome basket of goodies.  Then you get the hell out before they arrive.  If I’m still there when they get there, I feel I’ve failed to keep up my end of the bargain.  But our Italian exchangers take the opposite view.  If they aren’t there to greet you, show you around, buy you a drink or share a bottle of champagne, they evidently feel they’ve made a massive social faux paux:  a sort of social soiling themselves, so to speak. 

I wonder what this says about our two cultures.  Have we Americans lost the art of throwing open our doors to strangers and embracing them?  Do we exchange houses more as a business proposal than as an act of comraderie and good will?  Are we cold-hearted exchangers, seeing it as a way to simply use another person’s building, rather than as a way to welcome and embrace others into our homes? 
 

I couldn’t help but wonder:  am I missing something by not embracing the exchanger as much as I embrace the exchange?