Writing this has been on my agenda for a few days, but after arriving home in Paris, then seeing my room mate off to Berlin, I have had a rather unproductive batch of activity, colored by a mild cold (which seems to have been Greece's parting gift). At any rate, here come some tidbits about the trip, bullet-style.
The strange thing about traveling, these days, is the sense of having manifested something. When I was younger it was more about the act of departure and arrival -- the sense of moving away from people and coming back, the age-old idea of a trip that changes you, even if it is just for a weekend. While much of that still stands, it feels different. No longer do tray tables inspire scrawled journal entries about how exciting it feels to be in transit, to know the sensation of geographic movement. Now I mostly try to sleep, I get knots in my back, and I try not to drool in public. The taste of once-frozen dinner rolls and mid-morning vegetable spread isn't much condolence.
I think maybe the romance surrounding air travel died on a flight from Atlanta to Seoul, when I spent four of sixteen hours in the airplane bathroom, throwing up and trying to stay conscious. I have worked hard to train myself into napping uncontrollably, if only to avoid thinking too hard about my digestive tract and all the things I have put it through in life. The romance of being in transit has completely fallen away; transit is hardly time to reflect on the places one has seen, or time to ponder where one is going. Rather, it is a miserable experience one must endure between bursts of life. Here are hours not wasted, but folded somewhere into time. Though geographic movement seems to take forever while it is experienced, once you have arrived it seems quite sudden. Suddenly you are home. Suddenly it is tomorrow. Suddenly it occurs to you how terrible you smell, how long you have been awake, that you have been on your computer for six hours, and that, for the second time in a day, the only meal you can assemble is farfalle with butter and a glass of apple juice. It would behoove me to remember to stock a little something in the freezer for Sunday arrivals, when all grocery stores and markets in France are closed.
The strangeness and the delight, as I said, concern the manifestation of a trip -- to plan from start to finish, to assemble tickets, to gather information. Even choosing destinations can inspire disbelief. One moment there is a voice in your computer, and a few years later you are visiting a friend in Bosnia. One evening you see a photograph and decide you must experience its subject directly. One month you are collecting signatures on campus, then suddenly you are alone in an airport, about to move to a foreign country for a year. Each journey can be traced by its own string of events, but as you experience them they can feel quite disconnected. It is hard for me to convey how many times I have stood before monuments or looked out on a view and had an experience that abruptly changes from witnessing the site to an awareness that I really am there, that I decided to do something that seemed impossible and accomplished it. Sometimes it feels almost by accident. So often while traveling you are too overwhelmed for clarity, but every now and then a moment hits you and you realize you are standing in the spot you imagined you'd never reach, or that you'd only be able to visit thirty years down the road. It's freeing. Anything seems possible when, even if only for an instant, you feel you've controlled the course of your own life.
When trying to capture this sensation, I often return to this video, which ends with, "The end goal of this project, both in its vlog and
documentary form is to share people's reasons and motivations behind
their trip. Most importantly, to share what makes or drives a person
to leave everything behind: their routines, their friends, the things
that are comfortable to us and give us a false sense of security.
There's an infinite number of stories and paths chosen that lead to
leaving it all behind. But even more important than sharing these
stories is doing so in a way that helps break down the myths and false
fears that people put up. Because, in the end, it has almost nothing
to do with the bike and everything to do with setting out to accomplish
something that is intimidating, that is unknown to you -- something you
know you have a good chance of failing at, but doing it anyway, and
slowly but surely, proving yourself wrong."
In addition to researching internship opportunities (and mailing off about fifteen applications), I have been my usual busy self, stretching time between seeing the city, reading, school, and social engagements. The good news is that my February intensive six-hours-a-day French course is over, so I have more free time. What's more, I can officially state that I received my first rejection letter from National Geographic. While the intern apps are still rolling out via the French postal system, I've begun a new set of classes at the Institut Catholique de Paris, the school I'm attending this semester.
