Bordeaux and Palmiers

Siena is generally seen as one of the more touristy Italian cities. Up there with Venice, it’s not a place people go to discover the “real” Italy. It’s a gorgeous city that is wonderful for pedestrians, but where Naples and Florence retain the charm of encountering true locals on your travels, Siena is so overrun with tourists that it’s difficult to see anything aside from the postcards and snowglobes sold on every street corner.

But I was in Siena alone for several days, and I somehow managed to find the same charm in Siena that I was able to find in other cities I love so much. Somehow, being alone in a city so filled with people made it easier to find places that were untouched by the tourism that had so invaded the city.

It wasn’t whole piazzas or restaurants: it was little things. Courtyards, piazzettas, tiny little streets that were somehow unknown to the rest of the city. I found a tiny hotel on a little street, somehow close to the Piazza del Campo but still reasonably priced and filled with students like me who were looking, not for tourism or museums, but just to see an Italian city for a little while.

Siena is not my favorite city in Italy. Not even close. But the few days I spent there in the summer of 2007 were eye-opening: when it comes to travel alone, sometimes the best places to discover true culture and things you wouldn’t have seen if you were traveling with a group are the places you wouldn’t expect.

Generally, when I travel, I go to cities, not small towns, for the pure reason that I don’t know how to drive a stick shift car, and am not old enough to rent one even if I did know how. On my first backpacking trip, we hit only large cities, and the only place we did stay that wasn’t a major metropolis, Mestre, was just outside of Venice with a bus.

When, on my second backpacking trip, my friends and I decided to visit the northeast of France, we chose a B and B in the small town of St. Marcan, an hour away from St. Malo. The B and B was called Au Bon Accueil, which literally translated means “of the good welcome” in French. It’s perhaps not as poetic in English, but no less true.

The B and B offered bikes for its guests to rent. Our first evening, we forwent this offer in favor of walking to a small crêpe restaurant nearby, where I learned that I’m allergic to buckwheat.

A few years before, just before my first backpacking trip across Europe, I’d had a mysterious reaction to something I ate in a Korean restaurant that sent me to the hospital for severe dosages of steroids. Since then, I’d always carried an Epi-Pen with me, just in case, but after three years, I’d grown lazy and didn’t carry it with me everywhere. One galette later and my friend Katie was running down the hill to the B and B to retrieve my Epi-Pen while my other friend, Emily, was hijacking a car (and its sixteen-year-old French driver) to take us to the nearest fire station. (Note: When in distress in France, call the pompiers (fire department). They’re the fastest to respond to a call, no matter what kind.)

All this to say that, when I finally returned from the hospital, the British couple who run the B and B were very gracious and welcoming. The lady drove us into the larger town to replace some things I lost (oh yeah… when Katie went to get the Epi-Pen, she brought the plastic bag that had all of my cosmetics in it, posed it atop the car, and the driver took off, scattering disposable razors and Advil all over the road.)

When we finally felt up to it, we took the owners up on their offer to rent bikes and did the 40 minute jaunt to Mont St. Michel. I had never seen it before, and it was quite lovely. The bike trip on the way there was a lot of fun, but on the way back, we rode headfirst into a rain storm. But when we got back to the B and B, the couple pointed us up to the pub up the road owned by their friend for a hot chicken curry and a beer… the perfect cure for a ride in the rain.

Although we’re all perfectly aware somewhere in our heads that Paris is a city, it’s somehow difficult to imagine that the Paris we see in movies, the Paris of cafés, cigarettes, romantic walks along the Seine… could actually be a thriving metropolis. Let me tell you, when you first get settled in in Paris and you suddenly realize that the people who work at the café on your corner couldn’t care less what your name is, much less what your regular order is, you start to wonder if places like that exist anywhere outside of movies. Places with quirky characters with names like Jean-Paul who smoke Gauloises and drink Pastis.

I found one.

Granted, I didn’t find him in Paris, but in a tiny town in Normandy. He was amused with my French accent, a mix of traditional Parisian school French and some of the Provençal twang I had picked up in my four months in Cannes. We could barely understand him, but as he watched us work our way through our Pastis, a memory of our days in the South, he and his friends came up with an idea.

Though we couldn’t understand one another, this gruff ouvrier from the North bought us a pitcher of sweet white wine and stood across from our table, at the bar, to talk for awhile. He even volunteered to strike a pose for a photo, though I doubt he knew that he would be appearing on my blog, or even has any idea what a blog really is.

When he and his friends left, my friends and I giggled over the rest of our wine, trying to mimic the noises we’d heard coming from his throat and chest, noises that someone, somewhere must have understood to be French, but that we just heard as sound. I don’t think I fully appreciated the gift he gave me, this story, this memory, this true reflection of the stereotypical France we see in the movies, until now.

When I was growing up, I was lucky to have parents who wanted to travel. Even considering the fact that they had four children under the age of 12, when I was in the 6th grade, we went to Italy.

We visited Rome, Siena, Venice and Florence, and my favorite by far was Venice. Some compare the gondolas and canal-lined streets with some sort of Disney-esque theme park, but I thought it was magical.

However, it wasn’t until I returned six years later that I truly fell in love with Venice. You see, the problem with traveling with four children under the age of 12 is the fact that every five minutes, someone is hungry, thirsty, has to go to the bathroom, tired… There’s really no feasible way to just walk around the city and explore, which, I’ve since learned, is by far my favorite way to experience a city.

On my infamous backpacking trip after senior year of high school, we visited Venice, staying at a hotel in Mestre, a bit outside of the city, and riding the bus in every day. Because the last bus left Venice at midnight and because we weren’t quite experienced enough with drinking to even consider a Nuit Blanche, our biggest brush with true Venitian nightlife culture was the “spritz.”

