Travelday

One of the main… well… really the ONLY tourist attraction in my old city of Toronto is the CN Tower. It’s the tallest free-standing structure in the world… which means it’s pretty tall. There’s a restaurant up at the top, where my residence hall took us to eat after orientation first year of university. It was good, but I think the most fun part is to go to the Skypod observation deck. You can see all of the city… and some of Rochester, New York across the lake on a clear day.

The only problem is the lines: you usually have to wait behind scores of tourists to get up. The wait is worth it though, and if you show up early in the morning in the middle of the week, you can sometimes beat the crowds. If not, you can always hang out with the moose in the gift shop until it’s your turn to go up…

This time of year gets me thinking about the island off the coast of Toronto. Most of the year, it’s really too cold to enjoy it, but for my 19th birthday in 2006, when I lived there, my friends and I got on the ferry and brought a picnic out to frolic.

I’ve mentioned the fact that I like city parks, but I might like the island even more. You leave the city for just a day, and in less than an hour, there is a beach and fields and trees to climb.

The island makes me regress a little bit. My friend Rachael and I spent hours on the swings and exploring the jetty, while down on the beach, we put together a game of American football, 3 vs. 3. As for me, I was most excited for climbing trees.

When I was younger, I loved being in the tree in our front yard on Long Island. I carved my initials into my favorite branch, and I would bring a book up with me to read. I was fearless.

Even in high school, once the weather got nice on our Massachusetts campus, I would bring my homework out to the lawn in front of our dorm and laze on a branch while reading Slaughterhouse Five.

I’m not fearless anymore, though. When I got myself up that tree on the island, I had a very hard time getting down. I miss the days when I didn’t think about my ankles every time I tried to jump out of a tree. I miss the days when I just jumped.

Every once in awhile, it’s nice to remember the things you did when you were young.

When I went on my first backpacking trip, after graduating high school in 2005, our first stop was Barcelona. By the end of our trip, we got tired and barely did any touristy stuff in the cities we visited, but in Barcelona, we were just getting started, and we saw everything: we went to the cathedral, walked down Las Ramblas and went to the Guell Park in the Gaudi Village: my favorite.

I’ve always had a thing for city parks. Maybe it has something to do with living so close to Central Park in New York City. Regardless, I love the little spot of nature within the city. The Gaudi park, however, is different from any other park I’ve seen. Unlike other parks, it doesn’t seem to be merely a spot of nature within a bustling city: it’s also an work of art, a wonderful place to explore.

Of course, there are the parts designed by Gaudi: the vibrantly painted walls and benches and the decorative wall and staircase in the middle. However, there are also other art forms being portrayed here. My favorite was a guitarist who was in the park the day we chose to explore it. I’ve seen many street musicians in my time, and it’s not necessarily the fact that he was any more talented than anyone else, but he had an aura about him. Perhaps it was him within the park that I liked: the whole package of a Spanish guitarist in a very Spanish park in a city that I love.

You should get used to me talking quite a bit about a very small town called Paziols (paz-YOL), in Southwestern France.

Last summer, my French tutor from middle school moved four of her brightest bilingual (French-English) students from New York City to this little town in the garrigue for three months. She and her brother Serge had bought an old vigneron’s house in the town, and she had decided to turn it into a language camp, where American students could come, not only to learn French, but also to learn something about French life. Anne-Marie, her nephew Alex, her daughter Lalé, the four kids and I spoke only French, made French meals, did research on attractions in the area, and basically experimented for three months, trying to discover what we would be able to do with a much younger, much less bilingual group the next year.

I don’t know what this year’s group is going to be like, but the seven of us will be back to do the same things we did last year: tennis on the town tennis courts, dances and barbecues in the town square, exploring the ancient garrigue with both its cultivated fields of wine grapes and its savage flora of wild plum bushes, almond trees and raspberries and blackberries by the bucketful. We’ll find new places to swim, although I think I’ll always have a soft spot for the waterfall that lies within the woods and the little creek that runs past the clearing of picnic tables where we spent time last year. I look forward to new things, but some things should stay the same.