Here's the course load. Pretend like you're interested:
In other news, travel plans are shaping up for the semester. First up are American visitors. Last weekend Melinda, a graduate of UA's French program, came to Paris. She's been living in Nantes and we finally managed to cross paths. We saw Fontainebleau and Victor Hugo's house (pictures forthcoming). Next up are three other Alabamian friends who found affordable tickets and have nothing better to do for their spring break than to visit me. Immediately following is a trip to Dublin, to see another Alabamian friend from high school who's studying at Trinity for the semester. The following weekend I see Adis in Sarajevo. Then for spring break I'm going to Greece for a few days with friends. All I can say is that even with terrible service and inconvenient airports, thank goodness for RyanAir and easyjet alike. Though most of my savings are now pocket lint, if there's anything left over I might hop over to Casablanca for a weekend. All of which is to say that if you have any tips or recommendations for any or all upcoming destinations, please send them my way.
Things I owe you, now that I fixed Movable Type (it's been broken for about two weeks, making it impossible to update until I found time to reinstall everything):
Cast your vote in the comments for which should come first.
Istanbul: vignettes from glynnis on Vimeo.
In recent months, I've stumbled across a number of pieces like this one
that accuse Paris and other history-saturated European
destinations of stagnation--that they are more like urban, city-sized
museums that cater to consumers than beautiful hometowns that color the lives of residents. In her article, Field writes: Surely residents of other European cities take history in one hand and the everyday in the other, but I have come to admire the ease with which Parisians do so. To breach the border of the city-museum when you travel as a tourist is difficult. Venice, especially, stands out in my mind as a museum empty of residents--like a kind of historical theme park that caters to adults. Prague, too, felt a little like this. The historical parts of the city--called "Prague 1" and "Prague 2" (similar to the arrondissement system of Paris)--seemed lacking in local life. I should pause to say that by "local life" I mean something like local business--places to shop, eat, or spend time that can't be included in a portrait of consumerism. In Staré Město (also called "Old Town")--the ground zero of historical Prague--many streets are lined with souvenir shops. Just off Old Town Square is a Starbucks. At one end of Wenceslas Square sits a grand pedestrian boulevard lined with shops: H&M, Lacoste, Mango, Zara, Deisel. During my visit, I saw a handful of KFCs and even a TGI Friday's. I hardly expect historical cities--especially those like Prague, founded as early as the ninth century with buildings that survive from the 1200s--to cease modernization. Still, it is strange to stand before the theatre where Mozart debuted Don Giovanni, then wander a few blocks into a six-floor shopping mall that could just as easily be located in Atlanta, Georgia. Though the city's facades remain intact, the streets are saturated with souvenir shops and restaurants. Prague is relatively new to tourism. I would guess that a good five years passed following the Velvet Revolution (the fall of Communism in Prague, November 1989) before many people traveled to see the city, which means that Prague has seen about fifteen years of increasingly heavy tourism. In the case of the Municipal House, the birth of tourism in the city meant that restoration could be funded, after years of falling into disrepair behind the Iron Curtain. A part of me is alarmingly appreciative of the kind of kitsch this environment produces. Prague's popular souvenir "Czech me out" t-shirt rivals the singing Mao lighter I brought home from China last year. The delight a seasoned tourist takes in kitschy souvenirs can be compared to the internet's love of LOLcats. Still, sometimes when traveling I long for the authenticity that I feel tourism destroys, which which will forever remain the tourist's dilemma. The existence of souvenir shops in any given destination probably began with other conveniences like airport shuttles, English-speaking waiters, and centrally located hotels. Many of these things are the reasons people visit places like Prague as opposed to remote villages in Tibet. That said, tourism is something I enjoy but also have a hard time wrapping my head around. I have such a strong desire to visit the unvisited places--to see local life and street markets untouched by consumerism. When I think of travel in the early 1900s--the cost, the difficulty--I find something of the travel I long for. Surely it was difficult, uncomfortable. But surely also it was more immersive, more awe-inspiring. Imagine visiting ancient ruins you had only seen sketches of, or standing as one of the first foreigners in the center of Lhasa, a forbidden city. Though the world harbors many tiny villages tucked into mountain ranges, or forgotten towns along riverbanks, they feel as distant now as they must have two hundred years ago, but for different reasons. Then, it was mostly the matter of getting there. Today, though getting there is easier, there is the issue of inconvenience. Is there a hotel to book? What sites are there to see? We tend to leave the inconvenient places to National Geographic. My idealization of this kind of inconvenient travel is slightly illogical considering my sensitive stomach, my lack of physical fitness, and my general disinterest in hardcore Patagonia-type backpacking adventures. But, you know...there's always the chance that some day I may blow a few thousand dollars making my way to the monasteries of the Himalayas to see the sun rise over Nagarkot. I suppose generally I like to be inconvenienced in the sense of being/feeling displaced--not passing McDonald's every two blocks, not finding a GAP around the corner--but I'd also rather not hike 300 miles to find things to eat that aren't in my knapsack. That is, I suppose, my personal dilemma, if not the dilemma of every tourist--that anything convenient will likely destroy some authenticity of a location. Rarely do inconvenient places entice visitors. During my weekend in Prague, I found myself wishing I could have visited within a year or two following the Velvet
