Senioritis

Posted in travel by

rope_bridge.jpgI have one week left on my contract, and I’m not looking for a new job. After that I have about a month and a half off before I intend to leave for Senegal, where I will first be doing French immersion and then who knows what (for who knows how long).

This liminal period feels startlingly akin to my last semester of high school after I had been accepted to college and knew that only a few short weeks of classes and two months of summer separated me from a freedom-filled new life in New York City. The things that used to bother me didn’t bother me, and I walked around in a dream, filled with infinite possibility and muted excitement – muted because I knew that if I gave in to it fully the anticipation would kill me.

Now, work is no longer work. New York is no longer New York. Annoying people are no longer annoying. I don’t have senioritis in the traditional sense that I’ve checked out of my responsibilities, but I have it in the sense that I am delighting in the present without being at all concerned by it  –  instead putting all my energy into my next step, which is so close I can taste it.

For the past few years, there has been meaning and purpose and challenge in my life, but not nearly enough. On some mornings it’s been difficult to get out of bed, and I’ve chalked up my exhaustion to not getting enough sleep. But now that I’m popping awake every day I realize I had just been bored into depression.

Same thing with my taciturn stomach. It did a million times better in countries where you’re not even supposed to drink the water, because I was a million times happier there.

I’m pretty sure at this point that I’m going to make it to Senegal, but even if I change my mind and end up staying here for the foreseeable future, I’ll have benefited from experiencing the me that I am when I’m excited about life. If I stick with New York I’m going to have to figure out how to do it more on my terms, so that I can keep this fun-to-be me around.

[Photo: Clark Maxwell]

ESPRESSOOOOOO

Posted in foreign food festival, travel by

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I mournfully gave up coffee many years ago, when it became clear that my stomach just could not handle it. In switching to black tea I abandoned not only one of my favorite foods but also one of my favorite past-times. Because drinking coffee is an act not only of consumption but also of culture, community, and – due to my extremely sensitive nervous system – hypercaffeination.

When I visited Elsewhere, though, I realized that I could not possibly leave without partaking of the ubiquitous espresso-drinking ritual. This was quite risky, considering the state of Elsewhere’s bathrooms. But one quiet morning towards the end of my trip, I took the plunge. I headed over to an unmarked home restaurant at the top of a nondescript apartment building, parked myself at the deck bar overlooking the city and the sea, and ordered a cup of “cafe en el estilo Elsewhere-ano,” because at that point I didn’t realize it was plain old espresso everyone was drinking.

I then proceeded to spend the next two hours drinking my teeny coffee, because savoring it and the view at the same time was about as perfect an experience as you can get. I also figured that would give my digestive system time to alert me to an impending disaster before I had ingested all of the toxins. As it turned out, my body reacted to espresso quite well: I became high as a kite in the smoothest way possible, and without any intestinal distress. My guess is that my only real problem for years and years had been gluten, and in giving it up two years ago I recovered my ability to eat all sorts of other things that I used to think set me off when in fact it was just collateral damage from gluten-induced inflammation.

Since that fateful, magical day (because coffee really is magical for someone who reacts to it like cocaine), I’ve indulged in an espresso every morning. Each time I drag out a cup for twenty minutes,  I experience a three-fold pleasure – the thrill of consuming what feels like it should be an illicit substance, the delight of tasting something so delicious that I thought was lost to me, and the joy of partaking in a slow, Old-World ritual that connects me culturally to two places I love – Elsewhere, where I picked up the habit, and Italy, where it was born.

what luck!

Posted in French, inspiration & encouragement, travel by

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In the more than two years that I’ve been going to French conversation Meetups, I have met people from virtually every francophone country – except Senegal, the one in which I’m most interested. Last night, less than one week after setting my tentative departure date for Dakar (February 15) and beginning to make concrete plans, I met two guys from… Dakar. They live in New York at the moment, but one of them, Michel, will be heading back soon. I told him he will be my first friend there, and I hope I’m right, because living in place where you don’t know a soul is pretty challenging.

He also works at a really great Senegalese restaurant in Harlem, so I now have a plan for my first lunch as a lady of leisure in January.

Ask, and – sometimes, when it feels like it – the universe answers.

[Photo: Tomo Tapio K]

If you’re still looking for holiday gifts…

Posted in travel by

…and if you have a travel-lover on your list, may I suggest:

a map on which they can scratch off all the places they’ve visiteddeluxe_scratch_map.jpg

or a cork globe to chart where they’ve been in 3D.

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Both awesome.

Happy holidays!

lo que hice en mis vacaciones de invierno

Posted in foreign food festival, Spanish, travel by

post_officeConsidering that my command of both French and Spanish is at a grade-school level, it seems appropriate to report on my vacations to French and Spanish-speaking countries with elementary school-style essays. Today I bring you the second installment: DF and Elsewhere edition.

Please note that I did not consult Google Translate or a living, breathing Spanish speaker for this. So what follows is not pretty, but it’s an accurate representation of where I’m at when I have only my brain and Spanish spell-check to rely upon:

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He llegado por la tarde en Cuidad de México (DF) y he ido a mi hotel en el barrio Condesa. La primera noche, he conocido a mi amiga de la universidad que vive ahora en DF. En el restaurante ella me dijo que puedo beber el agua además comer los vegetales frescos, si es un bueno restaurante, porque ellos anudan ‘iodine’ a su agua y limpian todo con este agua. Aunque el más importante reglo que he escuchado para México estaba de no beber el agua, decidí de crear en mi amiga y esperar por lo mejor. O sea que la primera cosa que he comido en México estaba la más prohibida: unos hojas de una verdura con agua no-de-la-botella (no-botellado?). Continue reading →

theoretically speaking

Posted in Spanish, travel by

through_the_glass.jpgLet’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!

all shot up and ready to go

Posted in le week-end, travel by

Photo by Chhor Sokunthea World Bank.jpgIt’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

Posted in inspiration & encouragement, Spanish, travel by

Terry_Pratchett_Travel_Quote.jpgI 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!

Posted in Spanish, travel by

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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!

[Photo: Eneas De Troya]

*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

Posted in Spanish, travel by

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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.

[Photo: JD Hancock]