A whole year?

Random travel notes

• Bidets are perfect for hand-washing clothes. Great for soaking your feet after a long day of sightseeing, too.
• While flipping through channels on the TV in our hotel room in Paris we noticed that they were mostly in English and German. Chloe said they saw the same thing in the south of Spain so we theorized that those must be the free cable channels.
• On our drive from the airport to our hotel in Paris I checked the speedometer: 160 kilometers per hour, just about 100 miles per hour. Cool, but there was no sensation of going fast because we were keeping pace with traffic.
• A charming hotel room quickly turns into hell when there is no air conditioning. Don't let them fool you: a fan is not enough.
• The small hotels we've stayed in have worked out great for us, but now I've confirmed what I've always suspected: I enjoy the anonymity of a larger hotel devoid of intimidating personalities. I'm a failure at travel of the backdoor variety. I'm always afraid I'm going to get yelled at for doing something wrong, like bringing food into the room (expressly forbidden in our Paris hotel). In Rome, the maid scared me (I at first took her to be a disgruntled guest because we'd hear her complaining in the hallway to no one in particular), and here in Paris I can feel the maid's impatient glare through the door. I didn't come to Paris to sleep, but nor did I come to be herded out of my room at the crack of noon.
• At 11:00 PM we watched the Eiffel Tower light up and sparkle. It was still that way at 12:30 AM, the last time I checked.
• I haven't yet seen a hotel hairdryer-on-the-wall that's worth the space it would save in my luggage if I were to leave mine at home.
• A little refrigerator in the hotel room is darn near on my necessity list.
• Next time I will bring a water bottle and not rely on buying bottled water (could easily spend more than $25 a day for one person and there are few places to refill one) or even on buying a bottle of water and refilling it in the hotel, which was my original plan. I get tired of carrying stuff around and I'm much less likely to throw away a water bottle than I am to throw away an empty bottle of water.
• It's true - pop is more expensive than wine, especially in eating establishments. And forget about free refills. It's also true that if chilly beverages are a deal-breaker for you you'd better stay home.
• It doesn't have to be too hot before it is far too hot to lug a backpack around. Just about everyone - men and women - carry different shapes of bags diagonally across their chests. In Rome I bought a purse-kind of thing that wasn't too big and did the same as the Spaniards and the Romans and now the French. It became our lifeline filled with everything we'd need for the day and with the things I wouldn't leave in our rooms: passports, train and plane tickets, money, debit card, water, snacks, maps, Vaseline Lip Therapy, which is like crack to me. But backpacks are great to haul around extra stuff at airports, bus, and train stations, as long as the zippers are locked.
• Those suitcases that convert to backpacks? Yeah, no one uses them. I have several and have never used them as backpacks. Rick Steves said his company doesn't sell one anymore for that reason. But I can't begin to imagine a suitcase without wheels.
• Plan on your luggage getting smashed and being opened by TSA. Better to plan on it than be surprised.
• When suitcase shopping, thicker is not better. There were many places where our largish suitcases fit, but wouldn't have if they had been just an inch thicker. Everything is crowded and your time will be more pleasant if you're not angering every person whose knees you bash every time you walk down the aisle.
• Heed all the warnings about safeguarding your wallet and valuable documents, but you don't need to be psychotic about it - common sense is enough. A guy at the train station in Rome was begging for help to get his suitcases from Left Luggage because his wallet had been stolen and the claim ticket was in it. The place was busy and the people behind the counter were not making his life any easier. They asked where his wallet had been and he patted his now-empty back pocket. Any sympathy they may have had vanished with that admission. He told them, nicely if a little desperately, that if they didn't help him find his luggage quickly  (amid thousands of bags) he would miss his train. They shrugged.
• Before I left I bought fancy-pants laminated folding maps of the major cities we visited. I had fun looking at them in my compulsive zeal before I left, but didn't need them in Europe. The ubiquitous free maps available everywhere and handed out automatically at our hotels (and stores, train, subway, and bus stations) were better, newer, and easier to follow. And I could get several: one for each day because I discovered that helpful people tend to draw all over them when you ask them them directions. That was great, but I get confused easily so I was able to start clean every day.

More Europe trip posts

Beginning here and ending here. Vatican Museums, Bastille Day, and just one rude Parisian. I intend to have the all the trip posts done by the one-year anniversary of the trip.

Filling in some more

A few more backposts, still in Rome. They begin here and go to here, or you can find them under Europe trip on July 11. Note to self: a map of Rome and me are a useless combination. Any other city I'm fine and I'm quite distressed that I can't figure out why I'm so inept at following a map of Rome. And did National Geographic run out of North symbols before they got to the Rs?

