Hi! I’m Ellen Rosewall. I’m happy to be here as a guest blogger for Wild Women Wander. I’m a retired college professor who loves to travel and loves to learn. I’m married to another retired college professor. Both of us taught in the arts for our whole careers. My husband is a music historian, composer and conductor who has published several of his choral compositions and speaks moderately fluent German. I started my career in the performing arts (opera and musical theater) and morphed through teaching voice to becoming an arts manager and finally teaching arts management and starting a retirement gig as a visual artist.
I explain all of this to let you know why most of our travels revolve around experiencing culture. And by culture, I mean everything from habitats to landmarks to people to art. I am fascinated by customs and traditions of various peoples throughout human history, and this fascination shows up in my art when I incorporate techniques, images or styles from places we’ve been. Both of us also love attending museums of all kinds, visiting landmarks, and seeing concerts and plays, and much of our travel is built around the cultural activities we will consume.
Let me tell you about two recent trips as an example of what I mean. We visited New York City a couple of months ago. We went to 2 Broadway musicals and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we walked through Central Park until we found the “Imagine” memorial to John Lennon. Walking around Times Square was probably the most touristy thing we did, but in our defense, the people watching was excellent. We were only there for three days, so the cultural activities took priority over visiting landmarks (we did see the Statue of Liberty from the plane though).
A few weeks later, we were in Grand Rapids, Michigan, because one of my art pieces was being exhibited there as a part of ArtPrize, an international public art exhibition in which the entire city turns into a venue and more than 900 works are displayed. So that’s all we did – we found art in shops, restaurants, museums, schools, and on plazas. We talked to artists about our respective work and took home some art.
You may have guessed by now that I’m here to make the case for including – even emphasizing – cultural activities in your travels. I’d also like to try and make the case that cultural immersion – that is, deliberately spending more time and effort experiencing or learning about culture– is a valuable and maybe even potentially life changing use of your time.
How do you experience culture in your travels? Do you travel specifically to experience culture? Is it a priority in your planning? Perhaps you are not a “cuture vulture” but you take in a museum if it’s a famous one
Several years ago, my husband and I went down for breakfast at our Paris hotel and struck up a conversation with two other tourists. They confessed to being unsure what their agenda would be that day. “We did EuroDisney yesterday,” they said, “What else is there to do here?"
We were IN PARIS.
Okay, that’s a pretty dramatic example. But statistics show that while people do go to museums and other cultural activities when they travel, fewer than 20% structure their entire trip around culture. And many people manage to get in and out of a place without ever truly experiencing high, low, or any kind of culture. This, coupled with technological means that there are more resources for cultural tourists than ever before. I’m seeing many more interactive apps, for example (I used one to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston a few years ago) that will allow you to click through to more information on whatever you’re seeing.
Websites are full of information that will allow you to prepare and plan your visit, listen to an artist or curator talk, or even take a class.
Music and theater have taken advantage of YouTube, Spotify and other audio and visual apps to give patrons more information than was available when I first started going to the theater (granted, that was a long time ago). I can’t resist sharing with you a lovely piece about one of the shows we saw in New York. See it when you can – it starts a national tour next year!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8UAUxQnLAY
So – just as you might train physically before you go on a trip where you plan to hike or climb, you can train mentally to prepare for experiencing culture. In future posts, I’ll dig a little deeper into different kinds of cultural tourism. In the meantime, ask me questions! What would you like to know? How could experiencing cultural be more satisfying for you?