Revolution--that perhaps that could have offered a real glimpse into the heart of the city, the scars Communism left there etc. (nevermind the fact that I would have been three or four years old at the time...). A few things remain that, I think, are tiny relics of that earlier Prague. If you find yourself in the city, I highly recommend you try to experience them yourself. They are: 1) The metro. Perhaps comparing it with Paris's stations has a lot to do with my opinion, but there's something very Post-Communist about many of the stations, design-wise. Generally speaking, it's easy to lose yourself in the culture and local life of any place by using public transportation, and sitting in the car of one of Prague's metro trains surrounded by Slavic language, it's easy to imagine what the city might have been twenty years ago. Visual aids: 1, 2, 3, 4. 2) Walking the city at night. Like Paris, the city closes up around 6PM, save a few restaurants and bars. During my time there I didn't find any particularly hopping areas as far as nightlife was concerned, even though we stayed right off Wenceslas Square (where there are some clubs) on a street full of sex shops and cabaret theaters. The city is lit, of course, but something about walking the city at night felt especially dark and quiet, probably due to the high number of pedestrian areas. A dark, quiet city is something I've rarely experienced, especially as early as 8PM. It was more refreshing than eerie. 3) Trams. There is something very Dr. Zhivago-y about them, though I realize that neither the film nor Omar Sharif have anything to do with the Czech Republic. If you find yourself in Prague, I recommend taking the tram from Charles Bridge up to Prague Castle. Again, there's something delightfully Post-Communist about the trams, but unlike the metro, its in the most storybook "Hey kids! Communism!" kind of way. (Sorry. It's getting late, I've been working on this post for a long time, and my figurative language--and perhaps my general grasp of English--is beginning to escape me.) Visual aids: 1, 2, 3. 4) The post office. My room mate for the trip, Kristin, and I went into a post office to get stamps for postcards. The office was in what seemed like a restored train station, with pews for waiting customers, and a lot of open space. The postal workers behind glass along one wall. The environment really did feel more like a station than a post office. Kristin and I walked up to ask about stamps. The woman behind the glass was surprised and somewhat angry as she explained that we needed to take a number. A man in a very elevator-operator uniform approached us and showed us where to take a number. Once we did, we sat on a pew, and immediately our number appeared on a digital marquee above the woman we had asked for stamps two minutes earlier. Sunday morning, our last day in Prague, I woke early and ate alone before wandering through the city flâneur style. As the sun rose and bathed Old Town Square in pink, I strolled past the the clock tower and the statue of Jan Hus. Very few people milled through the square as waiters set up chairs and tables on restaurant patios. With so few shops open at the early hour, I decided to check out the churches. Sure enough, Týn Cathedral's doors were open, and I stepped inside to find a service in session. The church's pews were filled with Czechs, all dressed very casually. A priest at the altar chanted a prayer, and the congregation chanted in response. There was something quite ordinary, yet quite surprising about witnessing this, similar to the je ne sais quoi of Parisians walking their dogs outside palaces. Here were the locals that seemed to be missing all weekend, gathered in blue jeans and hoodies inside the Týn Cathedral, a church constructed in 1256. The interior is decked with gold and Baroque-style altars. Tycho Brahe, the famous astronomer, is buried there. Perhaps this curiosity and disbelief in mixing such rich history with the mundanity of daily life is uniquely American, since many historical buildings in our country have an entry free and roped-off rooms, or else have been privatized. I'm thinking specifically of early government buildings in Philadelphia. The more I see of the world, the less I know what to say about the places I have visited. Rarely have I thought of an answer to satiate my friends' curiosity when returning from some new city. More often than not, I settle on a few sentences that cannot be disputed, like "It was more touristy than I expected," or "The buildings are really beautiful." To capture the essence of a place after catching only a glimpse is like writing about love without platitude; it rarely happens. It is much easier to write about the nature of travel itself than the way a specific voyage has reshaped the traveler. Rarely can one describe transformation until long after it has occurred. And so, as ever, I return to the subject of Travel Itself. Many others have captured it better than I. Pico Iyer, in his essay, "Why We Travel: A Love Affair With the World," writes:But the worshippers these days are consumers, not creators. They are
mainly foreign tourists who come to see the eternal Mona Lisa,
post-modern American artists, the French Impressionists and Moliere.
