European Ghost Town

There is an irreparable allure in windswept tourist towns beset by clouds, darkness, and the narrow winter horizon. Careless motorbikes dented by locals are left without fear; boarded windows echo the footsteps ahead.  When no one is in sight, fish scales mingle with bird chirrups in palatable silence. Tic tacs of canine claws, yowling mewls from cats hardened by street fights, yet needy for ear scratches and languid tours of legs--  stone walls transmute, for four months a year, into empty skulls bleached by forgetfulness.

In Oia, it is impossible to stay lost.  Certainly a wrong turn leads bayward, but eventually, if you are meant to venture no further, the path will narrow, then bar herself with a door, a gateway, and you will retrace your steps, breathing heavy in the ascent.

In a way, the village reminds me of the 60degree Florida of my childhood, when beach going families have returned home to the routine they adeptly forgot for ten days in the 5 flagged city, and the Spanish streets are left for those who love them innately.  As the air cools and the wind navigates the streets, shop hours become shorter, characters (from  didgeridoo  to local pirates) move further south, to Miami's constant bustle, and St Augustine is left quieter.

But it is different here. The reverberations of summer linger in a way Floridian cities know not.  Locals seem nonexistent, save the harried bed and breakfast owner and tanned construction worker, toiling away in early bougainvillea skies even before the clanging of Sunday's sacred bells begin. There is a preparation for the season to come, a hastening of demolition and renovation that forgets cracked pallets along pathways.



Then, there are the faces already becoming familiar, as we pass along the single street or eavesdrop in the handful of eateries. The tourists who are here aren't the swarms of summer dread.  We move in couples, triplets occasionally, amiably ignoring each other as we pass.  Outside of our tables, we never stay within hearing distance.  At sunset, a score of us spread through kilometers of paths, blissful as the sun dipped, rapidly shining a new day somewhere unimaginable.

48 Hours in Paris

Notes from my weekend in Paris, which turned out to be much more work than play.  I saw half a dozen hotels from top to bottom, each more decadent than the last.  The trip was a tease, leaving me wanting more of the Parisian life.  

Add caption

Day 1

17h

I arrived in Gare de Lyon the beautiful nineteenth century train station, just before 5 and immediately grabbed Line l of the metro, the oldest in Paris, straight to George V. Exiting onto the Champs Elysées, I was greeted by the line for Louis Vuitton.  A single turn right and several steps brought me to the steps of Hotel Prince de Galles. 

17h45

After a short tour of the hotel I discovered that both Gorbachev and Elvis had visited where I was to now stay.  I also saw the UNESCO heritage site courtyard and the Michelin star restaurant before the receptionist led me to my room, where a personal letter and complimentary champagne awaited. I spent a few minutes relaxing, then had a quick cup of Nespresso before heading out. 

18h15

October in Paris means it was already dark, even at 6. But this only meant that when I came to the end of Avenue George V, after a few stops of window shopping, the Eiffel Tower was already lit, rising up from the Seine, as beautiful as ever.  Every time I come to Paris, I am stunned by the beauty of the golden lights against the night sky, searchlight beaming in a citywide arch, and in that moment, I never want to leave. 

19h15

After walking along the quays to Pont Alexandre III, I strolled up a ramp to find myself in Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe on one side, the Louvre on the other.  I went straight ahead, towards the Madeleine and a quarter of Paris I had never seen before. 

21h

Exhausted after several hours of walking, I was glad to find my way to Chez Andre, a bistrot near my hotel.  I recommend the chateaubriand with bernaise.  Honestly, I recommend everything.  I’ve nibbled off of so many plates, and tried so many things, you’re sure to find something you like.

22h

Back at the hotel, I drew a hot bath, scented with complimentary bath salts. With champagne in one hand and chocolate in the other, I soaked away the streets in preparation for tomorrow's site inspections. 

The Mandarin Oriental lobby

Day 2

9h

Breakfasted in the bar of the hotel, one if the most beautiful I've seen. The chairs are mismatched and upholstered, nestled beneath dark marble tables. My seat was next to the window and as I sip my coffee, I see the reflection of the vaguely organic chandelier superimposed over the mosaic of the courtyard pillars. As soon as I sat down, a coffee was brought to me as well as a copper bowl croissants, brioches, and baguette. Sampling the breads, I found they were still warm. 

13h30

After a whirlwind morning of hotel visits, from Geroge V to Place Vendome, I found my way to Cafe de Flore, one of my personal must-see restaurants of Paris. Though it's become a bit of a tourist high road, shuffling through the crowds for a plate of Welsh rarebit is always a delight. 

After lunch, I searched for a recommended chocolate shop and went through place Saint Sulplice before heading towards Rue Saint Honore. 

15h

The afternoon hotel tours began with the Mandarin Oriental then on to The Peninsula.  Both hotels battled each other for first place for most luxurious lodgings in Paris.  House-sized apartments, butlers, and sky-high views, I couldn’t decide which is the best.  The Mandarin offers quiet solitude, The Peninsula a bustling atmosphere.  