Like the peaches. One of my favorite days in Paziols was the morning that Anne-Marie and I got up early to meet the peach lady who sold peaches, apricots and homemade jam in the town square every week. They announced her arrival over the town loudspeaker, like the also announced the pizza truck and the butcher-on-wheels, but if you waited for the announcement, you were too late: those in the know were already assembled to buy some of the most luscious, delicious peaches you’ve ever tasted.

Part of being in Paziols isn’t just learning about France: for these displaced New Yorkers, Paziols also became a window to a slower time, a more peaceful place than the bustling city where we were raised. At the risk of sounding cliché, I love the way that the locals take time to find out about who you are, where you’re from and why you’re here. I love that people are content to spend their day slowly, sieste in the afternoon, or a swim if its especially warm. I don’t know how I would do living in Paziols all the time, but it’s nice to know that I have that house to go back to every summer, where we can spend our evenings watching old French movies on the big projection screen in the living room, talking together and eating ice cream, and know that everyone else in town is probably doing the same thing.

In my introductory blog post, I mentioned that I consider one of my homes to be Cannes, a small city on the Côte d’Azur famous for its yearly film festival.

I applied to go to Cannes on a whim. I had been living at home and working all summer after my first year of college, and I was very nervous to go back: one of my best friends at the University of Toronto had been an exchange student, so he was headed back to Wales to finish his degree, and the rest of us were moving out of the dorms and into apartments. It didn’t help that my summer consisted almost entirely of working crazy hours at a local Italian restaurant for four months.

While doing some research on Junior year study abroad in Italy for my Italian major, I stumbled upon the website for a program sending students to Cannes for four months. My mother, who is a francophile herself, and who was sitting next to me in the kitchen, encouraged me to apply for the spring semester of my Sophomore year. I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t go: I had my heart set on spending Junior year in Siena, but I sent in the application anyway, and then I promptly stopped thinking about it.

By the time my acceptance letter came from Cannes, I was growing bored in Toronto. I needed a change, so I accepted. Just a few short months later, and I was spending the hardest months of the Toronto winter on the Mediterranean coast. Little did I know then that that would be the end of my time in Toronto.

I got to know Cannes very well in those months before the tourist crowds came. The city extends far back into the hills, but my favorite places to go were within the small city center.

My American study group lived at the Collège International de Cannes, a foreign language school right on the beach. Aside from our large American group, there were people from all over the world, and despite the language barriers, we all became fast friends. We had a favorite Irish pub, Quay’s, where everyone knew us and we could always find people to hang out with and a section of the beach where you were sure to run into friends. Most of all, though, I just loved exploring.

First, I explored the city. There were shops and restaurants to see, and the Suquet besides, which was a pedestrian street that ran through the middle of the city. I loved to walk the familiar streets and just listen to people speak: it didn’t matter what I was doing or that I had seen the same shops hundreds of times; I loved listening to people speak French. I loved being in France.

After I’d had my fill of the town, and especially once the weather grew even more beautiful, it became hard to stay away from the shore. Walking along the beach, you could head either towards Italy or towards Spain. In the Italian direction, you ran into Antibes and Nice before anything else, but towards Spain, the road twisted and turned to reveal some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. I would ride on the back of a scooter all the way up and down the twisting roads to find secret alcoves for swimming and picnics.

I’m back in Cannes again for the week, taking some time away from Paris before finals start. I love arriving here and seeing the same familiar scenery: palm trees slaying in the breeze, and the deep blue Mediterranean. It’s like coming home.

I have seen my share of hard winters. After three years at boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts and then two more at university in Toronto, Ontario, I’m not a stranger to snow and cold. Still, there’s something about a winter that is just rainy that is even more depressing than six feet of snow. Lucky me, that’s the kind of winter we had in Paris. Until this past weekend.

This weekend, the sun finally came out, the rain finally stopped, and I finally made my way down to the sixth arrondissement for a walk. Usually, that’s my favorite part of living in a city: wandering around and getting lost on my way to nowhere. But until this week, I hadn’t had the opportunity, which was a shame.

In fact, winter made me resent Paris a little bit. I took this amazing city for granted. I forgot how much I love the trendy 6th, the ritzy 1st, the glamorous 8th, the young 5th… and my home, the 7th.