The city chemistry that produced rawness, dynamism, change and
challenge seems absent.
As a resident of Paris, I will admit that
parts of the city are museum-like, but there remains a
large portion of Paris's character tucked away in quiet
neighborhoods--pieces of the city rarely written about in travel books, and rarely noticed by visitors who skip from one site
to another via metro. While those producing cutting-edge work in the art world may have moved elsewhere, Paris is still a hometown. The daily market, the tiny bakery, the ateliers in Haussmann-style
apartment buildings: to an outsider, these things seem picturesque, if
not fantastic. To Parisians they are relatively quotidian, though not
unappreciated.
Parisians adore the city's parks, if only because their well-groomed dogs can trot along behind them as they stroll past former palaces. I once stood in line at a bakery as the pâttisier helped an old woman remember which was her favorite cake. Vous ne vous souvenez pas ce gateau? Ça c'est le gateau que vous avez acheté pour l'anniversaire de votre fils le mois dernier! Je crois que vous aimez ça. When he had finally convinced her that it was, in fact, the cake that she liked (she continued to disagree with him, even after sampling a piece), he bid her goodbye and told her he'd see her tomorrow. Only in Paris do bakers help senile old women stay finicky (and on a daily basis, at that). The way the French embrace and disregard their history simultaneously--the way they respect and grow weary with their oldest living generation--will remain for me the je ne sais quoi of life in the city. Maybe a photo can explain better than my words can. This photo was taken in the library of École Militaire, Paris's military academy. The library houses hundreds if not thousands of antique volumes, some dating back to the French exploration of China. The painting pictured is authentic and original--not like the cheap copies and modern imitations we're used to seeing in America's dentist offices.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York City and lie in bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and rereading my diaries, as if to
And:
extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning--from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament--and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity--and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other.
Prague was, indeed, a bit of a love affair, and offered more than I expected in mulling over ideas about Travel Itself. Walking the dark streets under the tram cables of such a sleepy city, or strolling through Old Town Square at sunrise, I found a bit of the terror and wonder I always hope to run across in exploration.
I feel I should begin by describing how I have arrived here this evening. This description will not flatter me, but somehow recording it seems vital to beginning whatever it is I am to say, explore, or discover this evening while addressing a somewhat formless and indefinite audience (Oh Internets, will we ever truly come to know and understand each other?). I woke moments ago after drifting off for what may have been half an hour. I had a tissue stuffed into one nostril, my face propped up with one hand, and a thick drool of sickness rolling halfway down my forearm. In my lap, my computer; I'd made it halfway through an interview with David Foster Wallace, which I say not as commentary on the quality of his writing, but to reveal something about which and what kind of sentences may have helped usher me here.
