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.