Let’s just say that I went somewhere that I desperately wanted to talk about but didn’t want to call by name. Let’s just say that I did not feel like discussing the reasons for this publicly. Let’s just say that I chose to call that place Elsewhere and asked you to call it that, too. Let’s just say, OK? Okay. Adelante!
Category Archives: travel
all shot up and ready to go
It’s looking increasingly definite that my contract, and thus my health insurance, will end on December 31. So before going on vacation I made about eight doctor’s appointments, all for the last three weeks of the year, to get my medical ducks in a row before losing my benefits / leaving for Senegal.
February 15, 2016 is just shy of two years from the day I promised myself to do a French language sabbatical in Senegal within two years, so I’ve set that as my target departure date. But there’s nothing forcing me to go then – I don’t have my plane ticket yet, I still haven’t signed up for the immersion program, there’s no job waiting for me there afterwards. At times, I harbor doubts about my ability to step out into a much more nebulous unknown than ever before. I wonder if I’ll actually go through the motions of booking the ticket, scheduling the classes, pitching myself to the people who could give me work in West Africa.
But I realized this afternoon as my needle-phobic self walked back to work from the latest doctor: there’s nothing like paying $340 and rolling five band-aids deep after three travel-related vaccinations and two blood draws in 24 hours, to redouble your commitment to the thing that necessitated all that anxiety and expense.
As I rubbed my sore arms and staunched the irrational fear that my throat would close up from an allergic reaction to the typhoid, meningitis or polio inoculations, I also smiled gleefully with the knowledge that I’d be damned if I let the never-ending-needles ordeal go to waste. Today was one more baby push out the door to go abroad.
And on that happy note, have a lovely weekend!
[Photo: Chhor Sokunthea / World Bank]
(get over the) hump day inspiration: Terry Pratchett edition
I don’t actually need any hump day inspiration considering that I got back from vacation last night and did literally nothing at work today but hang out and hyperventilate/chatter about said vacation while extremely high on espresso and life.
I’ll share photos once I sift through all 1,500+ of them and find the gemmiest of the many, many gems… Because where I went, it was eye orgasms every which way you looked.
Hasta pronto, mis amigos! No puedo esperar para mostrar mis fotos del más magnífico vacaciones en la historia de vacaciones! (I’m still high on that coffee, fourteen hours later.)
adios, amigos!
It’s 1:57 a.m. and I have to leave for the airport at 5:05. Part of the reason I’m still awake is that tomorrow today is the last day of my Spanish class, during which there will be a final exam. Because I won’t be there, my teacher provided me with instructions for taking the exam online on some special site. So in addition to my usual last-minute million things to do, tonight before packing I took a 1 1/2 hour Spanish test.
Which I failed miserably. Not because I did badly per se, but because something went horribly wrong when the timer ran out on Part One while I was still typing, which somehow triggered the entire exam to submit itself without giving me a chance to move on to the more heavily weighted second essay. And apparently once the exam is submitted, there’s no way to reverse course and continue working on it.
The submission confirmation page showed me what the second essay question was, so I typed something up in Word and emailed it to my teacher, along with a little note beseeching her to show me mercy.* Since I’ll barely have Internet access during my trip, I won’t actually know whether she did or not til I return from what will be the true test of my Spanish skills.
…In approximately twelve hours I’ll be in Mexico City, trying desperately to be understood. And wishing desperately for a nap.
Back in a couple of weeks. Hasta luego!
*I care about my grade not because of pride or perfectionism but because if I don’t pass the test, I don’t pass Level 3 Spanish, and I can’t move on to Level 4 if I ever come back to work here after my current contract ends.
what not to do when planning an international trip
1. Buy your airline ticket.
2. Vaguely look into visas and decide you don’t need any for the countries you’re visiting.
3. Wait a month.
4. Two days before your trip, think to yourself, did I adequately check whether I need a visa for that one country?
5. Do a quick Google search.
6. Convince yourself a visa may be necessary even though the vast majority of the information online claims that you can get it in the airport… But there are those one or two sites that differ.
