Beirut Wednesday,
I’m trapped in a hotel room in Beirut. 3 days after landing, and three negative Covid tests later, I can go out and do my job.
I have time to think a little there, and think of the other day at home in Stockholm when I was out and about. I passed an SL bus that was waiting at its terminus.
It snorted like buses sometimes do and let out a smell of bus. Some rubber, some seats, some exhaust. You know it smells like BUS:
A familiar scent that I have not noticed before. As always just been there, but as I now note. I pull it in properly, get a little excited, what is this. It smells like … freedom.
I believe I know what it is, I was thrown back into my teens, when I started high school and suddenly had enough miles to school that we were no longer expected to walk every morning. But instead got a bus pass from the municipality.
When I realized that that little piece of paper, which had been tucked in a red little plastic pocket, was the key to life. It could take me anywhere, at least it felt that way. I could hop on the commuter train, and hop off and hop on any bus I wanted, no matter how far, (yes anyway in Stockholm County, but it felt endless) I was lyrical.
I forced my friends to get on the commuter train at the terminus where we lived in Nynäshamn and go all the way to the next terminus Bålsta, over two hours away. Just because we could. We just went there, back and forth. It was a feeling that the world had suddenly grown and shrunk at the same time.
I experienced a bit of the same feeling with my job as a correspondent, that the world seemed to shrink and grow at the same time. More accessible, easier to understand, at the same time even bigger and more complex. If my job as a teenager was to feel just like that, that the world was connected, then maybe my job now is to convey the experiences from all places to you listeners, so it feels close, even if it is far away.
Now this became pompous. But my point is that right now that’s over. I am not crowded on buses and have done very little in the last year, so much so that I missed the smell of buses.
I also travel much less in my work as a correspondent right now, although I still travel more than most others, there are many obstacles along the way, many certificates and papers.
In order to take me here to Beirut and then back, for example, a total of five PCR tests are required, six tops in the nose. Sometimes in both drills and sometimes in the throat. It is clearly more difficult.
I think pleasure travel right now would be perceived as anything but a pleasure, even though I have understood that there are many who long for the world. I notice it in loved ones, or in strangers when I talk about travel or post a picture from a flight. That many want to do that again, as soon as possible.
The smell of freedom has kind of taken a beating – whether it means crossing land borders, or as for me the smell of a bus.
Source: ICELAND NEWS