I live right under the Eiffel Tower. Every night when I first got here, when I would turn the corner onto the tiny street that held my apartment, I would laugh to myself as I saw the Eiffel Tower, lit up against the Paris sky. “I live here,” I said aloud, laughing. And I am not one for talking to myself.

This weekend, as I turned a different corner towards Invalides, on my way home from a glorious afternoon of palmiers and witnessing a speech by Jean-Marie LePen in the 1st (that’s what all the flags are about, by the way), I saw it again. My Tower, in all its glory, peeking out from behind an apartment building at the end of the street. And I laughed.

When I was ten years old, my father brought me to Paris for the first time. We flew into London Heathrow and spent a day in the city. I fell asleep on the double-decker bus: my first and only brush with jet lag. The next evening, we had first-class tickets on the brand-new Eurostar train. We had dinner under the English Channel.

Ever since then, I have been blessed (or cursed) with wanderlust. I couldn’t get enough. It started small enough, with weekends spent at my best friend’s house. It always started as one night, but invariably I would make the telephone call, begging “please, please, please” to let me stay just one more night. None of my other siblings were like this. I know now, after years of experience, that even just these nights spent a mere thirty minutes from home were about the brush with the unknown, the unfamiliar. Transporting myself from my house, where I was the oldest of four children and my parents were 70s and early 80s kids to my best friend’s life, only child of hippie parents, was an incredible sensation. We blasted Beatles music and fell in love with John Lennon all over again, and returning home felt miles away.

It started with Bridgehampton, New York. But it didn’t stop there.

The next step was the begging, pleading for summer camp. First Colorado, the the Berkshires, then Maine. I would have kept going, except by then I had moved on: my new love was Europe.

The summer of 2001, when I had just turned fourteen years old, I went to Cambridge University for a three-week study trip, and I loved every moment of it. I signed myself up for nearly every extracurricular play, walking tour and workshop. I soaked in the culture, my surroundings, the people. I don’t know that I’ve ever embraced one city so wholeheartedly and head first as I did that time.

After Cambridge, I had plans to go to Bondues, France for three months. Bondues was yet another key to my wanderlust, and the one that is most actively discussed in my daily life. There’s that constant question as soon as people learn that I’m bilingual: “Are your parents French?” No… they’re not. I have no French lineage whatsoever. I’m bilingual because of that trip to France, living with a French family in the north and going to school entirely in French. It was one of the most difficult and the most rewarding experience of my life.

I fell in love with France, as so many of us do, and my high school years, which I spent at a boarding school in Massachusetts (unheard of in my family) were tinged with trips back: a visit at New Years, a summer spent on the west coast of France studying the language, and, finally, when I graduated, my first backpacking trips. Five weeks with my two best friends from high school before college started.

College was in Canada. Another oddball move, I know. I’m not unaware of the strangeness of my story, just unfazed. I lived in Toronto for two years before making a bold and random move to Cannes, in the south of France, for the last four months of my sophomore year. After three weeks, I knew that the change would be permanent.

After yet another backpacking trip, a job teaching English to French kids and French to Americans, and a very brief trip back to the States for my new passport and visa, I was back in Europe, this time in Paris, to finish my undergraduate degree in the first country I fell in love with.

This is a very wordy way to start a new blog, I’m aware. If you’ve made it this far, I congratulate you. I had considered a smaller post to start, a mini-introduction, but then I realized that this is as mini as my relationship with travel can become. There are already a lot of holes: my love affair with Italy, my time spent in Spain, and the anecdotes that come with all of the places I’ve mentioned so briefly and without the fanfare they deserve.

Starting with that trip to Cambridge, I embrace everywhere I go, fully, falling headfirst into the places I live. I’m a nomad, but unlike so many nomads I know who just “stay” places for a little while, I move in everywhere. I unpack all my stuff, I put my name on the buzzer, I get the paper delivered. This is a travel blog, for want of a better word, but it’s also my story. I hope that in reading this, you come to love the places I’ve loved as much as I have. Take my tips, my photos, my stories of the best places to go in this or that city, and make them your own. Embrace them. Fall in love with travel. For me, there is no other way to live.