Saying Goodbye

Since many of you never knew me in the first eighteen years of my existence, I’m going to make one of the more blatant understatements I’ve made on this blog: I was a big youth group kid going up. My youth group, NFTY (pronounced “nifty”) dominated my high school experience—almost all of my extracurricular activities went to some facet of NFTY life, my closest friends were all in the youth group with me, and the nineteen NFTY regions quickly supplanted the 50 states as my way of dividing and categorizing this great nation. One of the things that NFTY did really well was saying goodbye, partly because it’s a Jewish organization and Jews like to linger in others’ company and partly because it’s a youth organization and teenagers use long, drawn-out goodbyes to reinforce the genuineness of their friendships in the all-too-fake world of high school. At least half an hour on the last day of every event was dedicated to the rather kitschy “friendship circle,” where we would all offer reflections on the event and talk about people we’d miss, and it took another half an hour for everyone to say goodbye to those who lived in different cities and meander onto the buses. As for me, I would make a plan of the people to whom I would say goodbye, ordering it so that my best friends came last and I could act like the only thing that parted us was the incessant prodding of my youth group advisor. In those exchanges, I would hug and (if I had found romance) kiss the other person, share some of our favorite memories from the event, talk about how much I’ll miss them, and then hug and/or kiss again. As I would get on the bus, I invariably felt content, enveloped in the love of my friends, if not a bit sad that the event had ended. I still remember some of those goodbye exchanges as some of the most tender, empowering moments of my high school experience.

For better or worse, my goodbyes have become a little more mundane since I started college. As I became more sure of myself, I grew to realize that the depth of a friendship can’t be measured by the length of a goodbye, and I think my friends have as well. Yet I think I’m still a bit haunted by the nonchalant goodbyes I gave to the people on my program, and to London itself. After classes ended, everyone started to trickle out of the city to catch flights back home, meet family, or do more traveling. Amidst packing and planning travels, and given that all but one person the program will be back in Chapel Hill next fall, saying goodbye became more of a rushed sideshow than anything else. Why waste the time to say goodbye to someone when I know I’ll see them again within a few months? Why say goodbye to a city that I was going to fly out of in a few weeks anyway?

Returning home from living in another community can always be disorienting, whether we return from university life, another continent, or even a youth group event. In making our journeys, we uproot ourselves from our home culture and shred others’ expectations of us, our comfort zones, our fears, and eventually our own expectations of ourselves. We forge new personalities when we venture to new places—the Jonathan of Jacksonville is different than the Jonathan of Chapel Hill, and those Jonathans are markedly different from the Jonathan of London, who is perhaps a bit different from the Jonathan of Aix-en-Provence or Amsterdam. Yet it’s not just that we develop different personalities in new situations, we allow those new personalities and expectations to interact with and to mold each other. In short, we change. My thoughts on music, labor movements, travel, packing for travel, risk-taking, my own privilege, and the tastiness of certain types of vegetables have changed pretty substantially from my thoughts on those topics five months ago. Yet when I return home, I’m confronted with a community that knows that I’ve changed, but for simplicity’s sake is forced to assume that they’re talking to the Jonathan that left for London five months ago. (I remember my mother’s shock when I didn’t pick all of the mushrooms out of a dinner dish.) For my first couple weeks in Jacksonville, I found myself in a funk because I couldn’t quite navigate the path between the London version of myself, the old Jacksonville version, the version shaped by my parents’ and friends’ perceptions of me, and whatever I wanted the new Jacksonville version to be. I couldn’t quite pin it down at the time, but I was having a mini-identity crisis—Jacksonville felt safe and fun, but

For all of its idiosyncrasies, my youth group understood that the NFTY versions of ourselves were different than the home versions of ourselves (to this day, I am called “Jonny” by my NFTY friends and “Jon” or “Jonathan” by everyone else). NFTY understood that we could only move back to our homes once we spent time saying goodbye to these “other” versions of ourselves and the people and places that made up those other versions. In my race to distance myself from my high school affects, I forgot about this nugget of wisdom. I made sure to cram all the travel and sightseeing I could into my time in Europe, but I never took the time to say goodbye to friends, places, and even myself. The community that gets together for our London reunion this fall will be different than the one that stayed in Bloomsbury a couple months ago, not because it will be comprised of different people but because the people who comprise it will have changed. I assumed that I’d see my friends from London again, but I realize now that I won’t see them in quite the same light. And I’ll never see myself in quite the same light, either. Am I sad about that? Not really. But I should have mustered a goodbye to my European way of thinking.

Hyde Park.

Tower Bridge at night.

