When anticipating a vacation, I am always completely delusional about what it will be like. I imagine myself with no time constraints, able to endlessly blog and sleep and explore, without ever having to choose between different activities. The reality, of course, is not that. There is always more to do than there is time, and vacations eventually end, thus tonight is my last night in Paris and I haven't blogged in two weeks. I assure anyone who hasn't been following me on Twitter that yes, I have been having a fabulous time, and yes, I have been eating ridiculous numbers of pastries.
This has been a really, really good trip. There have been moments when I have felt lonely, and more than once I have seriously considered going to a cat cafe for some feline attention, but overall it has been good to travel alone. The introvert in me had been craving silence, long stretches of time without having to answer to anyone, and the past three weeks have been exactly that. My mind has been able to wander wherever it wants, and I have had time to think and think and think about all the big questions in my life. It has been good.
And of course, I have seen things! So, so many things. On my last day in Caen, I took a tour of the Canadian D-Day beaches, and then I went to Dijon, where I slept a lot and drank wine on the couch and did a bit of wandering through the historic city. In Paris I have been all over the place: the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Shakespeare and Co, the Musée d'Orsay, the Natural History Museum, Sacre-Coeur, Montmartre, the Curie Museum, and the Army Museum. It has been delightfully nerdy, in both a scientific and a historical way, which suits me perfectly.
I haven't done as well with my French as I had hopped. I struggle a lot with verbal comprehension, and the accents are different from the ones that I am used to, so I have said "Désolé, je ne comprends pas" and "Pouvez-vous repétér ça, s'il vous plaît?" more times than I can count. (Actually, I have mostly just contorted my face painfully and made awkward sounds, which is the introvert's way of saying "I don't understand".) But I have learned new words, thanks to reading every street sign and countless museum displays, and my ability to understand written French is getting better quickly.
(Yesterday's word of the day was "ruche", as in hive, which I learned from this beehive at the Natural History Museum. Yup...I am a nerd.*)
There have been moments on the trip when I have considered giving up on learning French, as it is frustrating to see how far I still have to go before I will be functionally fluent. But then, I wander into a bookstore and walk out with The Handmaid's Tail in French (La servante écarlate), and I think that the learning will continue. I dream of living in Europe for at least a year in retirement, and if I continue to plug at it for the next 7+ years, I can hopefully be functional by then.
(Also, there is a cute lesbian in my conversational French group. Not that that's a reason to learn a language...)
So...that is my trip in a very small nutshell. I will try to post some more pictures, although I dread the volume of work that awaits my return to work, so I make no promises. There is part of me that is resentful of the fact that I need to go back to work, but mostly right now I am incredibly grateful to have been able to do this. I know how fortunate I am that this is my life.
*When I was a kid, my Dad used to play a silly game in which he would ask what letter a word started with, and when I would reply "B" he would scream "A bee! Bzzzzzzzzz!" and pretend that his hand was a buzzing bee. Since studying French, whenever I try to remember the word for bee, I will scream "Une abeille! Bzzzzzzzzzz!". Thankfully I have learned to scream this in my head when I am in public.
The first time I ever traveled overseas, I was 22 years old, and I had just graduated from university. Using my parents' travel miles, I flew to Europe with my good friend N, whom I'd known since I was five. We had six weeks, ridiculously heavy backpacks, Eurail passes, and very little money. It was going to be amazing.
Except, it kind of wasn't. I mean...there were moments that were amazing. Like the first day in London, when I walked around the city with my mouth hanging open saying things like "OMG...Alfred Russel Wallace lived here*. OMG...MAHATMA GANDHI LIVED HERE!!!" Or the beautiful day we spent on a boat on Loch Ness, before I discovered how badly I had burned my legs because I had decided to "let them tan". But there was also a lot of hard stuff.
The biggest problem was that N and I wanted to have completely different trips. I had planned for the trip obsessively, reading Let's Go Europe from cover to cover and marking things as "Must-See" or "Would-Like-To-See-If-We-Have-Time". I had practiced saying Hello/Goodbye/Please/Thank You/I desperately need a bathroom now in the languages of every country we would visit. And I had dreamed of all the nerdy historical places we would visit: Westminster Abbey, Edinburgh Castle, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Roman Forum.
N had packed her party clothes. Unbeknownst to me, this trip for her represented an opportunity to escape from her somewhat overprotective parents and just have fun. She had almost no desire to buy the discount passes that let you see all the historical sites in a city, but every desire to meet people at hostels and go dancing. So for six weeks, we cramped each other's style, arguing constantly about whether to spend our time in a museum or a bar. By the time we flew home, we were barely talking to each other.
I realized on that trip that I have some pretty specific desires when I travel, and they aren't necessarily the desires of others. Which is completely okay. I in no way judge the crazy people who want to be social and spend times in crowded spaces. I simply don't want to travel with them.
Over the years, I have been very fortunate to have lots of opportunities to travel. And with each trip, I've gotten even better at knowing what I will or will not enjoy. Which is particularly relevant to me right now, as I just bought tickets for a conference and vacation in France this Spring. FRANCE! If you follow me on Twitter, you will know that I have been posting there frequently about my excitement about learning to speak French and planning my trip. And to build on that excitement, I've decided to post about some of the things that make a great trip for me.
Really Nerdy Activities:
I love nerdy things, and the more I embrace this fact, the happier I become. When traveling, I have no interest at all in the popular shopping district, but I absolutely do want to see the collection of 18th century dioramas/the site where a famous scientist was born/Galileo's middle finger.
