Category Archives: Travel

Some thoughts, pre-trip

In about four days, I’ll be heading to London and Prague for a week. I’m putting the final touches on my packing, checking my to-do list and making sure I have everything printed out that we’ll need. I’m very excited to see my boyfriend again after almost a year apart.

I wanted to share a final list of what all we’ll be doing. I’m actually pretty amazed that we’ll be able to fit it all inside a week, and it’s a testament to our teamwork and planning abilities. So without further ado, here are the highlights of our upcoming trip:

  • The National Gallery in London
  • The British Museum
  • A proper curry dinner
  • BBC Proms concert featuring Yo-Yo Ma
  • The Spanish Synagogue and Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague
  • Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral
  • Our Lady Victorious church
  • An evening Prague ghost tour
  • A visit to Petrin Hill and the Stefanik Observatory in Prague
  • Lunch at a Michelin-starred restaurant
  • The Beer Museum
  • An alternative walking tour of Prague
  • A Prague cocktail bar specializing in Prohibition-era drinks
  • A breakout game in Prague
  • A boat tour on the Vltava River
  • SkyGarden in London
  • Borough Market in London
  • The Tate Modern
  • Dinner with one of my friends in London
  • “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Globe Theatre
  • A picnic in Hyde Park
  • Harrods
  • The Victoria & Albert Museum
  • Two “secret” places we’ve each picked out to surprise the other

It’s a lot, isn’t it? And yet somehow we’ll be doing it, and more. I can’t wait.

Trip-planning as a couple

As September gets closer, I’m putting final touches on my planned holiday with my boyfriend. This isn’t our first vacation together, but it’s the first one that requires international travel for both of us, and the first one to require substantial planning and booking ahead of time. With our previous trip to Manchester and the Lake District, we showed up at hotels where we’d booked, ate where we wanted and went to whatever museums we wanted. It was generally unhurried and relaxed. This year, though, the planning is more intensive.

I booked my flight for September back in March, and at about that same time, booked tickets to see “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Globe Theatre in London. This was for a play six months away and seats were still mostly sold out or unavailable. This past weekend, I managed to secure tickets for a Yo-Yo Ma solo performance at Royal Albert Hall, part of the BBC Proms concert series. The tickets sold out the same day they became available and I was lucky to get them.

Still ahead for booking: our return flight to Prague, Gatwick Express return tickets, tickets to visit the Sky Garden in London, ghost tour tickets in Prague, the Prague Card combination museum/transit pass, seven of our eight nights in hotels, some restaurants (including the Michelin-starred Alcron in Prague) and Thorpe Park tickets. Some things we’re doing were my idea, some were his idea and some came from both of us. It’s compromise, and it’s wonderful.

Just thinking about the sheer amount of stuff we’re fitting into this week is taxing. But that also makes it unique and amazing, the second in what I hope will be an extensive series of holidays, both long and short, for us as partners.

I’ve heard before that if you and your partner can travel successfully together, you’ll be OK. While we didn’t travel too extensively last time, we were able to catch trains and find hotels smoothly. I’d say we passed the initial hurdle. We didn’t fight or get frustrated with each other. This coming trip will require a little more coordination and put us more to the test, but I can’t wait. I love talking about it with my boyfriend and I love the two of us working together to create an experience that’s ours.

September to remember

I’ve spent the past couple of days meticulously planning a late summer trip with my boyfriend. We have a lot to celebrate, as he recently achieved an internship/training placement with a job offer at the end of it.

We decided to move our holiday from August to September, because his work placement starts in August and he wanted time to arrange his holiday time off.

Assuming he can get the time off, we’re spending a day in London, then heading off to Prague for four nights. Our Prague sightseeing list includes Prague Castle, the Old Jewish Cemetery, Charles Bridge, St. Vitus Cathedral and the Clementinum. The plan is to head back to London on a late flight, spend another day in the city (“Much Ado About Nothing” is playing at the Globe Theatre; it is my favorite Shakespearean play so it feels like serendipity), then visit Thorpe Park on our last day.

If he can’t secure the time off, then I’ll simply stay with him that week and we’ll do what we have time do in the area. The important thing is that we’ll be able to see each other after a year (?!) apart. Everything is coming together, and I couldn’t be happier to head back to my favorite city and discover another one.