The Ethereal Delights of Touchscreens and Twitter

It feels good to be back. Yesterday marked a month since I last posted a blog entry, and nine days since I returned back to Jacksonville. I guess my blog is a bit of a misnomer now, since I’m not “in London,” but I’ve decided to continue writing for the time being because 1) there’s still a bunch of my semester about which I haven’t talked, 2) I see my reflection on the semester as a vital part of the “abroad experience,” and 3) I like having this soapbox. So to start, let me give a brief overview of what’s happened since you last read about my exploits to Barcelona and my internship. Our program took a weekend trip to Cornwall (the southwest corner of England) on our second-to-last weekend of the program, and my remaining time in London was largely swallowed up by finals (especially the 3,500-word essay on the 1867 Reform Act that I miraculously wrote for history). Finals, as well as my internship, were wrapped up by Wednesday, but instead of spending the last few days sightseeing I hit the cold, hard reality of packing, cleaning out the flat, and preparing all of my travel documents. With everything in order, I left London on Saturday, April 20^th to begin a two-week trip around central Europe and Scotland. I have the trip outlined below:

·      April 20-23: Vienna, Austria with my parents for sightseeing

·      April 23-26: Prague with my parents for the same reason

·      April 26-29: Glasgow and Isle of Skye, Scotland with my friend Josh (from the program) to go hiking

·      April 29-May 1: Amsterdam (again) with five friends from my program to attend the Queen’s Day festivities

·      May 1-2: Back to London to stay with my friend Elston (the actual Londoner)

·      May 2: Fly from Heathrow to Atlanta, and then to Jacksonville, where my mom picked me up at the airport

Everything in this overview deserves some lengthy reflection, but since I know that you’ll start to zone out and look for paragraphs to skim if my posts go over about 750 words, I’ll talk about them in subsequent posts. For now, I want to talk about one of my most surprising moments from my trip home:

One of the first things I did when I arrived in London (I think it was my first errand) was to get a cell phone. Annoyingly, Verizon and Sprint cell phones don’t work in Europe (and in most of the world), but since cell ownership is approaching the level of basic necessity in the developed world most of us in the program invested in U.K.-based cell phones. As we were only there for three and a half months, we opted for cheap, pre-paid plans with no data and those ubiquitous £5 brick phones. As a result, I didn’t text much this past semester and I even stopped checking my phone every ten minutes because I knew no one would be texting me anyway. Despite this tragedy, the phone ended up being serviceable and even quite dependable as I traveled across Europe. Yet as my flight home approached, I became more and more excited to get back to my American smartphone with its somewhat finicky touchscreen and its 3G capabilities. I missed the ease of my QWERTY keyboard as opposed to the clunky T9 system, I missed being able to send a text without worrying about it costing 10 pence, and a bit conceitedly, I wanted to see what text messages I had missed in my long time abroad—I wanted to see that people had indeed missed me. (I ended up being greeted with precisely zero texts upon my arrival as my parents had suspended service while I was abroad—sad Jonathan.) Anyway, I had packed my phone under a bunch of clothes and such, so I made the trip back to Jacksonville still with my U.K. brick phone. When I got home, one of the first things I did was to unpack and find my phone buried under everything else.

After a few minutes of searching, I found it and hurriedly turned it on. Yet as I waited for the phone’s operating system to boot up, I was struck by an unexpected feeling—I felt a pang of revulsion. While I had been thinking only of the technological ease that my smartphone afforded me, my emotions seemed to be telling a different story. As I saw the phone turn on for the first time in months, I remembered not those times where I checked Twitter using my 3G capability, but the countless times I sat restless, waiting for texts that would never come. I remembered being devastated by petty conversations that never needed to be had, and above all, the constant, unrelenting urge to glance at the screen of my phone in all situations, even when I knew it would be rude and insensitive. I’m not one to rail against the dangers of new technology, but I do think it says something when the most enduring memory of our new connectedness is the disdain that we’re letting it run our lives. At any rate, I think this semester has shown me what I already knew, but perhaps never took to heart: I only need technology to lead a fulfilling life when technology brings me closer to other people. Everything else is just superfluous.

Pictures to come soon!

From the sublime to the routine (and maybe back again)

Check in.

People have asked me a bit about how my day-to-day life in London has been going, since I haven’t talked about that much since the first few weeks. Though I’ve had amazing trips and cool experiences in London, I still spend the most time with people in my program, my internship, and classes. So, here’s an update:

My classes are still going well—there’s really not too much to report. I find myself studying less for each class and mainly just writing essays every now and then. My art class has started to head to more galleries: Saatchi Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, which have contained works that are a bit more challenging to analyze, but I’ve appreciated the challenge. I’ve started to enjoy my history class more and more—my professor has a quirky sense of humor that takes a few weeks to appreciate, and as we cover more topics in class I find myself more able to make the connections essential to an adequate understanding of Victorian and turn-of-the-century British social movements. My British politics class is still, well, a class on British politics.

