wander holidays

okay, y’all. i’m just going to go ahead and apologize for the delay in this blog post.. it’s been a long time coming. i haven’t posted all year (ba dum, tsss) and i have no excuse except for the fact that i traveled for 20 days straight over the holidays and couldn’t really sit down at a random computer to start blogging. soo…

happy new year! it’s 2014!! i can’t believe it.. i feel like new year’s 2013 was just like 6 weeks ago… i really need to get my internal calendar sorted. i’ve been out of the country for over 4 months, and i’ll be home just over 4 months from now! ay caramba.

in the interest of not making this post a total “captain’s log” of my travels, i give you a bridget jones version of my holiday season saga. (if you want the longer version, feel free to read below!)

          days elapsed: 20

          countries visited: 3

          cities visited: 9

          friends visited: 14

          friends made: 16

          modes of transportation used: plane (4), train (4), bus (11), car (many)

          party games played: 4

          presents: given – 6 // received – 5

          cups of tea consumed: innumerable

          most interesting experience: england – singing christmas carols on the train to 

          cambridge with a bunch   of mildly-intoxicated football hooligans // 

          ireland – partying until nearly dawn with a different bunch of 

          slightly-more-than-mildly-intoxicated couchsurfing buddies

okay, that’s enough of that. here’s the longer version!

basically, i spent the first week of my break (well, tuesday through saturday) getting to the place where i’d be spending christmas – six cities in six days, and it was a whirlwind. excideuil, bordeaux, nantes, dublin, london, cambridge! i had a blast visiting friends in each of my stops along the way – several of whom i hadn’t seen since 2011! crazy! the highlight of that week was probably my pit stop in london. i hung out with my first-ever couchsurfing host, tristan, and got to see the beauty that is london at christmas. plus, i finally got my picture at platform 9 3/4. so, i got that going for me.

arriving in cambridge was a welcomed respite – i was really looking forward to sleeping in the same bed for more than one night! i spent the week with two dear friends from home – cameron and carly. if you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might remember them from my time in scotland back in september! they spent this fall semester in cambridge as a part of a seminary exchange program between westcott house in cambridge and sewanee, back in tennessee. we visited several of the major colleges in town, decorated our makeshift christmas tree, attended multiple anglican masses (including christmas eve midnight mass and christmas morning mass, a scant 8 hours apart), cooked several lovely meals, shopped a little, and celebrated our first christmas away from home, together as friends abroad. it was a wonderful way to enjoy the holiday – i was so grateful to have a little bit of home with me here in europe! :)

the next week and a half of my vacation was spent in varying parts of ireland. i moved around so much in the first few days! one night in dublin, two nights in cork, one night in galway, and then i finally landed in clare for new year’s! the weekend in cork was an absolute blast – one of the best couchsurfing experiences i’ve had to date. my host and his friends were the epitome of hospitality and i felt right at home from the very beginning. i mean.. i was jokingly (but maybe not?) invited to their friend’s wedding in brazil next summer after having been at the house for like 6 hours. typical. a weekend was not long enough in cork; i can’t wait to go back and explore the city a little more! a quick pit stop in galway allowed me to visit with my friend emma and her family before i headed back down to clare to relax for a few days at my friend shane’s house. we essentially had a 4 day house party, with varying groups of friends coming to hang out each night! i always love getting to spend time in that house – it’s so wonderful to be in a family environment! warms the soul. and our new year’s eve was the perfect mix of relaxing and entertaining – and by that, i mean i got to wear comfy clothes and not worry about braving the elements outside, while still partying it up with my friends! my last night in ireland was spent in wonderful company, wandering around dublin and soaking in that fantastic irish charm. this break really reinforced my desire to move to ireland in the very near future.. might have even started researching grad school options! shh, don’t tell my parents.

i finally, finally made it back home to my little village on sunday, after spending the night in bordeaux after my flight. living in a place with no train station (or even bus access on the weekends) makes getting in and out fairly difficult, but thankfully i have friends at each step in the journey that make traveling much more enjoyable! now that i’m home and can reflect on this break, i have to admit.. i probably overdid it a little bit. my life here in excideuil is so relaxing and laid-back that my vacations are actually more demanding and stressful than my work weeks! next break, i’m going to focus on one country (morocco!!) in the hopes of giving myself more time to enjoy fewer places. and i might even take a week off from travel planning before i launch myself into that new endeavor! vacationing is hard work, y’all.

i hope that you had a wonderful holiday season, and that 2014 brings you all the happiness and adventure that you can imagine! wander on, my friends!

*as always, if you’d like to see pictures from this post, just click here (starting at #29)!*

what's in a date?

all day, i’ve been contemplating the concept of time and the significance of its passage. and the irony of this post is not lost on me… a reflective post about reflection, how very meta of me. but truly, how strange a process it is!

today, more than other days, i’ve been preoccupied by the passage of time. it’s a topic that is never far from my mind; i’m an exceptionally nostalgic and sentimental person. i’ve always had a thing for dates, like birthdays, anniversaries, or just significant events. i know what day i donated my hair for the first time (april 25, 2002), i still know all of my would-be anniversaries with boyfriends-of-old (today being one), and i go out of my way to make countdowns and mark my calendars for future events. part of this obsession comes from an innate desire to see cycles completed. it’s not necessarily a compulsion, per se… but i really, really, really like to see things come full circle. for example, i began and ended my job at the public library in high school on august 7^th, 2006 and 2009, respectively. moments like that make my soul feel like the universe is working properly. i might have a psychological problem.