Czech mate

My boyfriend and I have decided to spend a few days in Prague this August. The plan is for me to fly to London, for us to spend a couple of days together there, then go to Prague, and then fly back to London for another couple of days.

Prague is one of the major cities I’ve wanted to visit but haven’t been able to yet. We agreed to go somewhere neither of us had been, and Prague fit the bill. Its weather in the summer, numerous museums, gorgeous architecture and inexpensive food and beer made it a clear choice.

So that is my next international adventure. The time should go by quickly, as I prepare to move into a new apartment, visit my parents in July and go through major transitions at work.

Anyone with good tips for what to see and do in Prague, let me have it. Likewise, if anyone has a good language resource for Czech, that’d be great, too!

Language for the masses? Wunderbar

It’s been a busy couple of months. Work’s picked up as the 2014 election looms, I spent a fantastic week in England with my now-boyfriend, and I’ve gotten to spend time with friends in D.C. during my precious few moments off. (And the Royals are in the World Series.)

One other thing I’ve done, at the recommendation of my boyfriend, is try out Duolingo. It’s a Web-based language-learning program that is completely free and based on crowd-sourced translated content. It’s set up like a game, with organized lessons, points, levels and a currency that can “buy” supplemental lessons and other goodies. The lessons are a combination of translating phrases into English, translating English phrases into the language, transcribing audio of the language and verbally repeating phrases in the language. The lessons are separated by topic, such as colors, verbs, time, adjectives and clothing.

So far, you can learn German, Spanish, French, Italian, English, and Portuguese. Dutch, Irish and Danish are in beta development, and still more are in the works. It’s set up like a community, where you can compete with friends for points, discuss lessons to figure out what you might have missed, and translate articles and read translated articles.

Again, it is all free, based on the idea of learning languages as a tool of economic mobility. It stands in stark contrast to Rosetta Stone, which costs hundreds of dollars for a five-level program. I have Rosetta Stone in French, German and Hebrew, but I was curious about Duolingo as a supplement.

I think I’m addicted.

I dabbled in French first, then resolved to work through the German program, since I’m more familiar with that language. I do go back daily and do a lesson in French to keep my “streak” (number of uninterrupted days you complete a lesson, part of the “game” aspect), but my focus now is on completing the German program before going back to work through the French program. Once both programs are done, I’ll go back and do revision lessons on them to “keep my bars up,” and then start on a third language (I’m thinking Italian).

It has always been a goal of mine to become at least conversational in as many languages as possible. I know that true fluency will probably come only with total immersion for an extended period, but Duolingo seems great at teaching the basics, while keeping it fun and making you want to come back. I look forward to traveling more now, because I know I can sample the languages beforehand.

If you’re interested in learning a language but unable or unwilling to make a large monetary commitment, I’d definitely look into Duolingo. It’s probably best paired with other tools (I still use Rosetta Stone and try to read German news sites regularly), but for light study, it’s a great tool.

In praise of digital relationships, romantic and otherwise

Earlier tonight, as I prepared to go to bed, I looked up a few old schoolmates on Facebook. People to whom I was never particularly close, even then. The ones I found were nearly strangers to me. I have nothing in common with them now, and the only thing I had in common with them then was geography. Even that wasn’t exactly a matter of agency, given that we lived where our parents had chosen to live.

I’ve long rejected the notion that friendships and relationships should be based on geography. Obviously you’ll eventually want to meet your closest online friends and especially your online romantic interests, and romantic partners would ultimately relocate for each other. But choosing a friend or a partner based on elementary school or high school or even college always seemed needlessly limited to me. I know many people who found their long-term partners in school; I wasn’t one of them. And while I do retain close friendships with many people with whom I went to school, I have just as many close friends whom I met through various online means, based on our mutual interests.

Because of my shyness and, to use the technical term, resting bitch face, I’ve long had difficulty getting close to people I meet first in person. I know that I come off as a bit awkward and aloof. I communicate much better in writing. Even my co-workers compliment my humor and wit in our office chat program. So it makes sense that someone like me would more easily forge written-based relationships. 