My internship is likewise going well. I’ve been doing a lot of writing over the past few weeks, and I recently had a piece that I wrote with my supervisor go into the Jewish Chronicle, which was really cool to see. I’ve had a few days off over the past couple weeks for Passover, which have been unexpectedly needed as I’d gotten behind on various things (like this blog) and used the time to catch up. I only have just over a week at my internship left, though, and I confess that I’ll be a bit sad to leave the working environment.

My program as a whole has continued to be stellar. My flatmates have been a dream to live with, although some bickering has started to emerge between the loose social groups that formed over the past couple months. However, if all that I have to complain about is a bit of bickering after three months of living with 24 other college students, I figure things must be going pretty well. I’ve started to distance myself a bit from the constant conversation of our flat common room over the past few weeks, partly so I can get work done and partly so I can get some alone time, but I think that’s just me being the introverted person that I am. I think I’ll miss getting to hang out with these people every day when we leave Europe, but I’m glad that I can continue friendships from the program back in Chapel Hill next year.

Check out.

I admit it: I didn't like Barcelona. Feel free to shun me now.

Check in.

I guess I never got to talk about my spring break trip, so I’ll do that now. I feel that I’m consistently amazed by how essential pre-trip planning has turned out to be. Amidst planning trips to Scotland and Provence, writing essays, and generally getting settled into the program, I found myself just going with the crowd for the first half of spring break. A lot of people on our program wanted to go to Barcelona, and after not really taking the time to research anything else, I booked a flight and a hostel for six nights. Since sixteen of us (out of the 25 people on our program) ended up in Barça at some point, I absolved myself of the responsibility of reading up at all about what there was to do in Barcelona. I only got from the airport to the hostel by the generosity of my friends and the driver of our transport van, who were willing to squeeze two more people than had signed up online into the van for the 90-minute ride. The hostel itself was comically party-oriented; instead of having a lounge area on the ground floor like most hostels, this one had a full bar that played dance club music from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. I found out quickly that Barcelona is like a glorified Miami—lots of beach, lots of partying, and days don’t start until noon and don’t end until the sun is just about to rise. For my part, I made the mistake of booking a 22-person room to save a few pounds, and was kept up from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. for two nights by my roommates. By Day 2, I was already worn out and didn’t see much end in sight, so I decided to cut my losses and book a getaway. I was able to find a 3-hour bus ride to Perpignan, France and a relatively cheap hostel there, so I left Barcelona after three nights (I had to stay to see the FC Barcelona game) on that Monday. My time in Perpignan was rather uneventful, but I was able to get into the Pyrenees, snap some pictures, and get some much-needed rest. On Wednesday, I caught the bus back to Barça, where I stayed at a cheaper, quieter hostel before heading flying off to Amsterdam the next morning.

I spent the last four days of my spring break in Amsterdam, staying with my friend who had stayed with me in London at the beginning of the semester. She was staying in a host home, so I was able to experience some true Dutch culture through my interactions with her host mother. I learned that the Dutch are much more environmentally conscious than even the greenest of us Americans: I was banned from doing the dishes after I had absentmindedly left the faucet running for a few seconds. I was also thrust into the Dutch biking culture, as my friend instructed me to rent a used bike for the time I was there. There was really nothing like riding around Amsterdam on a bike, freed from the confining subway or bus walls yet still enraptured in the beauty and newness of the city passing by me. I really enjoyed Amsterdam—I was able to get to a lot of museums there (including the Anne Frank Huis) and we even got a tour of a working windmill! I had a good guidebook for the city, so made a point of exploring different restaurants and bars mentioned, and we were able to find a lot of authentic local places that were also incredibly welcoming.

Looking back, I was happy with where I was able to go on the trip. Had I planned better, I perhaps would have tried to go to Ireland or Paris or Italy, but where I ended up wasn’t too bad. I didn’t really care for Barcelona or much of Spain, and I felt at a real disadvantage there not being able to speak Spanish, but at least I know that now. I still adored France and felt very sad to leave the country—I hope I can make it back there someday. The Netherlands was challenging in its eternal commitment to social responsibility, since it contained an implicit condemnation of my lifestyle that I know to be completely valid. I am too consumerist, too wasteful, more willing to buy from companies who offer eccentric bells and whistles than from companies who commit to environmental sustainability and fair trade practices. There’s always time to change, though.

Check out.

Hôtel de Ville, Perpignan

Centre ville, Perpignan

The port in Barcelona.

Villefranche-de-Conflent, France

View of the Pyrenees from above Villefranche.

View from the Casa in Perpignan.

Working windmill in Amsterdam.