as i sit in my little french village, one question in particular has been plaguing me on this sunny fall day; is it more important to look back on your past and honour where you’ve  been, or to leave it behind and just look to the future and what lies ahead? as someone who is simultaneously extremely nostalgic and notorious for playing the “what if” game... how do i reconcile this contradiction in my spirit?

i want to learn from my past, of course.  and, even on a bigger scale, i love history. i love knowing that hundreds and thousands of years have rolled by, and that people have lived and worked and loved and died through them all. that’s why i have always wanted to live in europe – the history here is palpable… hell, the town where i’m living was mentioned in writing in 572 ad. richard the lion-hearted slept at the chateau. i’m living in history – i’m reminded of that every day, and i love it.

but at the same time… i’m a planner. i like knowing how things will play out – or, if i can’t know, i like to at least think about it. part of my INFJ-ness is that i like to think about every single possible outcome of any given situation so i can know all my options. (thanks, mrs. v, for teaching me about myers-briggs. changed my world!) that trait translates into spending hours looking at various travel options, researching tons of different potential career paths, browsing every aisle of whatever shop i might enter… it can be both a very rewarding and very frustrating tendency.

so, how do i break my habit of obsessing over dates? do i even want to break it? more than anything else, this year abroad was a way for me to ask myself some big questions and start working through the answers. is it better to just cut all ties? do i want to be the kind of person who holds on to the nostalgia and the history as the years go by?

at the end of the day, what’s more important… october 19, 2010 or october 19, 2016? even on this smaller scale… just a few years backward or forward. deciding which way to look is hard, especially when i’m trying to be here and live in 2013.

bureaucrazy

bureaucrazy: (n) the ridiculous number of administrative hoops one must navigate in order to legally reside in a new country; the gladiator games of paperwork

they say patience is a virtue. here in france, it’s more of a condescending expectation. if you think anything is going to happen here with any sense of urgency… you’re wrong. however, if you think that anyone else is going to get your paperwork done for you… you’re even more wrong. i’ve been trying so hard to maintain a healthy combination of persistence and patience since i’ve gotten to france, because it takes both to come out of the soul-sucking, nerve-frying, catch-22-riddled machine that is french bureaucracy with any modicum of sanity intact. i’ve been dancing an exasperating tango with the bureaucrazy here – one step forward, two steps back, side-step, complete spin, forward, back…. it honestly feels like i’ve made no progress at all, and it’s starting to get overwhelming. there is always some form missing from the application packet or some mysterious bank god that needs to approve some other form before the payment can go through or another step to complete before you can get that stamp on your visa… the list goes on.

it’s exceptionally challenging for me, since i’m someone that likes to be prepared. france has thoroughly unarmed, frustrated, and humbled me in this respect.  i suppose i shouldn’t be surprised – the only reason i’m here at all is because i had the rug pulled out from under all my carefully-laid plans last year, which prompted me to apply for this grant. so, i probably could have looked at that experience as an indicator for how this adventure was going to be. when little things add up, i sometimes have the tendency to let it get to me; i’m a pretty on-the-ball kind of girl, and i do well taking care of myself and what i need to get done. but if i get too far behind, or if the inefficiency of a process is too glaringly insurmountable, i can feel the panic start to settle into the pit of my stomach. i hate when things don’t work well and i can’t make it right. but, over the last few weeks, i have had a crash course in patience, humility, and just being able to let frustration slide off of me. with the way things are here, sometimes there really is just nothing to be done but wait. ugh.

if each governmental system in the world were to be represented by a famous architectural icon, france would be the coliseum. it’s renowned for the unbelievable detail and complexity of its structure; it’s run by a network of state officials that all take great pride in acting completely unconcerned with the needs of the plebeians they serve; it looks nice and pretty and organized from the outside, and the inside is a vicious labyrinth of dead-end websites, incomprehensible hours of operation, enough forms and paperwork to redecorate versailles, and a few man-eating beasts (probably). you can only do so much to be prepared – you can have every single form listed on the website (multiple copies), your passport, extra passport photos (the french need a passport photo for everything), your work contract, your lease, your bank account identification information, your second grade report cards, your dog’s immunization records….. it doesn’t matter. they’re going to need something you don’t have on the first visit. and then, once you do have everything they need, you have to mail it to them. and then they mail you something back saying they received it. and then, later, they mail you another form which tells you when your next appointment will be. and then, after that appointment, you get a stamp which allows you to move onto the next step. my point is, the process is literally never-ending. sometimes, i use that word as emphasis (and not in its original sense) – but this time, i mean that i’m pretty sure this process has no endpoint. there will always be something else. always. (i’ve had this confirmed by french friends, so i’m confident. and thoroughly disheartened at the thought.)

when i take a mental step back and look at the last few weeks, i can see that i’ve definitely have made some progress. i opened my bank account and received my card. i submitted all my forms for the immigration office and my dossier for my insurance. i’m on my way to having all my accommodation paperwork done (damn you, electric company) and my paychecks are set up for direct deposit. so, yay! i keep reminding myself that i am not the first person to ever go through this process – it can be done, it just takes time. and, ironically, time is what i have the most of here. today was the first day that i really felt the downswing of expatriation – the part of the process where the nice, shiny veneer of novelty is wearing off, and everything is just kind of wrong and annoying. but, those feelings are all part of the game, and having them means that i’m doing it right. so, instead of crying to the woman in the post office (who saw me three separate times today) like i wanted to do this evening, i just ate half a pan of apple cake and watched french game shows. that’s productive, right?