One of my best friends now is someone I’d have never met at all, in person or otherwise, were it not for our mutual love of Harry Potter and various other geekery. We crossed paths online over five years ago and up to this point we’ve visited each other and we regularly chat long-distance about other things: cooking, pets, work, moving. I talk to her about things I’d talk to any true friend about in person.

My current long-distance partner (soon to, in a few weeks, hopefully become my short-distance partner for a few days at least) approached me because he admired my online writing about, of all things, “A Song of Ice and Fire.” That was six months ago and we’ve been talking non-stop ever since. Though I’m eager to see him, I don’t consider what we have to be inherently less meaningful because it’s mostly based on written communication.

Finally, the peril of going to school in the Midwest and in England and living on the East Coast is that nearly all of my friends, even if they began as in-person friends, became long-distance friends. Written communication is absolutely essential, whether it’s a tweet, email, text, Facebook message or something else. This is what helps me sustain my friendships, because the vast majority of my friends live hundreds or thousands of miles away.

I have more in common with a handful of people thousands of miles away in England than I do with a handful of people in Kansas with whom I shared a few years of schooling 20-odd years ago. It’s worth it to me to forsake in-person interactions for the time being in exchange for a deeper emotional attachment through writing. I wouldn’t trade a day’s worth of emails with my partner for 50 middling OKCupid dates in D.C.

But I am excited to see him, though …

In search of “home”

I do some of my best thinking on the Metro. There’s nothing to do, really, except think and go over things in my mind.

My little epiphany this morning was in my realization that, while I can safely say that I don’t feel much emotional attachment to where I grew up — without my friends and parents and other family there, I’d have no reason to go back — I also don’t have that many roots in D.C., despite living here for a year and a half. I think deep down, I see my time here as temporary and transient. Will it end up being so? Maybe. Maybe not. Plenty of people in D.C. planned to stay for a year or two, and lo, 30 years pass and they’re still here.

Then I thought about what makes a home. How do you decide to lay down roots? When should you decide? Should you fall in love with a place, and stay out of love for that place, or should you fall in love with a person, and lay roots with them wherever? I don’t think it’s too much to ask to love someone and stay with them in a place that you’d love even if you weren’t with them. I hope to be so fortunate.

I’m also not sure that time expended counts toward a feeling of home. I still think of England as “home” on some occasions, despite only living there for two years. On the one hand, almost two decades in the Midwest hadn’t done much to solidify nostalgia for that place. The jury’s still out on D.C., I have a certain fondness for it, but can’t help this nagging feeling that it too is just a pit stop on the road to … somewhere else.

Traveling is something I have to do, almost compulsively. Even my trips that get planned months in advance receive almost obsessive attention. Is my travel bug some subconscious method of “scouting” a possible home? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m destined to just be a wanderer, moving here and there whenever I manage to overcome inertia.

At the end of the day, I think a true home has to combine both people and location. It’s not enough to live somewhere you love if you have no one to share it with, and it’s not enough to be with someone you love if the location makes you miserable or unhappy.

Wish me luck eventually finding that happy balance.

Back to Blighty, for a little while

It’s no secret that I’ve put off going for my Ph.D. Mainly it’s an issue of finances and the fact that my job in D.C. is going well. But I still miss England fairly often, so I decided to head back to visit for a little more than a week in September. I’m flying to Manchester, not London, and seeing some parts of the country that I haven’t before, or haven’t seen in a long time: Manchester, Liverpool, the Lake District and that general area.

I plan to be joined in this adventure by my good friend Deborah, with whom I went to Uni. Kent and formed part of a formidable pub quiz team (Grandma’s Wisdom for life!). I also hope to meet my pen pal (which sounds archaic and quaint but is the best way to describe it), a fellow nerd (we bonded over “A Song of Ice and Fire” and it doesn’t get geekier than that) and software developer/physics enthusiast who lives near Liverpool. I’m hoping a beer or two can help us figure out if it’s worth traveling down the Kingsroad, so to speak.

I have mixed feelings going back, even though it’s just for a brief period. I was probably at my personal and emotional nadir when I left the last time, and I’ll be going back on a far, far higher note, with good friends and a great job and other prospects. I’m hoping that that change in perspective lets me see the country more pragmatically and maybe figure out if going back long-term is really something I still want to pursue. If nothing else, I’ll get to see some great people and have some new adventures.

