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In anticipation of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations, the Citizen’s Bruce Deachman has been out in search of Ottawans — 150 of them — to learn their stories of life and death, hope and love, the uncommon and the everyday. We’ll share one person’s story every day until Canada Day.
“Travel has been an important part of my life, partly because I grew up in a small northern Manitoba native community when I was a young person. We lived on an island, and if you wanted to run away from home, you couldn’t. I think that accounted for the way I felt about travel; I wanted to see more of the world.
“I took a year off work when I was 55 — I was teaching English at Algonquin. I wanted to go around the world on my own, and I did, including busing all around Australia. I did it all and I did it well.
“The money sounds funny now because it would be so much more today, but I did it all for $10,000, which I carried on my person, in travellers’ cheques. And I even had some money left over when I came back — which was in time to see Expo 86 in Vancouver. So I went around the world and saw a lot of things I hadn’t seen before.
“I went to London first, because you could get better deals there from the bucket shops — travel helpers, where here you’d go to a travel agency. But a bucket shop knew how you could travel cheaply. So I visited Europe and then Southeast Asia. And from there to Australia and New Zealand.
“I always met interesting people. I stayed in youth hostels, even at 55. I’d had my first youth hostel experience 30 years earlier, when I hitchhiked around Europe. I was in my mid 20s then and it was just about 10 years after the Second World War ended. And you HAD to hitchhike; there was really no other cheap way of travelling. And I had many interesting conversations with the drivers, most of them men and most of them very nice men who would say, ‘Now, I’m a good man, but you will meet a lot of men who are not so good.’ It became almost a mantra. And you got to read people quite well. And of course when I first went to Europe, the wall was still up, and you couldn’t go to East Germany, for example. You were limited to the western countries.
“With the fall of the wall, there were opportunities to visit and learn about those Eastern European countries that had previously been more difficult to know. I was also in Israel for its eighth anniversary, in 1956; an unplanned month in 1979 while still under apartheid, a ‘revelationary’ experience, indeed; and on an extensive tour of the Soviet Union in 1983, and even managed to spot the elderly KGB agent embedded with our group. And subsequently China, in 1991, only two years after Tiananmen Square.
“Some travels in South America and the Galapagos Islands will always be an inspiring memory: all the animals and birds unafraid of humans. And my country has not been neglected. All the provinces have been visited and I have even survived a car rollover on the Dempster Highway in Yukon.
“One of the reasons I appreciate living in this part of Ottawa is that, while people-watching, I can spot representatives from so many of the parts of the world where I have travelled and they remind me…”
— Renie Grosser, Centretown, June 7, 2017.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
“Travel has been an important part of my life, partly because I grew up in a small northern Manitoba native community when I was a young person. We lived on an island, and if you wanted to run away from home, you couldn’t. I think that accounted for the way I felt about travel; I wanted to see more of the world.
“I took a year off work when I was 55 — I was teaching English at Algonquin. I wanted to go around the world on my own, and I did, including busing all around Australia. I did it all and I did it well.
“The money sounds funny now because it would be so much more today, but I did it all for $10,000, which I carried on my person, in travellers’ cheques. And I even had some money left over when I came back — which was in time to see Expo 86 in Vancouver. So I went around the world and saw a lot of things I hadn’t seen before.
“I went to London first, because you could get better deals there from the bucket shops — travel helpers, where here you’d go to a travel agency. But a bucket shop knew how you could travel cheaply. So I visited Europe and then Southeast Asia. And from there to Australia and New Zealand.
“I always met interesting people. I stayed in youth hostels, even at 55. I’d had my first youth hostel experience 30 years earlier, when I hitchhiked around Europe. I was in my mid 20s then and it was just about 10 years after the Second World War ended. And you HAD to hitchhike; there was really no other cheap way of travelling. And I had many interesting conversations with the drivers, most of them men and most of them very nice men who would say, ‘Now, I’m a good man, but you will meet a lot of men who are not so good.’ It became almost a mantra. And you got to read people quite well. And of course when I first went to Europe, the wall was still up, and you couldn’t go to East Germany, for example. You were limited to the western countries.
“With the fall of the wall, there were opportunities to visit and learn about those Eastern European countries that had previously been more difficult to know. I was also in Israel for its eighth anniversary, in 1956; an unplanned month in 1979 while still under apartheid, a ‘revelationary’ experience, indeed; and on an extensive tour of the Soviet Union in 1983, and even managed to spot the elderly KGB agent embedded with our group. And subsequently China, in 1991, only two years after Tiananmen Square.
“Some travels in South America and the Galapagos Islands will always be an inspiring memory: all the animals and birds unafraid of humans. And my country has not been neglected. All the provinces have been visited and I have even survived a car rollover on the Dempster Highway in Yukon.
“One of the reasons I appreciate living in this part of Ottawa is that, while people-watching, I can spot representatives from so many of the parts of the world where I have travelled and they remind me…”
— Renie Grosser, Centretown, June 7, 2017.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
