How it came about was this: I got a job. A proper one. But it won't start until mid-August. At the same time, I'm pretty much done with the work I've been doing at my current job. I'd been planning to spend most of the summer searching for jobs, but now that isn't necessary, so I was left figuring out how best to employ my time. Of course there's plenty to do here in New York - but, I've done a good deal of it, or it's unavailable or tourist-clogged in the summer, or it's the kind of thing you can't really occupy all your time with, or I really have to leave something interesting for myself to do for the next however many years I live here. It was suggested to me that I travel - "take a real summer vacation" was how one friend put it - and of course I thought that was a fabulous idea. There aren't many things I prefer to travelling, and finding the time for a major trip is difficult when one has a job and/or life, so an interstitial period between jobs would offer the perfect opportunity.
But where would I go? I did the hosteling-in-Europe thing right after college, and while it was terrific, I wouldn't do it again - for one thing, I'm simply too old and crotchety to sleep in a top bunk in a room with two dozen other people and take cold showers in a public bathroom. I haven't been to the landmark cities of southern Europe - Rome, Athens, Cypress - so that was a possibility. There are many other places I'd like to go to as well - Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Alaska, India, Madagascar - but those places all have a few problems. First and most inarguably, I was planning the trip with less than a month's lead time, so I couldn't go anywhere that required a lot of vaccinations or super-serious research or that would be best experienced through a pre-arranged guided trip (which I'm not big on anyway). Second, while I'm not on a shoestring budget, I don't have unlimited resources, so in order to maximize my trip I wanted to go somewhere that could be experienced reasonably well on a modest budget - meaning, no round-the-world flights and nowhere that I'd have to search for imported-just-for-Americans food/water/tourist attractions. Third, I'd be travelling alone, so it had to be somewhere that would be safe for a solo female American without much grounding in the local language.
The more I thought about it (over a time period of about a day) the clearer it became that the chief feature of this trip would be time. I could take a solid month to travel, but I couldn't afford to fly to a new continent every week of that month, to stay at fancy hotels for 30 nights, or to spend half a year researching my destination. I also knew that in order to enjoy such a long trip by myself, I needed to be doing something that I really wanted to do, not something to check off a box on Important Travels or to follow someone else's suggestion of a great place to go. It seemed clear that what this trip would be good for, that would be hard to do at any time in the foreseeable future, was going to a foreign city to live, at least for a month. And as soon as I thought of that, I knew the place that I wanted to live for a month was Paris.
Yes, I'm a cliché. But my entire life, from my first French class at age six, I'd thought of Paris as a place of romance and sophistication, where adults and artists lived in a rarefied sphere of rapid speech and Brie cheese. I've been there once, actually, at the very end of my hosteling-through-Europe experience, and I was devastated not to be able to enjoy the city. I was exhausted, filthy, short of gear (most of my possessions were stolen in Germany), and flat broke. I'd split up with my travel companion three countries previously and couldn't get hostel reservations. I barely had money to eat, no map on which to find things, and whenever I got lost local men would come out of the woodwork to ask if I needed a boyfriend. I just wanted to go home.
So I'm trying Paris again. I'll be there for the entire month of July, and this time I won't have to worry about hostels because I've rented an apartment. Although I do plan to do many touristy things - with an emphasis on architecture and art - I also plan to do other things. I'll walk a lot; I have a book of 24 walks in Paris (okay, this is semi-touristy) and I plan to do one every day. I'll shop in markets and possibly, since I'll have a kitchen, I'll cook (okay, realistically, I'll store fruit and cheese overnight and possibly make coffee or toast or, if I'm feeling ambitious, an egg). I've found a couple yoga studios with English-language classes, an English-language bookstore that holds readings, and a woman who runs an old-fashioned salon. The plan is to also write the Great American Novel, or anyway an amateurish American novella, which is not as ridiculous as it sounds because I've done such things before. I'm very excited about the trip - but I do have to admit the whole thing is sort of hastily assembled and, well, random.
To add to the confusion, the least-ridiculously-expensive flight available on the short notice with which I've planned this trip was through Iceland Air. Never one to do things simply when a more complicated option was available, I decided this meant I should visit Iceland on my way to Paris - after all, if you're flying to Europe through Reykjavik, the airfare isn't affected by whether you stay in Iceland a couple nights. But then I realized that, given my arrival and departure dates in Paris were determined by my lease, the minimum airfare required me to spend four days in Iceland. This seemed a bit much considering I'd done no planning whatsoever for an Iceland trip, and most of the attractions seem to require either renting a car (a bit too much complication even for me) or joining some sort of guided tour, about which I knew nothing. Two days really seemed like enough time; after all, Iceland isn't cheap, and this was really supposed to be a small detour on the way to Paris. But staying in Iceland only two days meant I'd either have to pay $500 more for my airfare or arrive on the Continent two days early.
That was when I realized that Iceland Air does not make many of the silly rules that American airlines do about flights always having to be roundtrip. Namely, my flight from Iceland didn't have to be to Paris in order to have a reasonable fare. I could fly to any one of a dozen cities in Europe, spend two days there, and then take the train to Paris. From there, I narrowed the list down by eliminating cities I'd already been to and those that were an inconvenient distance from Paris and arrived at... Frankfurt. I knew (still know, really) nothing about this city except that (a) it is located in Germany, and (b) it has a major financial center. However, I trust I can entertain myself there for a day and a half.
So, that's my trip. Liftoff is June 26, and I'm more or less prepared, meaning I'm not prepared but I do have a passport and a suitcase and plans to buy a guidebook for Paris and possibly print out a map of Frankfurt. I plan to use this blog as my travel journal, so it will contain all sorts of very boring details of the food I eat and the walks I take, but there will probably also be some excitement, or at least tales of zany Parisians. Please leave any suggestions of things I should do / see / eat in Paris in the comments. Au revoir!
No comments:
Post a Comment