What Will Be Your Waterloo?

When I was a camp counselor and RA, I would always gather my campers each night for the sacred ritual of “check-in, check-out.” The name comes from two phrases you say: you begin your turn by saying, “check in” and end it by saying, “check out.” Looking back on it, “check-in, check-out” was probably my favorite part of working at camp—it was the only time of the day where I could just exist in the same space as my campers and find out what was going on in their minds. Since I haven’t written on anything I’ve actually been doing recently, I figured I would try a “check-in, check-out” style for my next couple blog posts:

Check in.

With the prospect of cheap travel to so many interesting, diverse places, I’ve often found it easy to forget that I’m actually living in one of the most exciting cities in the world. I described a phenomenon a few weeks in where I started to get settled; I gradually stepped out of the tourist mindset of trying to do everything cool or different-looking all the time and into the resident mindset of balancing work, daily tasks, friends, and rest as well as possible. I welcomed this change at the time, but I began to realize there’s a danger in living in the resident mindset as well: I became all too content to sit on my couch at night and talk with friends or surf the Web instead of getting out and having new experiences. I’ve worked harder over the past few weeks to find cool things to do right here in London, and here are some of the highlights:

This Saturday, I tried to embrace my inner tourist by hanging around Parliament Square for most of the day. Our program had a tour of Westminster Abbey set up in the morning, so we bypassed the throngs of people and walked around the Abbey for a couple hours. It was wild to be in a building that was over seven hundred years old, unfathomable perhaps. Unfortunately, our guide assumed that we were also obsessed with the Royal Family, so we had to suffer through hearing all about the Royal Wedding and how Kate and Pippa (I think that’s her sister’s name, who knew she had a sister?) wore lovely dresses and how William was a real gentleman because he said something funny to his father in-law. I’ve grown to understand and even appreciate a lot of British traditions in my time here, but the monarchy seems as foreign and antiquated to me as when I first arrived. At least in America I can tour Washington without having to sit through the details of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s wedding.

Anyway, I met up with a friend from UNC who’s on another program here and headed down to the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum, where we were able to spend a few hours. I found the museum in particular to be incredibly interesting, a portrait of a man who was credited with saving Western civilization but who seemed out of place during peacetime. As it turns out, I came away thinking Churchill to be a bit of an unprincipled curmudgeon, one of the last exemplars of the doddering British upper class that controlled the country (and in effect, the world) for centuries before. I think I would’ve hated Churchill had I been around in his time. He seemed to want to be in Parliament for little more than to exert his own influence—he even changed parties from Conservative to Liberal and back again, if we had any doubts to his lack of clear ideology. His political stances were underlined by a belief that whites were superior to Indians and that even as Gandhi was rallying support for Indian independence, Indian people needed to be controlled by white people for their own good. He stood up to Hitler, but in peacetime, his record was less impressive.

After the War Rooms, I crossed the Thames to go to the National Theatre. At the suggestion of our program staffer, I had bought the last available ticket to Saturday night’s showing of This House, a play about Tory and Labour Party whips in the melodrama that was 1970s. My seat was above and behind the stage—since the play was set in Parliament, I “became” one of the opposition backbenchers. I even became friendly with one of my fellow backbenchers, a retired civil servant who had come in from Leeds to see the play. The play itself unfolded like a West Wing drama with a less happy ending—the main characters were of the Josh Lyman mold: insulated politicos more concerned with the business of politics than ideals of it. Yet for a political junkie like me, it read like an idealistic tragedy of the highest order: idiosyncratic, yet caring individuals trying to make deals to me people’s lives better who were undone by their ultimate realization that life is bigger than politics. It was a sad play, but it had more than its fair share of funny moments and it was extremely good. I’ve struggled a lot with British politics throughout my time here—it can be antiquated and self-defeating and, like Churchill, slimy at times, but this gave me a real connection to the motivations and ideals of someone in the Labour Party. For good measure, I listened to “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” again that night.

On the Westminster Abbey tour, the aforementioned program staffer told us about the Choral Evensong services that many of the Anglican churches put on here, so I decided to go to one at Westminster on Monday. I thought I’d feel a bit awkward being since I couldn’t partake in all of the prayers to Christ, but I felt incredibly welcome. It was actually much less of an ordeal than the tour on Saturday was; I mentioned that I was there for Evensong and the guards let me right in. It felt right to be in the cathedral for prayer instead of touring—the place was empty save for the couple hundred chairs they had set up for visitors. I took my seat in one of the last rows and looked up; a thousand years of history returned my gaze, assuring me both of my insignificance compared to higher powers and my safety in a room full of people driven by their faith to pray for a better world. Amidst the go-go-go environment of living in a city, it was nice to take a step back for an hour and reflect. I hope I can go again soon.