All of Paris seems to have caught cold. Everyone is sniffling and coughing. Unfortunately I am no exception. My head feels swollen with snot, I can't stop sneezing, and I feel miserable enough to wish I could stay in bed, but not miserable enough to feel justified in doing so. I took notes on Southworth and Hawes in art history this morning, met some girls in my program for lunch, then attended grammar at the Sorbonne, where things began to fall apart. Madame Berthier spied me looking pathetic halfway through her lecture on les adjectifs, and declared, Vous êtes vraiment malade, ma chérie, and advised me to arm myself with more than a bag of honey-flavored cough drops. After grammar I descended the twelve flights of stairs to phonetics to explain, Excusez-moi, je suis très malade--trop malade pour parler le joli français.
I write this not for pity, but for context.
Earlier this week I went to speak with my program director in her office. Primarily, I went to collect paperwork for my trip to the prefecture tomorrow, but I stayed longer to chat. She asked whether my room mate and I got on, if I was enjoying life in Paris. I told her a little about the people I've met, my plans for travel, how every day living here is like a gift. She confessed that even after thirty years of life in Paris, when she wakes up in a bad mood, a trip to the park or a stroll around the neighborhood can quickly lift her spirits. I'm inclined to agree with her.
Certainly there are experiences I grumble about--this cold, for one, or the long line I must wait in at the prefecture tomorrow. I share my hardships with other students, who suffer many of the same experiences. Over lunch, two California girls and I made light of forking over what seems an exhorbant amount of money for shampoo, which comes in tiny bottles. We anticipate our next trip to Sam's Club with both excitement and dread. I know that when I return, everything in America will seem ridiculously large--the cars, the roads, the buildings, the people. The fact that you can stock an American bathroom with gallons of shampoo and a year's supply of toilet paper with a single trip to one location baffles and excites me. The idea of not returning to Monoprix each week for a tiny 5€ bottle of shampoo appeals to me. Simultaneously, there is something to be said for living life one liter of milk at a time.
When I studied creative writing in high school and lived from workshop to workshop, critique to critique, we spent a lot of time thinking about our lives as creative writing students. The more we progressed with our expression, the more it seemed we wrote about the same thing over and over. I often felt like a broken record, and often said so. Here's an excerpt from one of my favorite poems that I wrote (was it sophomore year?), "On Finding the General Vicinity":And I wonder when we will resign ourselves
Though it hasn't quite happened yet, I'm beginning to feel the same way when I write here. If I come to write something personal rather than informative, it is always about the way Parisian life doesn't seem real. Even small things seem the stuff of dreams--the afternoon light, the collective murmur of softly-spoken French in a crowded park, the cobblestone pedestrian streets lined with specialty shops that sell globes, tea pots, or some other equally marvelous and unusual thing. If there is one thing I feel is difficult to capture, it is the sense of well-being and excitement in everyday life, since nearly nothing seems mundane in this city. I hope you will forgive me as I try again and again, with increasing sentimentality, to wrap my brain around the fact that I live here.
to the fact that we write the same poem
our whole lives,
that our existence is a poem
that merely revises itself;
no matter how much we change
we have only twenty-six letters
and a teaspoon of punctuation.
We are our own memories
rearranged.
The feeling only grows, since daily life is growing larger than Paris. I have booked a trip to Prague the weekend of my birthday, and this weekend I will purchase tickets for a visit to Istanbul mid-November. I've asked my parents to consider allowing me to stop in Reykjavik on my way back to the States next year. My program director encouraged me to see Croatia, to visit north Africa--Morocco, Egypt. There are still dozens of places in France that I've yet to see. I have never been to Spain. Though I've been to Austria, I have never seen Vienna. Even with a small budget the possibilities seem limitless. The world seems closer and more accessible than ever, and there's hardly a place I don't want to visit. Ayelen and I are counting the weekends we have left together, syncing our calendars, and creating lists of places near and far that we can squeeze into one weekend and a meager budget. The Canadian man who owns the Abbey Bookshop, an English-language bookstore with a sizeable travel section, is beginning to recognize me. I am leafing through guidebooks and reading literature to accompany the cities I plan to visit. I started The Unbearable Lightness of Being this morning, and have some books by Orhan Pamuk, who writes extensively about life in Istanbul.
It's becoming apparent how quickly I should find employment that requires me to travel. Life as a flight attendant sounds miserable. Do travel guide companies hire undergraduate interns with mediocre writing skills and minor ability to operate a camera?