The library of La Reserve

17h30

Exhausted from the day, I go back to Prince de Galles for another soak in the tub.  (I’m making up for lost time, as my house doesn’t have one.)  Afterwords, I go downstairs for tea and call it an early night. 

Day 3

8h

I fell asleep the night before with grand plans of breakfasting in the Tuileries. However, morning came to early and it's all I can do to wander downstairs for fresh pastry and espresso. 

10h

Jolted awake by the caffeine, I set off down the nearly empty Champs Elysées, making my way towards the Louvre. Sadly, there isn't enough time to make it to the museum. Brunch and a final hotel tour await. 

The view from the Westin

An Ideal Internship

A week of teaching stands between me and the first real foray into my dream internship.  At the end of August, while I was in Brazil, I met with a Sao Paulo-based travel agency about the possibility of a social media internship.  I wedged my foot into the door via Pepe’s aunt, one of the company’s partners, and went slightly under prepared in Portuguese but over prepared in photo documentation and Google Docs.  I had done a mock up of a website and chosen insta-worthy photos as examples of everything I could do for the company.

For half an hour I explained to Renata (aforementioned aunt) about what I envisioned.  Then, Ana, owner of the company, unexpectedly entered the conference room, upping my anxiety and the actually possibility of my proposal coming to fruition.  I explained again, this time pausing so my vast plans could be restated in Portuguese.  To my sheer delight, the two agreed.

Content with this, I was surprised as the conversation continued.  Where do you live?  France?   Then comments that I partly understood.  Hotel tours… too many to do… what if… She'll need cards... On and on, with me catching 7 out of 10 words.  I knew it was about travel, but the details escaped me.  

En gros, a hotel inspector was needed.  Due to my ideal European location and inclination toward voluntary work if it involved writing and traveling, they wanted me to help.  

No was an impossibility.  Nights spent in elegant hotels, days spent experiencing cities, it was everything I could have dreamed of.

My excitement was barely contained as the meeting finished and we proceeded to lunch.  The immensity of the past hour, the weight of the travel literature I left the office with was too much.

A sampling of the travel agent life.

***

I started immediately and with a few stumbling blocks along the way, I have found my rhythm.  On weekends, I pick a location then pour over luxury hotels worldwide to feature on our blog and Facebook.  I look at fact sheets and through Relais et Chateaux manuals, deciding on what chalet or hotel piques my fancy. 

But it hasn’t been the longed after pastime yet.  It has been an amusing, but solid work.  Several hours a week on top of my typical work schedule.  However, since the beginning of September, a trip has been in my planner.  A trip that will find me, once again, in Paris, this time far from the banlieux.  Rather, I will be spending a weekend on Avenue George V, in a beautiful hotel I only dreamed of staying in 2 months ago.

I am to meet Ana and Renata there for a crash course in hotel touring.  Duties will include careful photo documentation and (if I have anything to do with it) a myriad of questions.  I hope to see the establishment from top to bottom, from the majestic suites and balconies to the fitness room.

Add to this that next weekend welcomes the Salon du Chocolat to Paris, and a better visit to the city of gray skies and twinkling lights is unimaginable.  

A Wistful Wanderlust

And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy. ~Poe

The brisk autumn winds have brought with them the stirrings.  I once thought it was the tug of a notion called wanderlust, but I am in the process of a profound realization to the contrary.  Even though I returned from England a month ago and have already booked my tickets to both Paris at the end of the month and the US for Christmas, a certain discontentment lingers.  I’ve been to Rio and Rome, Venice and Vizille this year.  Nothing has touched the need.

Whenever I felt this before, I was ensconced in a rural town with nowhere to escape, looped in the monotony of classes and in commutes without a soundtrack.  It was easy then, to say I needed to travel.  But it’s not travel that I need, it’s a new life.  I’ve always had France to look forward to, the idea of living in a new place and settling, for a moment at least, as a promise.  I could plan my days and imagine the immense joy boulangeries would bring.

This has become mundane.  Often, I forget I am in France, until I see a tricolor fighting the breeze.  My life is here.  It is time to move on.  Ten months in the country and I am already planning my departure.  

Now, I have Brazil stretched before me.  I life of warmer weather where I will have a golden dog to walk through the park and… and what?  I am fearful that, once there, the same desires will return.  That I will grow tired of the catupiry cheese and the need to go, without knowing where will resurface.  A need to leave and stay away etched so deeply inside me, no contentment will be possible until I can once again pack an entire life into a single suitcase and step through security.  What if this is more than wanderlust and a sign of a greater discontentment with life, no matter where I may be?

Mixed in with this though, is the sheer delight I experience in a single moment that could happen anywhere.  Wandering around the dreary streets in the biting cold, I find a shop and laugh with the store owner.  Looking for a certain store and finally finding it steps from where I started, I discuss marshmallow fluff with the woman behind the counter.  On Tuesdays I go to the market, where the merchant sells me my celery and kiwis, explaining various fruits and trying on their English names for size.  