I can’t believe my London experience is coming to a close. I have less than three weeks left in the program from this point. There’s so much that I’ve been able to do, yet so much still left to do (including more essays than I’d like). Yet I’ve been able to learn so much here. I was sitting in Evensong service on Monday, taking in the late afternoon light streaming through the stained-glass windows and the airy harmonies of the choir, when I noticed that I was a bit chilly. Instead of lamenting my situation or putting on my gloves, I decided to embrace the by-now familiar feeling. It made me feel alive, vibrant, like when I take a deep breath and see it hang in the air for a moment before dissipating, or when I see the blue of the sky poke through the clouds after a long absence. Sometimes, at least every once in a while, London can captivate you.

Check out.

Ubiquitous Big Ben photo.

View of the Palace of Westminster from the Abbey.

The Thames at Sunset.

St. Paul's Cathedral at night, from one of my night runs.

Reflecting on my Blue Devil days (my high school's mascot, that is)

I remember crying a lot during my senior year of high school. That was a new thing for me, since I navigated tough times through most of my high school career with dry eyes. It was initially a point of pride for me, that I could weather anything and still keep my head about me, but I eventually became worried that I was becoming desensitized to even the most tragic events. Nevertheless, the floodgates opened up shortly before the start of the school year when I saw Up with my mom (that montage is as big of a tearjerker as I’ve come across), and reopened during a handful of times throughout the year: saying goodbye to some of my youth group mentors and friends at our leadership meeting and not knowing if I’d see them again, leaving my last youth group convention, watching Toy Story 3 with my mom (there’s something about cartoon movies that always get to me). Those were perhaps melodramatic, but good cries—while I would feel bad in the moment, I felt good that there were things by which I was so touched that to lose them or to witness them brought an impossibly heavy lump to my throat and left me a teary-eyed, runny-nosed mess.

Yet when I think of myself crying that year, my memory always turns back to one night in March. I had applied to a scholarship program that winter that I’d really been gunning for—I’d gotten cleared for an interview by my high school, spent all of Winter Break writing and rewriting what I thought were two of the best essays I’d ever written, and asked my favorite professors to write recommendations for me. I had it in my mind that I’d be perfect for this program, and so despite the impossibly low odds of acceptance I submitted my application to it with an air of confidence and optimism. That night in March, I found out that I didn’t make even the first cut. I remember going straight from reading the E-mail into my mother’s arms, letting out sob after sob in an unrestrained display of shock and disappointment. I was devastated—I felt as if not only my work on the application was wasted, but also my entire high school experience was devalued. I’m sure it wasn’t the worst state I’ve been in, but for a fatalistic, self-doubting teenager, I was in as bad a state emotionally as I can remember.

I’ve struggled with this moment a lot; as a rather even-keeled person, a moment of pure defeat such as that isn’t easily overcome. Eventually I put it out of my mind—I got wrapped up in the wide world of college and grew far too busy to worry about my hopes and insecurities from high school. Yet my experience in Europe over the past few months has given me the time and the perspective to think a bit more critically about my experiences in high school and in college. I’d long ago reached acceptance of my unsuccessful applications, but it wasn’t until the past few weeks that I think I’ve really been able to come to an understanding about them.

When I take away these convenient titles I’ve accumulated at college over the past few years—co-director of this, chair of that, and just look at the world as a college student trying to learn more about himself, when I take away the comfortable milieu of my college town and stretch my comfort zones, I find that I’m not as adept or as exceptional as I often imagine. I’m very prone to making mistakes and sometimes not learning from them, I’m often unwilling to take necessary risks, I struggle with taking initiative from time to time, and I have yet to really make sacrifices for things in which I believe. I’m far from perfect, and I didn’t deserve any rewards from my high school career—I was smart, I did well in school, and I tried to do the right thing, but that was about it. There’s a lot I still have to learn, and I’m okay with that. I’m just lucky to have the opportunity to travel the world and find out these things about myself. See, amidst all of these reality checks and new understandings, I think I can improve myself along the way and leave Europe a happier, more capable Jonathan than the Jonathan who blogged about Crosby and Nash a couple months ago. That, by the way, really does excite me.

En faisant des pique-niques, on doit apporter des fraises.

The weekend before last, I spent the weekend in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille with my good friend, Isaac. Here are some excerpts from my journal on the plane ride back to London (I pick up on Saturday morning, our first day in Aix):

Saturday morning, we woke up around 9:30 and went to petit déjeuner at the hostel. It was a really good breakfast: cereal and baguette slices and European yogurt. The latter was really good—sweeter than I was used to in the States. We left the hostel around 10:00, and went into town. We stopped at an Aldi-Marché (a type of supermarket) on the way into town to pick up some water and snacks. I tried out this new type of cookie, “Choco Duo” for 1€ there. It was SO good, even better than the (dare I say it) jaffa cakes that I’ve come to love in London. We picked up another box that night.