7. Panic.
8. Call the airline and attempt to ask in Spanish (yes, it had to be in Spanish) whether it is in fact possible to get the visa in the airport.
9. Further panic when the customer service guy wants to look up your ticket first, but can’t find it. (Yes, panic, even though when you click on a link in your ticket confirmation email, it takes you to a second confirmation page directly on the airline’s site. And even though the reasonable explanation for the confusion is that you can neither correctly spell your name in Spanish letters nor intelligibly articulate dates or times in Spanish numbers.)
10. Miraculously understand when the guy tells you he’s going to attempt to find someone who speaks English because the conversation will be too complicated otherwise.
11. Wait on hold for fifteen minutes, worried.
12. Call back when phone gets disconnected. Wait on hold another twenty five minutes.
13. Finally get on the line with someone who speaks English, and within the space of two minutes, confirm that your ticket is just fine and that you can get the visa in the airport before your flight, no problem.
14. Hang up the phone, and close ten Chrome tabs on which the same information was written, but which you chose to ignore because you court anxiety like it’s Vitamin C and you’ve got scurvy.
I’m just loco like that
The chapter we’re studying in my Spanish textbook is called “Ida y Vuelta,” and it’s travel-themed. Yesterday, we split into two groups for an in-class activity in which each group had to come up with a travel adventure plan to present to the other group. Details were to include where we’d go, what we’d do, how long we’d prepare for the trip, and how we’d finance it.
I sheepishly reported to my group that I have a real-life travel adventure plan I am hoping to put into action soon. When I told them what it was, it sounded so much like fantasy that I started passing it off as such to hide my embarrassment. “Primero, voy a ir al Senegal para practicar mi francés, y luego voy a ir al Argentina para seguir aprendiendo mi español, y voy a ir de un país al otro país por, erm… no sé… viajar alrededor los otros países del mundo, quizas?” Which, if I spoke proper Spanish, would translate to, “First I’m going to go to Senegal to practice my French and then I’m going to go to Argentina to continue learning Spanish, and I’m going to get from one country to the other by traveling around the world, maybe?”
We ended up fusing that plan with everyone else’s much more modest travel fantasies (tomar el sol en Florida, conducir por México, viajar a Praga para ver los museos) and decided we would finance our now wildly-untenable trip by working really hard in a restaurant for two months beforehand and selling our travel photos to National Geographic during our trip – which actually sounds much more plausible than the idea of me circumnavigating Africa in-between language immersion stints.
At one point while trying to explain the plan, my classmate asked the teacher, “Cómo se dice, ‘crazy'”?
I piped right up, “Loco!” Because if you harbor a dream as far-fetched as mine, you’re going to know that word in many languages.
[Photo: Fumigraphik]
setbacks
Setback one: After spending day after day checking airfare alerts for the best deals (and there were many: $525 to Seoul, $400 to Hong Kong, $330 to Paris, $275 to Martinique), I ended up buying two decidedly non-deal tickets to the two places I wanted to go to most: Mexico City and, erm, somewhere else nearby.
I leave next Thursday. Last Wednesday, I ran too far in my newish running shoes that just don’t fit very well, and I’ve been increasingly hobbled by my big toe since then. While the day after the run it merely ached, today it is so bad that I’m limping around wondering if I might have somehow broken my toe simply by running on it.
I had planned to spend the entirety of my vacation wandering aimlessly around the streets of the cities I’m visiting, as is my wont, but now I’ll be lucky if I can even step into and out of the taxis and buses I will be relying upon to haul me around. Panicked! Calling a doctor tomorrow…
Setback two: It’s time to register for my next semester of Spanish at work. In order to do that, I need to submit an updated letter from HR saying that I’m expected to be contracted through the end of the course. Problem is, in the pursuit of this letter I found out that my contract will almost certainly not be extended past December 31.
I’ve been at this job long enough to know that anything is possible, including that my contract will be miraculously renewed month by month until April 19, at which point I’ll have filled the post for the full year that it is allowed to be held by a temp. Even if that happens though, what’s fairly certain is that I won’t be able to take a free Spanish class next semester.
