Gary Wins Trip to Switzerland at Travel Massive Event

After an awesome Travel Massive San Francisco event hosted by Swissnex, travel journalist Gary Singh headed on his way to Switzerland to explore the 100th anniversary of Dada.

Travel Massive success stories are about sharing sustainable and successful encounters that Travel Massive members have while at Travel Massive events across the globe. The following is a guest post by Travel Massive community member Gary Singh, award-winning travel journalist.

Thanks to a Travel Massive raffle at the Swissnex San Francisco compound last summer, the anti-man-about-town boogied across the Atlantic to his favorite neutral haven of Switzerland. By a willed coincidence, the 100th anniversary of Dada was erupting all across the art scene in Zurich, and even parts of Geneva, so that’s where I found myself.

My creative ancestors, the Dadaists, originally left their native countries for neutral Zurich in 1916, in order to protest the butchery of WWI and the zoological nationalism then reconfiguring Europe. They were the original anti-men-about-town who crafted a nihilistic transnational anti-bourgeois web of multidisciplinary activity that reverberated throughout every genre-bending art movement for the rest of the 20th century. Had Dada not kicked open the door and cleared the room, there would be no Surrealism, no Pop Art, no mashups, no punk rock, no photomontages, and probably no cosplay, to say the least. Dada anticipated all of that stuff.

So there I was, in the original Cabaret Voltaire at Spiegelgasse 1, the very building where it all started 100 years ago. Just like then, a Dada soiree was taking place, at point even featuring people from Swissnex piped in via Skype during the performance. That was insane.

The Swissnex building is where I won this trip in the first place, so it was a rocking synchronicity to see them spiraling back to the forefront in such cosmic fashion.

They had no idea I was there, of course.

It gets even spookier. As with any trip, I also visited the graves of dead authors. Making a living as a writer or journalist these days is borderline-impossible, so when traveling I usually search out my heroes and ask them for help. I did this with Hermann Hesse the last time I visited Switzerland. This time around, I slithered up to the graves of James Joyce in Zurich and Jorge Luis Borges in Geneva. In both instances, I made a pact. In each case, I said to them: “Alright, old man, I will keep writing. You just show me how to pay the bills. Give me a sign. Anything.”

Sure enough, as soon as I returned home, I learned that I was awarded a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing by the English Department at San Jose State Univesrsity to work on my next book. There you have it.

Thanks to Travel Massive, Swissnex, Joyce, Borges, and SJSU, I don’t have to worry about making a living until at least next spring.

Curious to know more? For more information about Gary Singh feel free to visit him on Travel Massive, Facebook, Twitter and garysingh.info.