The Things They Carried

With a little more than a month left until I head home for the summer, I felt now would be a good time for some retrospection. But Keegan, you think, this blog is nothing BUT navel-gazing retrospection. You have done little but look back at events and the impressions made. There is no future tense in these blogs.

While that is certainly true, this is retrospection on a whole new scale:

Keegan's List of Things to Bring for Study Abroad

I am no expert on living in Wales, but I am becoming a bit of an expert on living abroad, and here are some things that I have found essential for survival here. Granted, some of these things are skewed because of my situation: 1) I have a girlfriend and family that are interested in me; 2) I have moved out of my home country for an extended period of time; 3) there is no public transport and I don't own a car; 4) etc. So without further ado, the things I carried.

1) A good sturdy pair of walking shoes: As I said, in a place without public transportation, and without any privatized transportation, like a horse or a trained emu, I have taken to walking everywhere. This has provided me with several opportunities to break trespassing laws, as well as a fairly encyclopedic layout of the land. Not only do I know how to get from A to B, but I usually know how to do so taking the shortest route that cars aren't allowed on (like illegally through sheep fields). None of this would have been possible or pleasant without my Nike Trail Runners. These sturdy walkers are great for most terrain, which is essential for a place surrounded by tons of wooded trails. There also come with a mesh upper layer for good foot temperature control; another essential for someone who usually walks an hour or two a day. Had I come here in my far cuter, but much less sturdy Chuck Taylor All-stars, I would have fit in better with the British, and their love of tiny shoes, but my feet would have let me know the price I paid for fashion. My Chucks are here, but I wear them sparingly, are rarely two days in a row.

2) A good backpack: I tend to go for the satchel, or what my sister has so ungraciously called my man-purse. My single-shoulder strapped messenger bag is very trendy, and for going to and from the library, I look really cool (which is essential). About halfway through being here, though, I found that the storage of my shoulder bag is less than accommodating if I want to, say, go grocery shopping. That requires a bag with more container space. Luckily, I needed to spend a night in London, so I needed to purchase a sturdy backpackers bag. This had the added benefit of holding a lot of groceries far more comfortably than my hands. Again, because I have to walk everywhere, I have to carry things I purchase, and it certainly isn't news to suggest that carrying a weeks worth of frozen meals in plastic bags is a recipe for disaster. Especially when you have to pack these bags, untrained the art of bag packing, leaving corners exposed just aching to tear through the flimsy bag, freeing your food on to the highway. A good backpack will solve all these problems. Qualities to look for include: thickly padded shoulders (why will become apparent when you are loaded down with ten pounds of frozen food), a clasp to hold the shoulder straps in place (these are found on all good backpackers bags), a large central storage compartment (unless you need it for school, avoid the padded, sewn in laptop section, as it will just get in the way), and two external pouches (for water bottle or camera).

3) A good map: I can't tell you how many times I needed to pull out the map the school gave me, which was less than adequate. Luckily, I have a very good sense of direction, and remember places easily. Otherwise, I may never have found my way anywhere. One thing that someone suggested to me, and I have yet to find is a map that details all the walking paths in the area. Aberystwyth, like many other European cities, is criss-crossed by walking paths, and it is only by sheer luck that I have started to map these out for myself. There have been more than a few occasions in which I ended up in a field I shouldn't have been in, or a neighborhood that literally went in circles. A better map would maybe have spared me these excursions, but then again, I never would have had the fun that comes with accidentally trespassing. Where a good map was even more important was in London. Personally, if I were ever to go to a major city, I would look for the Time Out travel guide. The one for London broke up central London into easily navigable sections that detailed even the smallest streets. As anyone who has ever been to London (or Paris, or Amsterdam, or Berlin, or any other really old city that predates modern forms of transportation), the landscape is scarred by these seemingly sinister looking alleyways that are really important methods of getting from one side of the city to the other quickly. Erika and I found ourselves in what I assumed was an alley, but consulting the map, it said that it was actually a wharf street. That was how we found some tasty gelato. With good maps come good finds for food and entertainment and the like.

4) A nice camera: As much as I know people love the pictures I paint with words, there is no replacing the picture. One might think that they need a sweet digital SLR with several lenses, and of course that would make for some amazing pictures. That would also require a lot of extra packing. There are times that you are not going to want to haul out all the equipment, and that is when a nice, reliable point-and-shoot camera becomes handy. I can toss my Kodak Easy Share into my satchel or backpack, and I am always ready to snap a neat tree, amazing sunset, or strange sign I pass by. Sure, I might not look as cool as someone who spends an hour adjusting depths of field and aperture settings, but I remember my purpose of these pictures. I'm not making a statement with these. I just want to show people where I live. A point-and-click is just fine for this purpose. That said, there are somethings that you should look for. A good battery life is important. My camera eats batteries like crazy, and I have taken to carrying loads of double-A batteries. Rechargeable batteries are nice, but then you need to remember to charge your camera before going out, which not all people are diligent about. A lot of storage is also helpful, as there maybe whole trips in which you can't upload the pictures. A camera that can take solid photos without the flash is also really useful. My camera does not adjust well to the dark interior lights, which sometimes tends to cast indoor shots in a weird brown color. Unfortunately, I can't alter the white balance or brighten the image, so those moments when the flash is forbidden becomes a problem. And finally, a nice screen. The screen on my Kodak Easyshare is super tiny, mostly because it is really old. A bigger screen would allow me to take less pictures, as I wouldn't have to wonder if I had gotten the image.

