The DATES checklist for hosts and travellers

September 2006

The host

• Get to know your guests and their background. Seek to get a sense of their interests in advance.
• Think what are the hidden or less visible aspects of your city, the facets tourist guides do not mention.
• Go beyond the obvious and the stereotype.
• It is fine to feel proud about your own city but it is even better if you have some critical and analytical attitude to it.
• Think of local collective memory – myths, anecdotes, unusual events from the past.
• Reflect on the process of the change that has taken place in your own life time in the city. Seek to show the traces of the old and gone.
• Share your favorite spots, your routine places, but go out of your ordinary ways to show your guests some less familiar spots according to their interest.
• Acknowledge the limits of your knowledge: what you do not know, admit without embarrassment; seek out those who could provide additional info or knowledge.

Travelers

Before the date

• Grasp the specifics of the place in advance through much reading & internet search. (You’ ll be going to the places with a surplus of history and with a record of accelerated change in the last 15 years).
• Study the place and its surrounding, region, country.
• Get familiar with the topography, check your pronunciation, exercises if necessary.
• Know your date partner in essential biographical sense.
• Establish communication with the date partners and the local host per email, get acquainted, get a feel of e/other, signal personal interests and share interesting discoveries you made about the place.
• Check and double check the logistic (visa regime!), made contingency plans, anticipate possible complications.

On the date

How to read an unknown city quickly with several pairs of eyes?

• Make visiting plans, bring your curiosities in a synch, match interests and priorities.
• Have a schedule of the visit worked out but allow for free, unscheduled roaming time.
• Use your host as the resource of the local knowledge. Feel free to be inquisitive, to ask through. But respect hosts’ limits of knowledge & interests in your topic.

• Share observations with the partners and the host, react to their observations.

• Document extensively: snapshots, video camera, drawings, audio record, notes.
• Get additional plans, postcards, leaflets, books on the spot.
• Look at the local posters, papers, advertising.
• Observe the changes in the dynamics of the city and frequency of people’s movement throughout the day and night. Seek to identify the key places of sociability.
• Look for occurrences of cultural diversity, for cultural clashes and intercultural engagement, for piled up cultural layers and distinct influences  interacting.
• Listen to languages spoken, to the music and songs, to the noises of the city.
• Observe the pattern of public behavior of men and women and their ways of interacting.
• Look at the behavior and life style of the young people but do register other age categories as well and notice the marginalized, impoverished and isolated city dwellers.
• Sure you’ll stay late night out in order to explore the night life; but make sure you get early in the morning so as not to miss the morning hustle and bustle.
• Use public transportations, make at least one longer journey along one city bus/tram line.
• Seek to understand how the city changed in the last 15 years. Ask your interlocutors to explain, illustrate, show, point out and take you to some specific spots.
• Make an effort to grasp the deep history of the place (100-200 years ago and further back) in whatever material traces or museum displays.
• Make sure there is enough time left for you and the your travel partners to have a final evaluation discussion.
• Make sure you work out how you will communicate and share ideas in the next few weeks.

After the date

• Write notes, make a blog, look at your notes and documents, keep yourself mentally IN the pace for a while. Make additional book/internet research if necessary. Check the accuracy with your partner and host.
• Stay in touch with your date partners, discuss experiences, keep each other involved with the place.
• Allow incubation, give time to this specific experience to connect with your interests and obsessions.
• Feel free to share preliminary, half baked ideas with your partners.
• Respond  to the ideas of your partners in positive and engaging way, even if being critical.
• Start thinking and discussing how you will jointly present your visit and the ideas it helped generate to the Black Seas meeting in Odessa in March 07.

What if?

• If you don’t like your partner and/or host, get bored or irritated by them?
• If the place resists your exploration, makes you indifferent or bored?
• If the place drives you crazy, makes you nervous or anxious?
• If the schedule made for the visit falls apart?
• What else can go wrong and how to set it right?
• Be prepared for any of those and other difficult to predict setbacks and challenges. But do not get too upset. Threat complications and upheavals as part of creation. And communicate them.