Tickets
Tickets: the key to the gateway that allows us to travel from one place to the next. They also allow us to gain entry into various locations to experience the culture and products of that area. We can date tickets back to as far as Ancient Greece for theatrical productions and the Roman era where small pieces of imprinted clay were used to gain entry into performances. Paper tickets then began to come into popularity during the late 1800s where we now find ourselves today with the ability to pull up tickets with ease on our smartphones anytime, anywhere. What may seem trivial by nature is actually an important piece of everyday writing that serves a memento for years down the line to act as the catalyst for memories of trips.
The topic of tickets as everyday writing did come up in our discussions at the museum as it seemed in modern days it's more along the lines of a computer printing the information and that's that. However, looking through the different ticket artifacts from online searches and my own collection I began to see the validity of them being everyday writing. We mark down luggage carousal locations, seat changes, tour times, interesting details, etc. They serve as a small notepad with which we can log new information about our trips and can be saved just as much as a tangible note can.
To quote perhaps one of the most cliche sayings when talking about travel, "it's not about the destination, it's about the journey." There is a range of emotions people can experience when taking a flight to various destinations across the world: excitement, happiness, and even stress. The latter is the one I experienced when first departing Atlanta to travel to London for my study abroad experience. The ticket I used for that trip is to the left and I kept it as it will always remind me of that day where I started a completely new experience in a foreign country. Having not had much flying experience previous to that, the gate agent luckily marked my flight number and gate location to make sure I didn't miss anything. These seemingly simple writing marks helped me easily figure out where to go and when. Just this ticket brings all those memories to mind which really shows the power that everyday writing can bring to those who experience it.
Tickets can also give some great historical information about trips from our past. This artifact that was submitted to Reddit is a ticket from 1956 that was used by an Australian Army Corporal to travel home after the war. This was during a time when tickets still had to be handwritten which gives us an idea of how much more time it took to write out plane tickets at the time as opposed to the easily printed tickets nowadays.
What we see as tickets in everyday writing do not only have to be travel tickets either. I saved this entry ticket to the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Ireland to help remember my experience with a tangible artifact. We got the opportunity to learn the history of the museum, explore the brewing process of Guinness, and even taste some different beers produced by Guinness that we had not heard of before. The ticket also acted a notepad for my friends and I to log our tasting experiences with the different Guinness beers. Not only do tickets help us gain entry into the various explored locations, but they can act as logs for some of the experiences we share at them.
Tickets can come in a wide variety of forms that represent tags for different expeditions we take within our lives. Feel free to browse some more of those tickets below.