5) Skype: There has been no bigger aid in connecting me to my family than Skype. I talk to my mother about once a week, Erika about two or three times, my sisters and brothers about three or four times a month, and occasionally even my Grandmother, who I know likes this shout out. When she had to spend some time in the hospital, my Mom brought her laptop to the room, and I was able to say hello to her as she recovered (which I know made me feel better, and I hope made her feel better). My niece Emily and nephew Nate are totally unfazed by this technology. I think had I been their ages, I would have lost my mind talking to someone on an electronic box who was thousands of miles away. I showed the two of them how it was dark outside here while it was still very bright out there, and Nate was very nonplussed. He was more interested in the strange money I had, and Emily was more interested in making faces at herself in the monitor. Again, my experience is slightly different than the average study abroad experience, because I have really moved out here, and psychologically, there is a lot more space between me and my family and loved ones because I am not returning for good for several years (even though, I will really only be here about as long as a standard study abroad trip before I return home). Certainly, emails and social networking sights like Facebook close the gap between where I am and where I was, but there is something about seeing someone face and hearing their voice that really makes the distance seem manageable.

6) An iPod: Again, I spend a lot of time walking places, and the train to London or Birmingham takes anywhere between three and five hours. That is a lot of time to be left with one's thoughts. An iPod can nicely fill the silences when you just want noise. My iPod was a birthday present from a few years back, but is still a massive 80 GBs. This is a lot of space for most people, but it doesn't hold all my music. What is particularly nice about this size, though, is not the amount of music storage, but that I can hold a movie or two. When I dropped Erika off at the train and had five hours to spend by myself, which was not really the happiest moment of my time here, it was nice to get lost in a movie (50 Dead Men Walking). Also, because of the size, I have a lot of music to chose from, so I don't have to constantly reload my iPod (like the rechargeable battery, this is not something that would, to me, become an annoyance). For these reasons, I find the iPod Touch nice, but ineffective. The 64 GB model is close to $400. Granted, it does more than the classic iPod (the 160 GB iPod classic is $259), with a bigger screen, a camera, several hundred apps and games and things like that. But the small hard drive is going to cause more problems for me than is worth the apps and what not. Whatever iPod you choose, it is essential that you get a good case for it. My case is really crappy. There is a plastic screen protector and button cover that makes using the spin wheel and seeing the screen difficult. A good case is one that protects the device but still allows you to use it effectively. Another feature I wish it had was some sort of headphone storage. Wrapping the headphones around the case has ensured that I need new headphones about every few months. Still, for what it does, my case is decent in that my iPod still functions despite the crazy amount of use it gets. And this, finally, is why I suggest going for an iPod as opposed to any random mp3 player: it really works. This iPod is really old (about four years, which in device years is like 100), but it still gives me several hours of use without a charge, and has only needed to be reboot once. They are not the cheapest thing to buy, but the Apple people know how to make a portable device, and that experience pays off in the end.

7) A blog: The one question anyone gets when they have gone on vacation is, How was your trip? That question can become the bane of your existence as you will have to relive all the experiences you have in several hundred emails (especially if you have as loving a family as I have). People are genuinely interested in new experiences and everyone wants to know, first hand, what happened. If you can direct people to a blog, a standard story that acts as the answer to that question, you can save yourself a lot of repetitive story telling. Couple with that, your family gets more than just the Cliff's Notes version of your trip, as my entries about toilets and pants have shown. Erika has said, several times, that this blog really helps her feel more connected to me when I am gone. When people come to a space to read your adventures, especially the mundane ones, it feels as if I were sitting there right now telling you how my day has been (today, if you are interested, was pretty good). That's really what elbows itself into the cracks in relationships, creating large fissures than need be there: disconnectedness. When something is missed, eventually that part of you grows numb and a certain level of complacency creeps into the relationship (this is particularly true for intimate relationships, more so than familial relationships). This blog prevents that sort of complacency from setting in. I couple this blog with my obsessive picture-taking, uploaded to my Facebook account, and it's almost like my loved ones are here.

So that's that. Take it for what it's worth, but these are really the only seven things I would grab if my apartment set on fire. Everything else (a car, a phone, my DVDs and books) I could live fine without. Without the above, I would be, in more than one sense, lost.