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.  

English Afternoons

Once a week I while away my afternoons under the old fort of Grenoble, the Bastille.  Sitting in the shade of the Café Cymaise, bordered on one side by the river, the part that roils and turns under a pedestrian suspension bridge, I listen.  To the other side is the old Italian quarter, always noisy with the bike tires rolling over cobblestones.  A single street squeezed on both sides by 5 story residential buildings leads through the shadows of a street that only sees light at midday.  Continuing, I would reach the crypte of Saint Laurent, a Romanesque church like any other on the outside, a catacombs on the inside, emptied of pews and open to the bones underneath.

{photo credit}

But I’m not often at the crypte.  I am at the café overlooking the river, in the shadow of a mountain, discussing life with my English student protégé Denis.  Seventy years old, yet as spry as many forty year olds I’ve seen in the US, Denis talks about his mountain biking trips, the badger in his garden, and paragliding.  

We found each other online, on the French version of Craigslist.  He was looking for an English teacher, as his former one had left town.  In preparations for a summer trip to Wales, he suggested weekly meetings.  Since the first meeting, we have gone through several cafés, but no matter the location, our two hours always goes the same way.  Denis is prepared for conversation.  He opens his notebook, full of questions — or his current favorite, English insults.  We spend a few minutes discussing the week, perhaps a David Sedaris book, then turn to his notes.  When conversational fodder diminishes, we go to the topic that calls to us both, our preferred interest in life.  It’s not our families, though we do often talk about them.  No, these favorite conversations always revolve around food.  

We are both avid foodies and constantly discuss kitchen terminology and traditionally anglo-saxon meals.  Twice now we have taken cooking classes together.  The singular moment from the sessions : whilst making a communal bowl of melon soup, with the other 3 students, our instructor told me to add a bit of port to the mixture… Only I failed to understand the French word she was using.  I mimicked a movement and threw in a huge glug.  Even as the port was flowing, the mouths of  those around me opened wider than a split cantaloupe.  Needless to say, I was taken off any duties that required adding “to taste” after that incident.

Denis and I talk a lot about macarons.  He’ll mention the best macaronier in town, which I will subsequently visit.  Our second cooking class together was the art of macarons.  Before the class, I had tried to create them myself… an utter failure.  In class, the success was resounding.  I marcroned perfect circles, even sized evenly placed, I filled them with chocolate chantilly, and I ate the bites of heaven.  I haven’t tried on my own, but Denis has… and his latest batch will be ready for a taste test for our meeting next Tuesday.

On Travel : Inspired by the Vatican Museum

Soon, I will go into the accolades about the two weeks I spent roaming with family, but I need a while to let it all sink in, to form the memories into what they will be.  It is a thankless task, reviewing photos and erasing the least desirable aspects surrounding that moment of that day.

The following I wrote during the second day of my trip.  Completely disillusioned with everything surrounding me, I tried to battle the wonder of what I should feel with the distaste in my mouth.

I promise though, good stories are coming, after this rant...

Ramblings from 12 June 2015

The loss of wonder frightens more than the disappearance of innocence.  

When the vast creation of manly creations fails to interest, a part of humanity is lost. 

Trying to combat the jade doesn't work. I've tried. I stumble through the most beautiful museums of the world, only to find myself complaining, hating. 

No, the issue lies not with a lack of enthusiasm but the crush of others sucking it away. Crowded through hallways, restlessly pushed onwards, I am unable to take pleasure in the glories. 

The pace forbids discovery. The drone of a guide suppresses the possibility of a musical accompaniment. I will not remember these steps through the Vatican.

I have associated notes with other art, with corridors, with marble. Recalled to mind in innocuous moments, the memory continues unabated years after the shadows faded in the winding halls of the Musée du Louvre. When did the light turn to orange as a band of horses stomped? 

The guilt of the Catholic Church sinks into my discontent as I wonder about the morality of critiquing an experience while I am still shuffling through it. 

Even the security rushes you, presses you closer to a sacred chapel defamed by an irreverent populace. The idea of holy no longer shimmers through the air here, only the stale stench of hundreds together. 

In a corner of solitude, a surly tourist explains he has not taken a photo. The guard knows otherwise, and forces the man to follow to an unknown.  The solitude becomes  complete as I exchange the chatter for music. Next to me are fellow seekers of solitude. We smile to each other, but I am the only one who stays.  One by one, the others leave.  They smile at friends, at humans who look like them in tennis shoes and fanny packs.    

The foulard on a stick, held by my cattle herder is within sight now. I'm watching it pass. I know I must follow and be crowded once more against the ever angering sea of skin.

Later, I realize that the creation of the universe, God’s touch to man, was within my sight.  I didn’t notice it through the tousled head.  I did take note of the benches though.  I did wonder how the leaders of a billion people fit comfortably into this room.