Going on Erlaub (Staycation)

Staycations became trendy following the recession of 2008, but seem to be out of fashion these days. Here is an appeal to dust off the concept. If you like the place you live, earn an NGO salary, are an INTP or all of the above, a staycation might be for you.

Alain de Botton puts his finger on the key to a rewarding staycation in his book "The Art of Travel" (2002), explaining how to "apply a travelling mind-set" to a familiar place (p. 242). What we need, he says, is to be receptive and humble and to become "alive to the layers of history beneath the present". You'll know that you have succeeded if you "irritate locals" and "risk getting run over".

To translate staycation into German, I began to ponder the word Urlaub - vacation. I was delighted when my suspicion was confirmed that Urlaub actually derives from the verb erlauben - to allow. If we can just allow ourselves "new eyes", as Marcel Proust once said, we can embark on a "voyage of discovery" without seeking any new landscape.

In order to permit ourselves to rethink the ordinary, we also have to forbid ourselves a few things. First, we have to let go of the household projects, errands and unanswered e-mails that can make staycations become fake-cations. But we also have to leave behind a few cherished things – so that we better understand their value upon return.

To facilitate a re-framing of the familiar, I recently spent ten days looking after a friend's cat - and making use of her otherwise empty house. This well-known, but unusual space gave me permission to indulge in unscheduled time. During my staycation, I traded in my guitar for internet radio and a CSA subscription for a Vitamix. I don’t know how well I managed to tweak out “layers of history” during visits to an urban garden, a spa, and the public library, but my curiosity and heightened awareness did occasionally halt sidewalk traffic.

My travel companion, Minou. 

People assume because I live abroad that I am adventuresome. But I am really just a homebody who, through personal attachments and a love of speaking in tongues, ended up on a foreign continent. Already struggling with having two Heimats, I am afraid to travel anywhere I might find a third. Luckily, the place in which I live has a ready supply of reading nooks, green spaces, museums and other places where transformation is pre-programmed into the experience.