More old stuff

More backfilled posts with photos - from after the pope's appearance to the top of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica - begin here and go to More views from up there (all July 10).

Filling in

More Europe trip posts (and some photos) backfilled in, under Europe trip on the right under Categories. The new stuff begins July 8 (getting ready to leave Pamplona) and goes, so far, to July 10 (an audience with the pope - us and thousands of other people).

Back posts

I've backfilled some of the Europe-trip posts, which you can find if you click Europe trip (under Categories in the right column). I'm up to just before the bulls run on July 7. Still have to finish between then and Rome and fill in Rome, our personal audience with the pope (us and a few thousand other people), Paris, only one rude Parisian, the Eiffel Tower rigged with explosives, the night train (not a big fan and despite what the travel agent tells you, expect a co-ed compartment), Berlin, a train employee in Berlin from Spokane, Flensburg, and our departure from Copenhagen after a stay in the only dumpy, smelly hotel on our whole trip (and the only one, I'm chuffed to bits to say, that I didn't personally book).

She's still her

She didn't gain twenty pounds (she probably lost a few), her hair is not green or cut into a Basque-style mullett, no tattoos (but a pierced nose, albeit a tiny stud), and she's not an obnoxious snob who thinks everyone she left at home is a provincial buffoon. So, did Chloe change?

A little. Like my mom said after her visit in May, "She talks more." As in more conversation instead of sitting back and letting others do the talking. Last night we went to a Rotary picnic with about five returning exchange students and several who are getting ready to leave. The returnees were asked to briefly talk about their experiences and give advice to the outbound students and their parents. Chloe was second up, she didn't hesitate to address the group, and no one had to ask her to speak louder. After the next girl spoke, Chloe asked if she could say one more thing: Speak. As in speak your new language as much as possible and forget about sounding stupid. That, for her, is a big change. Before, she would have addressed the group if asked but she would have been uncomfortable and nervous. And she would have never volunteered to speak again after her obligation had been discharged.

The changes are subtle and we'll never know exactly how this past year will shape her personality. She's much more at ease around people she doesn't know well. She'll ask a stranger for directions without balking. Because she went to "the best school in Pamplona" (according to a host father) and studied hard, she knows a lot more about world history, which gives her a deeper awareness of the world around her. She'd voluntarily take the map and plot our course (although maps were all but useless in Rome) and she navigated the subway systems with aplomb. And I let her with less than my usual amount of second-guessing. She's not the only one who changed.

These are simple things that on the surface are hardly worth mentioning but they indicate a, well, oh, hell. I'm too tired to work around the cliché: she's more self-assured. She's more compassionate because with experience comes the knowledge that there are many shades of gray to every story. She's more conscious of waste: water, electricity (although she was looking forward to not being crucified for leaving the light on when leaving a room), food, and space. And she's more horrified by bigotry because she'd rarely seen it up close and was shocked to hear it expressed openly and without apology.

But, like I told her before we left Pamplona as I tripped yet again over her shoes and dirty clothes on the floor of the room I alone was sleeping in, "You're still a pig." "Yeah - you didn't expect that to change, did you?"

We'll never all just get along

Being an exchange student is supposed to widen a person's perspective, make her realize that the world is not such a huge place, and that there are many different ways of doing things but that differences aren't necessarily bad, just different. Except in the case of washcloths. How can a large part of the world not use washcloths? Washcloths are a useful grooming aid but I tried to do without: "While in Rome . . ." and all that. Never again, however, will I travel without one. Cultural tolerance be damned in this case. Toothpaste and washcloths were among our most exciting Parisian purchases.

Before we came home I teased Chloe that she'd become quite the little bigot. She was talking about different versions of Spanish and half-jokingly shuddered and mentioned that they weren't "real" Spanish. Until then it hadn't occurred to me just how much America tries to be a nation of cultural sensitivity and makes more of an effort to be tolerant of differences than many other countries. Her comment about real Spanish wasn't original thinking - it's the opinion of many of her friends and families in Pamplona. During the year she'd also mentioned that she'd often hear derogatory comments about the African, Ecuadorian, and other immigrants who were employed mostly in service jobs. I heard one Spanish person explain her disdain for Mexicans because they were too dark, talked too slow, and most of them were dirty, and she was expressing a common opinion. The irony is that most people in America would, upon hearing her speak, assume she was Mexican. And there is always a fair amount of America-bashing and baiting to be heard in conversations. You can always tell a person itching to get into an argument about the shortcomings of America: he or she will work George Bush into the the first few sentences of the conversation.