Since my tax rebate is funding this little sojourn, I splurged for an exit row aisle seat on my flight over and back. Worth every penny. Or pence.

Refusing a bite of the apple

I might be one of a rare breed of female twentysomething journalists who consider themselves city mice: I have never made any serious, good-faith attempt to “make it” in New York, nor have I ever wanted to and honestly, unless an amazing opportunity arises or I move for a partner, I sincerely can see myself never wanting to.

A friend of mine shared this blog entry today, which I read and which maybe finally made me realize why I never sought that city the way so many women my age and in my profession do. New York City, the presumed epicenter of culture, literature and intellectual thought, is crowding out (and has been crowding out) the very people who contribute those things to the city. Creativity must be nurtured, and that requires basic security, energy and time, things that can be difficult if not impossible to attain in the city, especially if, like the blog author, you have to work a “real” job to make ends meet. The author decided to ultimately sacrifice location for that trifecta she needed to do something fulfilling, and left.

Which brings me back to myself; reading that, I have to wonder if I always knew, subconsciously, that I wouldn’t find in New York what I needed to fulfill me. Rather than needing to live there to realize that, maybe I always had a sense that it wasn’t really worth it. It wasn’t worth paying four figures to live with a bunch of other people in some outer borough, or doing a menial and unrewarding job, or going without food, just to be able to say, “I live in New York.” If “living in New York” doesn’t really come with the actual lifestyle implied by “living in New York” (creative freedom and intellectual growth), then what the bloody hell good is it? It’s an empty phrase, designed to impress outsiders or people from home; it would have no bearing on how I actually lived my life. That air of superiority, given the living circumstances of so many people like me in the city, just felt unearned, and I’d be damned if I moved there to perpetuate it.

And obviously it’s different for different people. I have friends there who love it, and I freely admit that I’d feel perfectly happy living in that other New York-esque metropolis with which I’m so familiar (London, I mean London). But after reading the blog entry and seeing a woman who might, in another life, have been me, it clicked. I had “gotten it” before I really even knew what I had “gotten.”

But then again, I never really knew or noticed how prevalent “Good-bye, New York” writings were. Time and again, young women aspire to go to New York, do so and then leave, for one reason or another. Maybe I just cut out the middleman.

In all fairness I do say this as a Washingtonian (via the Midwest and some stints in Britain), living in a place that isn’t exactly inexpensive. Many people in D.C. view it as a step on the way to New York, including at least a few of my friends. The District’s alleged inferiority complex is often remarked upon, and I’d be lying if I didn’t find the Times’s sometimes downright snotty coverage of the city (including, at times, bush-league geographic errors) to be grating. It seems like no matter what D.C. has, New York has more of it. Which is to be expected, as New York has more than 8 million people and D.C. only recently topped about 650,000, although it’s only getting bigger. But often, any criticism of New York by a D.C.-er brings allegations of jealousy or attempts at one-upping.

Which is why I found Andrew Sullivan’s own farewell to New York to be comforting; it’s rare (at least in my experience) to have someone that high-profile in the creative/journalistic community so publicly and forcefully side with D.C. over New York. For once, we’re not the ones being jilted. And Sullivan noticed that, too. It was “incomprehensible” to New Yorkers, he said, that a person might choose D.C. over their city.

And that’s at least partly why he left.

Going to Stockholm

I haven’t “been” anywhere lately. There was England — which was for school — and D.C. — which I visited for my interview and where I live now — and Boston — where I’ve been before a few times so visiting friends there felt pretty routine.

But this summer, I wanted someplace new. Someplace I hadn’t been before. I settled on Stockholm and sweet-talked Cheryl — my best friend since forever and travel buddy — into coming with me.

I swooned at photos of the islands and the outdoor cafes and the boat tours. I winced at the food prices but admitted the restaurants look amazing. We swore up and down we would eat cheap street food to save money for dinner; we’ll see if we can stick to it.

As is my wont, I’m researching restaurants, cafes, museums and galleries to make the most out of the week-long adventure in July. It’s exhilarating to have something to “plan” again.

Can’t wait.