Anyway, we went first to the Centre Ville and walked around. It was everything I could have wanted from a Provençal town. Everyone was walking around, but there were hardly any tourists. We must’ve walked through three different markets, each with the best-smelling bread, cheese, and fruit I can remember. Though we had walked down le Cours Mirabeau the night before, once we turned onto one of the side streets to head into Vieil Aix, the milieu got infinitely more French. There were narrow streets with tan buildings that must have been 350 years old surrounding us, and cobblestones under our feet. It was like something from a wonderful dream. After an hour or so of walking, we stopped at one of the markets and bought two baguettes, bananas, apples, a delicious olive dip, and a box of fresh strawberries. We packed our bags with our new-found food, and hiked 4km up to the “Terrain des Peintures.” It’s this beautiful garden outside of Aix that offers the highest viewpoint of the foreboding Mont Saint-Victoire in the Aix area. The mountain was hazy, but picturesque—Isaac kept ironically saying that it looked painted. Cezanne actually used this garden to paint the mountain dozens of times, which has since become iconic.

We parked on one of the green spaces and had a wonderful picnic lunch. We talked about everything; well mainly we talked about relationships [about which I probably shouldn’t write on a public forum]. After we’d talked ourselves out, we decided to just lie in the grass. Isaac passed out, and after a while I went up to look at other parts of the garden. I struck up a conversation with a French woman there, whom I quickly learned was meeting other members of a sort of homeowners associations trying to block an American company from building an ugly complex next to the garden. The conversation started in French, switched to English, and ended up in a sort-of Franglish. Mr. Mruz [my high school French teacher] would’ve been proud, though. Once Isaac woke up, we went down the hill to Cezanne’s studio, which had another lovely garden outside of it.

Finally, we came back into town and, after getting a bit lost, got our things from the hostel and took a bus to Marseille. We got into Marseille around 9 p.m. and walked to the hostel. We stopped in the Aldi-Marché before we left for Aix and picked up some eggs, chicken, and tomatoes, so we made them into one massive scramble (10 eggs all at once) at the hostel kitchen. We befriended a couple North Americans in the hostel kitchen, both of whom were spending the year teaching French in schools. One was from Toronto and one was from Michigan. They were both really great guys—I’d forgotten how nice it was to talk to Americans not just worried about partying and drinking. We took a walk with them around the Vieux Port, a beautiful rectangular harbor in the middle of Marseille. We got back rather late, so we went to sleep right away. The hostel was actually right next to a dance club, so we could hear the music in our room, but we were so tired that we zonked out anyway.

Today, we got up around 9 a.m. and went to petit déjeuner (no yogurt, though). We then went with our North American friends, walking around different parts of Marseille. We left our Canadian friend to explore by himself, and us three Americans hiked up to a church on the highest point of Marseille. From there, we could see the Mediterranean and all parts of the city. It was very Roman and very Mediterranean—lots of white houses with red roofs. We ate our lunch there and ventured up into the actual church, which was colorfully decorated like a Spanish mosque or Sephardic synagogue. After, we walked around a bit more and took in the sights of the city at a secluded spot on the Vieux Port.

It was getting to be late afternoon, so we picked up my stuff from the hostel and went up to the train/bus station. We stopped along the way in the Arab quarter to pick up some kebabs, and had an amazing experience in the store. The owner forced us all to order in French, but as he talked to us he revealed impeccable English skills. When found out that I studied philosophy, he went on a discourse about how to be happy in life (a job, a good wife, and a bit of vacation). He left us with a quote from William Blake (“he was an ass, by the way”) and some amazing kebab sandwiches.

So, we took our kebabs and walked up to the train station, which overlooks the rest of Marseille. As we sat there, finishing our kebabs and cheap rose wine that we’d bought earlier, watching the sun start to descend more and more rapidly towards the horizon, I realized that I am going to miss Provence. I may never see it again, but it had a certain feel to it. You seemed to know instinctively, among all the hazy mountains and old churches, that you were going to be okay here, that you were surrounded by warmth. I haven’t felt that in many places before. Anyway, I caught my bus and got to l’aéroport in plenty of time. There, I concluded my trip by striking up a great conversation with a Franco-British woman who was visiting Marseille for her brother’s wedding. As we land, I can say that I’ve had a great trip.