Most kids who go on exchange are relatively open minded, but it can be a struggle to remain so in the frequent company of closed-minded companions.

Oh, my

If you want to get fully immersed back into one aspect of American culture, jump right into the deep end and go to Wal-Mart.

While standing among the hordes at San Fermín in Pamplona I realized that I, at 5 feet, 4 inches tall, am just about as tall as the average Spanish man. And we saw no fat Spaniards. Chloe was told that bulimia and anorexia are huge problems in Spain and many of the girls and women we saw support that theory (if you're bigger than a woman's size 10 don't plan on buying clothes in Spain). On average, the girls and women in Spain were thinner than in Rome and Paris, and much thinner than in Germany and Copenhagen. Lots of Chloe's friends didn't eat lunch (other than Chupa Chups) and she's spent the past year living with small, thin (too often scarily thin) people who walk everywhere and are in relatively good shape.

Which makes the people walking out of Wal-Mart leaning on their shopping carts full of Cheetos, cheap cookies, and extra-extra-large sweats as they lumber their way to their cars parked as close to the entrance as possible look like the cast of Dawn of the Gasping for Breath. It's quite a shock coming from a place where everyone is walking to the store to pick up the ingredients for that night's dinner to a place where people are shuffling behind a shopping cart full of enough food to feed the average neighborhood for the next two weeks. Not everyone who shops at Wal-Mart is morbidly obese and not everyone screams "One. Two. Don't-make-me-get-to-three" at their kids while shopping there. But it's been my experience that there is a higher percentage of those kinds of people there than at anywhere else I've ever shopped.

Chloe's come home from her year in Spain consciously aware of how much unnecessary crap we Americans eat, the sheer quantity of food we eat at the average meal, and how little exercise we incorporate into our day-to-day lives. There is no getting around the fact that we Americans are much fatter than the citizens of almost any other nation. Fat-acceptance aside, the only explanation is that we simply eat too much and exercise too little.

It would be logical for Chloe, a sixteen-year-old girl, to come home obsessed with being thin at any cost, but instead she's come home much more aware of the dangers of eating disorders and she's both worried and repulsed by the sight of too-thin girls and women. Rather, she's come home concerned with being healthy, which means eating right and walking more. We'll see if that translates to walking to and from the ferry (a shorter distance than she walked to school in Pamplona) rather than getting a ride every day.

Worth the trip

Because this is my favorite comment - in French-accented, hesitant English - from the last few days:

To read a translation is to view a picture from behind.

This from a man in a suit with a briefcase in the Gard du Nord as we were waiting for our night train to Berlin. He was reading the new Harry Potter (Chloe so wanted to buy it, but I didn't pre-order it from Amazon UK months ago just so she could buy it in Paris and then schlep it around Europe). Because the book was in English, we asked him if it was good so far. We were surprised when he answered with difficulty in English. That's when he told us why he had the English version.

We had to check out of our hotel at noon, so we had lots of time to kill before our train left at 8:30 pm. We lugged our stuff to a taxi stand (apparently French taxis do not come to you - you must go to them) and had him take us to the train station so we could leave our luggage and explore for the rest of the day. There was lots of security and lots of beggars, a few quite aggressive, wandering the train station (everyone is still nervous after the London bombings on July 7).

The left-luggage line this time was also quite long and made even longer because we had to wait because there were no empty lockers. So, no one could leave anything until someone first came back to retrieve the luggage they'd left. Once again a woman crowded in front. I watched her as she quickly and quietly moved in front of people and rapidly made her way to the front of the line. When she stepped in front of the back-packing party in front of us (they were next to go, and we'd been waiting nearly an hour), they were confused. I helpfully explained that she'd been cutting in line for the last five minutes. They told her No in English and German, and she answered in French. They told her No in French (again, my mono-language slaps me in the face). Suddenly she speaks English enough to announce that the line is too long. Well, of course then. Please, take our place because the line is not too long for us, especially when we have no idea when the next party will come to claim their luggage, thus vacating space for our own. No problem, we're all standing patiently and politely because we have nothing else with which to occupy our time in the City of Light.

By the way, if anyone, usually a young woman with longish hair, no makeup, and a flowing skirt, approaches you and says, "Excuse me, do you speak English?" your answer is a blank stare as you keep walking forward, unless you want to get sucked in to a tale of woe that only you with your recently exchanged euros can fix.