Walking through the hallways where I teach, students approach, croaking a “hi” before babbling about aunts in Chicago and vacations in Miami.  My little ones crawl into my lap during story time.  Even as I type, Eva is curled in the duvet with me, stealing body heat.

I am blissful here, yet melancholy.   I try to breathe in all the lives I can.  I taste the lives of those around me, as I invent their histories.  I endure my life of bus timetables and endless coffee cups.  I embellish the future of another world made of sheer content and green coconuts with straws. 

A black hole does not engulf

I tend to pluck the oddest bits of science out of the videos and books I read.  Of course, my inspiration is never ending, as the particularities are seemingly endless.  

I cannot remember now if the following was born out of Redefining Reality, a collection of science lectures I just finished listening to, or a conversation I had, or the Dark Universe planetarium show from London.  Whatever it was, it recalled my third grade essay printed on orange paper about black holes.  In the same way that 8 year old Jessi was impressed with an enormity I couldn't understand, present day me is equally dumbfounded by the beauty of our infinite universe.  

A light hearted image for a darker note.

A black hole does not engulf 

Approaching,

My steps linger. 

An inextricable force tightens the strings of my marionette limbs. 

Jerked back, I step into molasses, Then cement. 

From the horizon,

You watch my skin 

Fading into the infrared. 

I darken, invisible to your eyes

Unable to sever the cords. 

London Town

In the weeks leading up to my trip to London, I constructed a perfectly concise image of what the city of all my books would look like.  There would be cobblestones, like Paris.  There would be parks, like Paris.  Palaces and castles, museums and cafes, my imaginings were of an ancient city dubbed in English for my listening pleasure.  To my immense surprise, this wasn’t the case.  Whereas France has strict laws about where modern buildings can spring up, London as a melange of the old and new, with18th century brick pubs perched inside gleaming glass monstrosities housing Mango and Starbucks.

My wanderings didn’t bring me to any famed street names, but the palaces were real.  Coming up from the Underground station, you can see castles and parks spreading before you.  On my first few hours alone in the city, I found Buckingham Palace and the adjoining green space.  From there, in the distance, I could see the London Eye framed by trees, a swan in the foreground.  

When I found the walk along the river, near the Tate and the Globe, I fell in love with a city I had only found tolerable before.  Away from the Westminster queues and Covent Garden crowds, there were ancient ships afloat in locks and newer ships à la Steampunk hidden inside shopping malls.  And always, just in sight and just out of sight, all around, there were the pubs.  Comforting in their branded similarity, the menus were the same and the silverware always brought to the table in pewter cups.  There was Guinness for Pepe and prosecco for me, with chips or nachos or fried fish, depending on our mood.

The best moments of the trip were not passing by the must sees, exploring the crypt of St. Paul’s or taking in Tower Bridge.  The best times were taking the overground out of the city proper and into Greenwich, where we climbed a hill to the Royal Observatory and listened to Neil de Grasse Tyson explain dark energy and matter or the surprise of finding “real” bacon at The Swan.  Sitting through Measure for Measure wrapped in a coat and seated on hard benches was as enjoyable as a dinner at Nobu and champagne cocktails.  Eating Italian with the “family” was better than any double-decker bus tour could have been.  As always, it wasn’t the place that made the trip, but rather the company, long conversations, and endless card games sheepishly played at pub counters.  

Even the grey weather didn’t dampen the visit.  In truth, it only reminded me more of Januarys in Paris and falling in love.  The modernity of London is overwhelming in a way that I was unprepared for in Europe.  In Paris and Grenoble and Turin, the modern exists, but separately, lending a charm to the everyday.  London’s patchwork makeup lends another mystique.  Rather than revering the past, the city flaunts her new appearance her ancient bits melding with her glass and steel exterior.

On Flight

I often try to fly, forgetting I don’t have wings.  Eyes closed, next to an open window, soaring downhill on a bicycle, the necessity of feathers fades away, as the wind picks apart individual hairs and invites them to dance.  I could attempt a flap, I could perhaps take off, if I found a high enough perch, but the angers of reality keep me grounded.

*******

On the floating bridge, I look at the roils beneath.  I can feel the unstable bounds of earth quivering.  For a moment, I want to dive low, like Javert, to feel weightlessness, then a cold press.  I can not.  The consequences of being unable to soar up, after diving down, are too grim.

*******

In dreams, flight is not the same.  There, in the misty confusion, it is always a sort of float.  You are a leaf caught in the wind, not a magician.

There is something much more appealing to the thought of hollow bones pounding through the air, defying gravity, choosing when and how.

Of feathers spread wide to feel a warm up current.

Of the ground growing closer and farther at your command, rising and falling.

You become the wind.  You create it.

As a group, we have conquered flight, but not in the proper way.  Not in the way that catches your breath and causes you to laugh at the beauty.

We have discovered the flight of a lumbering beetle.  Powerful, but without grace.  Heavy and confined.

Until my bones melt away from the interior, and my downed arms grow into colorful appendages, the perfection of flight will escape me, and I will be unable to escape the crushing earth.