Nadie va a escribime la carta, y sin lo [la?? ella??], no puedo tomar el clase. I wrote that without the help of Google Translate! This class has taught me so much, it’s the highlight of my Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and I’m so, so sad that I won’t be able to continue with it in the new year.
what can I say? not much.
I feel weird writing anything new on a blog about all things foreign without acknowledging first that what has transpired abroad over the past three weeks – in the air over Egypt, in Beirut, in Yola, in Paris, in Bamako, and in many smaller terrorist attacks that didn’t make the front pages – is a tragedy on the order of which no words, or at least not mine, can do justice. (Which is why I didn’t try to write any at the time.) The subsequent backlash against refugees – people who are themselves fleeing terror in their homelands – as well as against Muslims in general, is another sickening attack on our shared humanity.
Many years ago, a colleague told me that on the advice of some spiritual counselor or other she had chosen a three-word mantra to repeat every day. (Of course this was in Los Angeles.) I liked the idea and thought long and hard about what mine should be, before settling upon “courage – tolerance – compassion.” For awhile I would whisper the words to myself once or twice a day, and it did have a very grounding effect, though the habit didn’t last long. Seems like a good time to revive it. I believe in the primacy of those three words now more than ever.
passport, please
Though I was born and raised in the United States, I’m a dual American/Israeli citizen. I stopped by the Israeli consulate this morning to renew my passport for the fourth time in less than ten years. That’s because the last two times, they inexplicably extended my current passport for a year instead of actually renewing it. This consisted of pasting an extremely forged-looking document onto the second to last page, so that at first glance it still looked to foreign border agents as though my passport was expired, and I had to point the extension out to them while praying they wouldn’t accuse me of fraud and/or send me back to where I came from.
So this time I made sure to ask whether I could get a brand new ten-year passport as per the terms I had read online. I was told that while I was finally eligible for a new passbook, it would only be valid for three years. This seemed completely arbitrary to me, but I learned it’s because the last time I visited Israel was seven years ago, and my passport cannot extend ten years beyond that date.
Now, I don’t know whether this is customary practice in other countries. It may well be de rigueur around the world. But it struck me as a quintessentially Jewish thing to do: punishing me for not doting enough on my mother (country).
It is almost as if Israel is telling me, “You don’t call, you don’t write.* Oh, but you want something from me? First come for a visit, then we’ll talk.”
The day I return to Israel I become eligible for a ten-year passport. Until then, I’m in the doghouse. As annoying as this is in a practical sense, I can’t help but enjoy the appropriateness of this policy for a people who have perfected the guilt trip.
[Photo: Baigal Byamba]
home is where the Hungarian is
Tonight, in a mood, I abandoned my more ambitious plans for an idea that sprung to mind last minute, as I was walking to the subway from work. Instead of heading downtown, I took the train to my old college neighborhood, where I drifted down a familiar path to my once-favorite cafe to do my Spanish homework.
Hungarian Pastry Shop would have delighted me even if I were walking into it for the first time. It’s a miraculous vestige of a bygone era, when individual shops had individual styles, when cafés were authentically warm and cozy instead of corporate. It’s bohemian without being crunchy, perfect for both studying and socializing, a community hub that is somehow also off the beaten path.
The objective amazingness of it was enough to warm my heart, but not enough to account for the visceral sense of goodwill, sentimentality and promise that washed over me when I sat down and took it all in. The fact that this place continued to be here day after day, unchanged, while I went away and came back years later, much changed – and having accomplished much of what I daydreamed about doing then, in this place – that was the fairly overwhelming thing.*
I started this blog for my love of the foreign, but at moments like these I’m well aware that there’s no place like home. (Especially when home is New York City.)
PS I wrote this instead of doing my Spanish homework.
PPS I’m now turning to eavesdropping on two underclassmen on a cute first date. The girl just said, “You never hear of a pet squirrel.”
* disclaimer: hormones may also have had something to do with it.
talk foreign to me 