Around the world with an old Suitcase.

Basicly, Information is all we have...
And what our brains use to construct our world with...

What we experience change us. The world puts its mark on us...

The world certainly changes our minds. New connections between neurons create new memories...
Just as broken neuron connections disconnect us from our own past, and what we experienced there...

Still, most of what happens to us is invisible from the outside.

Looking at a person, we might see a few scars here and there,
but we can't see the millions upon millions of neural connection changes inside the brain,
that the world has forced upon us - ''in order to make us who we are''...

We change as we travel through the world.
And, it all becomes abundantly clear when we take a closer look at the things that we carry with us.

Indeed, looking at my old suitcase the other day, it became very clear,
that we can't travel around the world without the world leaving its mark on us...

The old Suitcase.

It all started, when I took a look at my old, battered suitcase, and decided it was time to buy a new one...

After I had bought a new suitcase, I took a very deep look at the wear and tear on the old suitcase.
Damage that naturally and inevitably occurs as a result of normal use, or aging.
And, as a result of big, terrible scars...

As all scars (on the bag) were connected to a story, it almost felt wrong to have even
considered buying a new suitcase... But, well, well...

I have lost the bag many times...

Kenya Airport. Bag missing. Erik searching.

Here, Erik Futtrup is trying to locate the bag in Jomo Kenyatta airport, in Nairobi, Kenya (2005).
His own bag was also lost, but (no worries) we got them back after a day or so.
The problem was a mix-up in London Heathrow, or so we were told...
(See more on our Kenya blog).

Later, I have lost and found the same bag many times.
In 2017, the old bag was lost in Malaga (see pics here), due to chaos in Schiphol.
The ground people in Malaga told us that we should appreciate being alive, instead of being complainers,
who argue endlessly over old bags ...(We got our bags the following day).

And most recently, the bag was lost in Genova (2018), due to a handling problem in Munich...
Again, I was separated from the bag for some 24 hours.
Not the worst thing that happened in Genova that week though.
Later, that very same week, the Ponte Morandi collapsed.

Strangely, the piece of the bag, where my nametag was supposed to be sitting
(Plastic, top of the suitcase, see picture below...), was also lost/torn off in Munich (on the same trip).
So, I have been travelling without the nametag part of the suitcase ever since.

The lock hasn't worked since 2014.
For reasons I can't remember, the suitcase lock was put in the close position on a flight to the US in 2014.
A decision US customs apparently didn't agree with.
Worse still, it wasn't a

TSA approved lock, identified by the red diamond shaped Travel Sentry logo...

And, they wanted to inspect the luggage...So...the lock was opened by brute force...
Indeed, that was the end of an operational suitcase lock...

Not that I travel with any valuables. Usually, the most valuable thing I have had in my suitcase has been old T-Shirts.
Still, before 2011, I sometimes had a small amount of dollars in a purse in the bag, just in case.
$ 20 -30 or something like that.
A practice that I stopped after a visit to Bangkok airport in 2011 (For more about that trip, see my trip video),
where someone meticulously looked through my bag, and eventually discovered my $20 there.
Which that someone then apparently thought was a gift to him/her...
Somehow, I still feel that was a horrendous invasion of privacy. But, well...

In 2019, I travelled from Frankfurt to Toronto and had very unwisely decided to put my laptop in my suitcase...

Murphy must have known about it:

Everything that can possibly go wrong will eventually go wrong.

So, on that exact trip my bag must have been dropped from a particular high place,
and it must have landed on something sharp ... somehow...
The end result was a gash on the front of the bag, and a laptop with a broken, smashed screen...

Not the only time I have packed my bag unwisely though...

In 2006, I had decided to bring back some especially good Guinness beers, inside an ''unbreakable'' box, from London (to Billund).
Again, clearly some bagage handlers must have been upset by this idea of putting beers in an ''unbreakable'' box inside a suitcase...

The end result was a lot of broken bottles, and a suitcase that remained somewhat ''sticky''
on the inside, from that day onward...

A (must have been sharp) metal souvenir from Barcelona,
had already damaged most of the inside of the bag on an earlier flight from Spain,
so the ''stickiness'' was at that stage only an extra feature...

The final straw came in Warszawa in July 2019.

Here, the wheels literally fell off the suitcase, as I was walking along from the Warsaw Central Railway Station
to my hotel close by (See trip pics here).

Managed to get the wheel back on. But well, that was it.
Time for a new suitcase.

Living in the physical world is hard.

Maybe, we should only travel in Virtual Reality?
Certainly, it is almost just as exciting (E.g. see: Richie's Plank Experience on Steam):

Richies Plank Experience PlayStation Virtual Reality

Richie's Plank Experience PlayStation VR

For more, go to my VR reports:

Trying out
Richie's Plank Experience
(at Dokk1, in Aarhus, Denmark).

The plank in Richie's Plank Experience

More Virtual Reality (earlier VR posts on this site):
● Life after Death with Virtual Avatars (Eterni.Me, August 2014)
● Oculus Rift
(Gender Swap in VR and The Machine - To Be Another, August 2013)
● How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Eye Candy (Avatar 3D worlds, January 2010)

-Simon

Simon Laub (Let me Google that for you).
www.simonlaub.net