I think the trip taught me a number of things. I realized that my French wasn’t nearly that bad, and it got a hell of a lot better as I spent more time in Provence. I don’t have much desire to continue learning French, but I do have hope that I’ll be able to master Hebrew someday. Second, if my trip to Edinburgh was an exercise in what not to do on a trip, this was a perfect picture of how to make a trip great. I went by myself and spent much of the weekend in small groups, so we could easily blend into the rest of the environment. I went to two places that weren’t terribly touristy, so the tourists that were there knew how to travel without sticking out like a sore thumb. I traveled during the day so I could get sleep at night. I went to different cities, but everything was quick and accessible so I didn’t have to worry about transportation. And, I got out of my shell and met some locals, some of whom were able to challenge my worldview. That’s what traveling is about, right?

View from the Terrain des Peintures.

At the church in Marseille, complete with French flag.

View from the train station in Marseille. 

Isaac "resting his eyes."

The back of my Scottish £5 note looks like a map of Middle Earth. No joke

Last weekend, I forged a new experience: my first real trip while abroad. On Friday night, eight friends and I packed our bags and took the night bus to a new nation! Well, sort of. We went to the capital of the centuries-old, quasi-self-governing nation of Scotland: Edinburgh (pronunciation rhymes with Greensboro). Ah Edinburgh. Home to centuries-old, jaw-dropping architecture, volcanic mountains that rise austerely from the city like calvary soldiers amongst armies of infantry, manly-sounding accents, and yes, throngs of well-off Americans treating the city like a Disney World with alcohol (and plenty of companies willing to make money off of them). I had a good weekend there, but not a great one. I was glad I went, but also realized that I made a few mistakes along the way that hampered my enjoyment of the weekend and cost me a fair amount of money. Did things go horribly wrong? Simply put, no. But they did go just wrong enough to leave me wondering after the trip about what might have been.

 Perhaps this story starts last Monday night, at around 8 p.m. or so when I got out my computer to work on my British politics essay that was due this Monday. Long story short, I didn’t, choosing instead to look up flight prices to random European destinations for a couple hours. I did similar things the next three nights so that by the time I left on Friday, I’d done the research I needed to, but none of the writing. Now, I’d always planned to take the train ride back to London to finish writing my essay (I have an uncanny work ethic on buses, trains, and planes—I once wrote a 10-page essay almost exclusively in airports), but I’d hoped to be at least a bit further along than I was. So throughout the weekend, I kept trying to make time to work on the essay because I had the sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t going to be able to finish it on the ride back (my suspicion was right). I’ve never been one to freak out about schoolwork, but this failed procrastination on my part did put me a little on edge.

If I was on edge at first, the night bus surely didn’t help. As I referenced in my earlier blog, I knew what I was getting myself into. I’ve been on enough Megabus rides to know that they’re not comfortable for extended periods, and enough night trains to know that they’re not conducive to restful sleep. I wasn’t exactly coming onto the bus well rested, either; I had yet to fully recover from watching the Duke game until 4 a.m. that week. So when I got off the bus after a hard-fought four hours of sleep, I wasn’t feeling my best self. I was functional and able to appreciate the beauty of the city as we walked around that day, but looking back on it, I wasn’t really in the best state to engage in a full day of walking and sightseeing. This had a number of small effects. I was slightly more irritable, less willing to go on the half-planned adventures that so often form the highlights of our travel experiences, and more likely to go along with the rest of the group. Consequently, when the group wanted to go on a “free” walking tour of the city that the hostel recommended, I readily consented.

The waling tour ended up being really interesting, even if it wasn’t exactly free, but perhaps it ended up being our tragic flaw. Our tour guide recommended a pub crawl that night, which was advertised as a trip through six of Edinburgh’s best pubs, with six free drinks for only £12. I was a bit skeptical, as I had bookmarked a few pubs that my Scotland guidebook recommended. Yet I didn’t think to speak up or talk about possible alternatives to the pub crawl. So as members of our group started buying their tickets, I was more or less forced to buy mine. The pub crawl, as you might have guessed, wasn’t much of one. Maybe one of the places we went to could qualify as a pub, the drinks weren’t really free, and the only non-Americans we met were the people leading us around and some creepy Scottish guys looking to get lucky with adventurous American girls. By 10:30, it was clear that we’d spent £12 for two mediocre drinks and a night effectively shielded from anything that could be considered authentic Edinburgh. Sensing a long night ahead of us, I started lobbying friends to cut our losses and head back to the hostel, and after an hour most of us did just that.

To my great satisfaction, we ended up wandering around the hostel and finding a lounge room with a record player, and spent the rest of the night singing along to Simon & Garfunkel tunes. I got a good night’s sleep and woke up on Sunday ready for the day. Most of the group went to explore Edinburgh Castle, but about five of us decided to hike up Arthur’s Seat, a mountain that overlooks Edinburgh (pictures coming soon). It was loads of fun, and a nice break from trying to keep up with a dozen people in a new city. We took the train back that afternoon and I made some great headway on my paper ended up switching prompts for my paper about halfway through, only finishing minutes before the paper was due on Monday. I felt good about the paper I did turn in, though.