We wanted to do what the Venitians did, so when, after a day of walking around the city people-watching, we saw all of the natives, nearly automatically pull up a seat at the nearest outdoor café and order a bright orange beverage, we knew we had to do the same.

As you can probably tell from the picture, I didn’t enjoy the bitter orange drink. But I did love sitting around for the northern Italian version of apéro, the French tradition that I have since come to love. I loved watching the native Venitians. I loved getting to the point with the magical city that happens in every relationship, when the goggles that appear the moment you fall in love start to fade, and you see things as they are clearly.

Venice was no longer the glamorous, magical knight in shining armor that I had met in the sixth grade. Venice was dirty. Venice was bitter. But Venice was real. And that’s the point you need to reach in every relationship, with a city as with a person, before you can truly say that you are in love. I may hate spritz, but I love Venice.

I really, really hate being a tourist.

Sure, if I’m visiting a new city, I’ll hit up some of the more famous museums and may even take a few pictures when no one is looking (mostly for this blog… you guys have made me a lot more photo-addicted than I used to be). But there are several things, that I simply will not do for fear of being pointed at and laughed at by the locals, including but not limited to eating at the Hard Rock Café, carrying around a bag of McDonald’s, wearing a visor, opening a map in the street, and, God forbid, riding on one of those heinous tour buses around the city. Nope. Definitely won’t do that.

Except that Alex didn’t know that. And rather than explain my phobia to him (in French) and be forced to a) be forever labeled as “crazy” by my new boyfriend and b) have to come up with another activity, I begrudgingly payed 26 euros for a 2-day ticket to hell.

Or so I thought.

Apparently, those bus tours aren’t so bad. The particular company we used had three different bus lines, two of which left from central Plaça Catalunya and visited the north and south ends of the city respectively, and one smaller line that focused on the redevelopment of Barcelona that occurred in the early nineties in preparation for the city’s hosting of the Olympics. Alex and I rode all of them on our two-day ticket, and I have to say, I learned something.

I hang my head in shame of my former attitude: not all tourist attractions are awful. Especially in a city as large as Barcelona, a bus tour like this outlining every main attraction in the city not only allows you to see a lot more of the city than you would have otherwise, but also lets you plan out things you may want to see later. One unfortunate side effect of my staunch refusal to use tour buses in the past has been that upon returning home, I almost always find something on the Internet that I woulda-coulda-shoulda visited back a week ago when I was in the city. Although Alex and I didn’t take as much advantage of this second perk as we should have (we had just gotten off six weeks of work and were plum tuckered out), I know that in the future (*sigh*) I’ll be riding tour buses and using them to map out the rest of my vacation.

Yep, you heard me. I’m a tour bus convert. So sue me.

The pictures accompanying this post were taken aboard the bus offered by a company called Barcelona Bus Turistíc. I highly recommend them, as they converted a former bus hater into a bus lover. You can find all the information about this company here .

I found this picture in my archives from a trip I took to Nice, in the South of France, in 2005. It’s nothing fancy: just the view from the hostel to a balcony across the way, two sets of pajamas drying from a clothesline. But for some reason, when I stood in our hostel room, it spoke to me. I’m finally starting to understand why.

There was always something in French–even Western European–culture that attracted me, even as a child. There are certain customs that have long since been removed from American daily life that still play a large part in the life of the average French person, including, but certainly not limited to, the use of the clothesline to air dry laundry.

There is something so quaint about the fact that even some of the highest ranking businessmen in Paris still hang their wet laundry from a line and let the air dry it. The fact that this tradition has kept on, even though most American families have a dryer and think nothing of using it constantly, reminds me of one of my favorite things about living in France: the pace.

This choice to allow laundry to dry itself throughout the day instead of blasting it with heat from a mechanical dryer is similar to the way in which the French seem to approach time in general. I have never seen a Frenchman, even a Parisian, as rushed as an American. They are famous for their long and luxurious meals here, but even walking down the street, I often have to remind myself that people are not walking slowly just to bother me, but because that’s the pace at which they walk. They’re not in enough of a hurry to be where they need to be to break their pace.

Perhaps it’s a stretch to say that this photograph says all of this. Maybe it’s just a pretty picture: a combination of Mediterranean colors and a quaint image. But to me, this picture speaks mountains, and every time I look at it, I am reminded to slow down, to breathe, to enjoy.

Antoní Gaudí was known as “God’s Architect” for his work on this masterpiece. His cathedral has taken much longer than the Spaniard’s lifetime to complete: it is still under construction today. Gaudí was famous as saying that his employer–God–wasn’t in a hurry.

In Europe, every major city boasts an aquarium and a cathedral, and in general, all cathedrals and all aquariums are fairly similar. Sure, each cathedral has something unique about it: a statue, a painting, a patron saint celebrated with a stained glass window, but the Gothic architecture tends to be fairly similar with each cathedral, and on a whirlwind tour of the major cities of Europe, very few cathedrals stand out next to another.

The Sagrada Familia is different.

Where other European cathedrals tend to recall Notre Dame and gargoyles, the Gaudi cathedral is immensely different. The detail in all of the surfaces is incredible to behold, and touring the inside to see the plans that are still underway for the completion of the cathedral makes the work that goes into building a monument such as this so much more tangible.

Each visitor to the cathedral pays an entry fee, something that is not usually requested upon visiting a religious site. However, the fee contributes to the completion of the cathedral. Every visitor becomes a patron of the arts and of the Church, and every visitor helps towards the completion of this gorgeous monument to God and to art.