Europe a la Carte Blog

Years ago I was walking down a road in Los Angeles when I spotted billboard that, to me, encapsulated one of the more enjoyable aspects of travelling. It was advertising a car, but that’s not as important as the message printed above it in three metre letters:

Go Away. Come Home. Gloat.

I can hear you protesting “No, we go away for the experience! We travel for the adventure!” but, seriously now, you can’t tell me that you don’t get a small frisson of glee when you drop in lines like “Yes, well, in Namibia last year…” or “This reminds me of a wonderful little restaurant I know in Paris…”

Ah-huh. You’re still protesting, but you know no one believes you.

Of course in the modern world with it’s thirty-second attention span we can no longer subject people to four hours of a slide-show of sunsets and mountain vistas. The eyes of friends and family glaze over by the time you reach Day Three in your journey’s recounting. So how can you still gloat, still tell people all that you’ve seen an experienced without boring them or bringing them to think that you’re a pain-in-the-proverbial name dropper?

Bored by scragz

Tell them all with a Blog

This is, of course, the most popular option. Blog your adventures! Gather a loyal cadre of readers who await your every written tale of excitement and amusing food anecdotes! If you don’t already have a blog (are there people who don’t?) sign up for a free one before your next trip. Of the big ones (MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad) I prefer Wordpress for it’s slickness and community-building aspects. There are also plenty of travel sites which host free blogs.

Keep it quick with Twitter

I’ve discussed this before, but it deserves to go on the list. Anyone can handle an SMS length update on your doings, right? If you update thirty times a day, they’re still each only short aren’t they? Just beware. You do have to pay for each SMS you send to Twitter, just as you have to pay to send an SMS to a normal phone, and those costs can stack up. It is addictive to try and create pithy, exciting updates in 140characters or less.

Make it pretty with a Facebook Application

The explosion of Facebook users means that this is a really nice way to show off to people you know – ESPECIALLY those who were enemies in high school but for some reason have still hunted you down and befriended you. So show off! Update your status with what you’re doing, or use the Twitter application to update it from your Twitter feed. Make some pretty maps showing where you’ve been. Search for “maps” and then click on “Application” in the result window and you’ll get a list around five hundred different applications. I’ve used the TripAdvisor and TravBuddy applications before on Facebook and found them both pretty good.

Show off on Flickr (or another photo hosting site)

Where are you going to showcase your photos? Of course, the really embarrassing ones taken by that Canadian guy you met in a bar in Reykjavik will appear on Facebook, but for the best of your shots, make sure they get onto a great photo hosting site. Just be careful of what you put up and how if you wish to retain the rights to them. The terms of service of Facebook do state that they can use any data you put up there, including your photos. Flickr gives you the option of releasing them under Creative Commons if you wish.

Spread the sound with Last.fm

This is a music social networking site which hooks into your iTunes library and creates your own personal radio station based on your tastes. It’ll play songs tagged similarly, or in the libraries of other users who also have what you have. Anybody can listen to your type of music by putting in your username and listening to your station. What you need when you’ve discovered that Lithuanian hip hop is your next great love and it needs more exposure. Similarly, a MySpace page will let you put in music – in fact bursting the eardrums of anyone who pops by is a must there.

Sketch your way into DeviantART

So you find yourself sketching quick glimpses of foreign life in your Moleskin, scribbling furiously in a bus-stop like the hipster artist you are? DeviantART lets you showcase your work and set up your own online gallery. The shop function even lets you sell artwork, but do make sure you are aware of their copyright policy before releasing work on the site. It isn’t just limited to traditional art – put up vector art and photos as well.

Send a Postcard

Putting pen to paper, licking a stamp and writing an address is still the best way to get people to pay attention to your travels. Everybody gets email, everybody has blog feeds building up in their RSS readers. Nowadays though, an old fashioned postal message is going to get you the attention that the flashiest MySpace background won’t. People will stop to read your short missive if it arrives by mail. They will look at the photo. They will think “Oh look, she was thinking of ME while away!” and feel special. And because of that they will be more likely to be forgiving of all the name- and place-dropping you do when you get home.

Old postcard. by Hot Meteor