So what did I learn from the weekend? First, I have to get my work done. Second, while the night bus is certainly cheaper, it’s not always the best option. Third, I shouldn’t be afraid to break off from the group and do my own thing. Fourth, it’s better to trust the guidebook, which is in the business of enabling me to have good travel experiences, than the free tour guide, who is in the business of getting unwitting college students to give him money. Finally, I’m not always going to have the best weekends travelling, but as long as I learn from my experiences, I’ll be okay.

Musings from the Night Bus

I’m not exactly sure where I’m writing this blog post from right now. It’s just after 3 a.m. and I’m on a night bus going from London to Edinburgh, Scotland. The bus left about four hours ago, so that should put us squarely in the middle of nowhere by now. There’s actually a nice view from the highway, which appears to be on some sort of hill, down into some sleepy towns with their orange bulbs of light off in the distance. Anyway, I was able to get about half an hour of sleep about an hour ago, and I’m hoping that after I’m finished writing I can nod off until the morning. I often take the night train to and from Chapel Hill, and I’ve learned that as long as you don’t expect to get more than four hours of sleep the ride really isn’t that bad. The same principle seems in play on this bus.

Tonight will actually mark the third time in third time in four nights that I’ll be up past 4 a.m.; I’ve fallen victim to the beck and call of my American interests. I took advantage of not having class until mid-afternoon on Wednesday to stay up and watch the State of the Union on Tuesday night. I’d planned to watch an online recording at a later date, but a couple friends convinced me that it would be fun to watch and keep up with the Twitterverse in real time. A couple thoughts on the speech: Agenda-wise, I was really excited about the universal preschool proposal, as well as the threat of executive action on climate change. I think we often underestimate how important early childhood education really is, and it’s a great place for government to step in and provide opportunities for all its citizens.

 Wednesday night, of course, was the Duke game. Four out of the five of us in the flat stayed up for the game, which started at 2 a.m. our time. Though we lost, I had a lot of fun watching with my flatmates. We had this moment of Zen where, after twenty minutes of cricket and rugby commercials, we realized we were streaming an American basketball game on an Australian ESPN station while we were in England. As far as the game went, it was nice to see the Heels play well together, and I quite liked the small lineup. Hopefully we can use this game to start to turn the season around. I’m skeptical, but it could certainly happen.

Now, to a couple weeks ago! Two Saturdays ago, we went on a day hike to Box Hill in Surrey. It was an hour train ride south of London, and as you’ll see from the photos, it was absolutely stunning. We got there late morning, and as soon as we got to the trailhead we began this quick ascent to a hill overlooking one of the most picturesque English towns I’ve seen. The views only got better from that, and we ended up hiking until about 6 p.m. on an 8-mile loop. The hike was relatively strenuous—a lot of steep descents and quick ascents, but I luckily wore my boots and did fine. The views were well worth all of that walking—in one day we got to see quaint villages from hilltops, walk through a medieval village, overlook a picturesque vista at sunset, and go rolling down a hill. There were hardly any tourists, just ourselves, some of the locals, and nature. It was a great change of pace to get out and go hiking, especially on terrain like that. I think one of my biggest regrets of college is how little I’ve hiked and gotten out into nature. I love the Piedmont area, and we’re only a couple hours away from the Appalachians, but somehow I’ve only explored trails on very rare occasions. It’s amazing how busy we can make ourselves in college.

A week from Wednesday, I was able to go to the England-Brazil friendly soccer match at Wembley stadium with six people from my program. I found out about the match and purchased tickets in November, so I’d been looking forward to it for a while. It was a great time—Wembley is a dream of stadium, and I was able to see some of the best players in the world face each other. Even though we had nosebleed seats, the view of the pitch was great, and the match was an exciting 2-1 victory for England. I was lucky to sit next to a friend who knows a lot more about European soccer than I do, so he was able to help me recognize the players. Even though we sung “My Country ‘Tis of  Thee” for about half of “God Save the Queen,” and my soccer discourse has substantial room for improvement, I felt like just another Londoner that night, supporting his national team play a match of soccer. Perhaps I’ll start calling it “football” one of these days.

National Anthems of England and Brazil

I told my friend I needed a picture for Mom...

All of us at Wembley!

Beautiful Box Hill. Photo courtesy of Emily Palmer, if she's reading ( :

Mickelham Village near Box Hill. Photo also from Emily Palmer.

Sunset from the hike.

Wembley again, with my new fake glasses from Primark!