One session at the Tourism Forum Villach on May 27th was devoted to the “utopia of travel”. Our author and speaker Ingrid Thurner, prevented from attending on Pentecost for health reasons, has now added her contribution. She asks whether travel under the Corona regime can work. And whether the retreat from the distance into a narrowness can also be understood as a departure into a new freedom …. Not all of them are equal to the virus, and also not to the virus-related restrictions and attacks on the person’s autonomy. Suddenly, mankind was divided into the categories “systemically important” or “dispensable”. Even if the Corona regime has produced a large number of unemployed and short-time workers through compliant state action, the summer need for relaxation will remain. Since there is no one whose life and everyday life has not been turned upside down, the leisure and vacation practices have to be reinvented, writes Ingrid Thurner. In the meantime, the standstill of travel and vacation machinery may offer a recovery to the earthly climate. This could be an occasion to review your own biography and to consider whether you really need so many long-distance trips, city breaks, worlds of experience, large exhibitions and mega-events, international conferences and trade fairs. Also, some might ask themselves self-critically, whether one or the other has been overlooked or even missed in the frenzied pace of life, or whether the leisure time is sometimes preferable to the hectic, the quiet to the noise. The journey continues in the STANDARD.