When traveling, I seek out the oddities. I look on Atlas Obscura to find places to visit (Oradour-Sur-Glane is high on my list for France). I allocate entire days to medical and natural history museums. And I love every minute of it.
Traveling Alone:
Shockingly there are few people in this world who want to spend hours with me in a natural history museum photographing a dodo bird (A DODO BIRD!) from every angle. When I travel with another person, it is inevitable that at some point the other person will become impatient and/or I will feel rushed. Which is quite easily overcome by me simply traveling alone.
While traveling with someone else isn't entirely negative (eating in restaurants tends to be better with another person), I do tend to prefer traveling on my own. I like having complete control over where I go and what I see. I like being able to commit a day of travel and four hours on a bus to visiting the seaside town from which the French explorers departed for Canada. And I like never being dragged out in the evening to socialize with people I don't know.
Flexible Schedule:
Whenever I travel, I tend to alternate between days of "OMG I'm so excitied! I'm going to see three museums and take a walking tour and take hundreds of photos!" and days of "Cobblestone hurts my feet and I don't like the food here and I want to stay in bed and Internet". This pattern repeats itself on every trip I go on, and if I ignore my need for downtime and try to push on with the sightseeing, I will inevitably become miserable. I've learned to build flexibility and extra time into my schedule so that, when needed, I can spend a day on the couch with a block of cheese and a good book and recharge my traveling energy.
Small Cities and Towns:
When N and I went to Europe, we gave ourselves four full days in Rome, recognizing that there was a lot to see. And for four days we rode on the crowded subways and got catcalled by Roman men and saw site after site of broken columns. For me, I was overwhelmed by the number of people and by the sense that no matter how much we rushed, we would never see everything. I learned from my visit to Rome that I prefer the small places to the big. Small places may not have as many things to see, but I enjoy the sense of being able to see everything, even when I go at a leisurely pace. And I love the oddities that turn up in small places, which would never attract tourists in a big city, like the preserved two-headed pig in the farming town where my grandparents lived.
Packing Light:
On my first trip, I bought the biggest backpack I could find, and I filled it with everything that would fit in it. And then I packed a second smaller backpack as a day pack. Even though I was only 22 years old, I felt like an old woman thanks to the constant back and shoulder pain from carrying my things around. When I watched the movie Wild, I couldn't stop laughing in recognition at Cheryl Strayed's pack (although, for the record, I did not pack 12 condoms for my trip to Europe).
Every time I travel, my suitcase gets lighter. I simply don't need much stuff, and I hate hauling a heavy bag into airport bathrooms and onto trains. On my most recent trip, which was to Quebec City, I took only my camera bag and a carry-on suitcase, and it was still more stuff than I needed. I will probably need to take a larger bag to France, as I need to bring work-appropriate clothes with me, but you can bet that it will be packed as lightly as possible. (Leaving room to bring home wine.)
So this is how I travel. A solitary introvert with a tiny bag and a big camera, visiting the nerdiest places I can find. My idea of a fun vacation would probably be a nightmare to a more outgoing person, but it works perfectly for me. Which I think is a good guiding principle for life: do what works perfectly for you.
*You know you're a nerd when you not only know who Alfred Russel Wallace was but also still feel angry that he didn't get the recognition he deserved for the theory of evolution.
This past weekend, when I was feeling a bit bored and aimless, I tried to watch a few different shows on Netflix. Orange is the New Black, Gilmore Girls, Breaking Bad. Even though I've enjoyed all of them in the past, I couldn't quite get into them again. I was beginning to think that I had moved beyond television and become someone who just does intellectual things like read books and drink sherry.
And then I started watching Stranger Things last night, and OMG it is so scary, but I can't stop watching it. Every light in my apartment is on, and I'm probably going to have to sleep on the couch with the cats because my bedroom is now scary, but I really need to know what happens.
Also...the Chief of Police is an idiot.
And I really wish Eleven could talk more, because really? Do we need to have a major female character who doesn't say more than 2 or 3 words at a time?
And that is my blog post for tonight, because I'm on episode 5 and I need to go to bed soon because my clinic starts at 7 am.
I will not start episode 6 tonight.
Probably not.
Although if I'm lying awake on the couch unable to sleep, what's the harm in watching another episode?
I needed to make some space on my iPhone (my fancy, modern iPhone 4S) in order to upgrade the software, so I decided to look through and delete some of my photos. Most of which are photos from the three-and-a-half years that M and I spent together. Oddly enough, this was a somewhat emotionally wrenching experience, and as a result my motivation to write a coherent blog post is a bit low right now. So I'm stealing an idea from Creampuff, who has been posting pictures of her dog on Saturdays and calling it Shar Pei Saturday. Except instead of my cats (who were featured on Thursday), I give you a cortical homunculus. This photo is from Le Musée de la Civilisation, which I visited on my recent trip to Quebec City.
What is a cortical homunculus, you ask? According to Wikipedia:
A cortical homunculus is a distorted representation of the human
body, based on a neurological "map" of the areas and proportions of the
brain dedicated to processing motor functions, or sensory functions, for
different parts of the body. Homunculus is Latin for "little man", and was a term used in alchemy and folklore prior to the concept being utilized in scientific literature. A
cortical homunculus, or "cortex man", illustrates the concept of a
representation of the body lying within the brain.
