Lately I've been planning my upcoming trip to Europe, and the anticipation and excitement has reminded me of the very first time I left the country. It had always been a dream of mine, since about the sixth grade, to go to Paris. From the very start, I loved my middle-school French classes... Our teacher was the fantastic Madame Sloan. She made France sound exotic and lively and fun, and I always think of her massive crush on "Monsieur Robert Redford." A few years later, one of the classes had the opportunity to travel there, but I was just too young and none of my little friends were going. But I loved French, I learned French, I could speak it, write it, read it, and even used to dream in French. I think eventually I had studied francais for 9 years...
And then one fine day I turned 30. I had been working full time and going back to college nights and weekends to finish another degree and change careers. The week before my birthday, I had seen a posting on a bulletin board at school for a ten-day tour of France with an art history professor. This was going to be my present to myself. I signed up, all alone, but with this wonderful group of people who took me in from our very first meeting. People told me their life stories on the long plane ride over, invited me to sit with them for meals, and hopped into pictures with me at every important landmark.
I remember our orientation bus ride around Paris, right after dropping our bags at the hotel, the very first thing we saw was the Eiffel Tower... in the rain. But it was immense and amazing and beautiful, and I was hooked. Luckily, the rest of our trip was blue skies and bright sunshine, and I loved absolutely everything about Paris... the architecture, the art, the flower boxes everywhere, the museums, the cathedrals. I had never experienced anything like it.
I kept a travel journal, and wrote excitedly every night before bed, of all the things we did and saw and experienced. I took a ton of photographs, of everything. The streets, the people, the gardens, you name it. When I remember this trip though, it's the little moments that I don't have on film which are some of the most vivid. Like the night that some friends and I lay in the grass on the long lawn that stretches out at the base of the Eiffel, and we would laugh and put our forefinger and thumb together, as if we were pinching the tower between our fingers. We tried and tried to take a picture of our feet and the tower, because from that distance and perspective, they seemed to be the same size, if you can imagine that. But it was dusk, and none of those photos turned out. But they are in my head, and it makes me laugh even now to think about that night. One of my friends celebrated a birthday while we were there, and we bought her a rum and Coke, which I think cost us something like eighteen dollars, but at the time we were far too excited to do the math.
I signed up again the following summer and went back to France with the same professor. This time I took my mom, who had just broken her foot! But she hobbled along those cobblestone streets like a trooper (thanks mom!). I lost my travel journal on that trip, the one with all my stories from the year before. You can't imagine how that felt... But I still have the pictures. Twenty-some rolls of film (yes, film), which remind me of a brave girl with a dream and a passport, and how beautiful and amazing this wide world can be. And that I want to see all of it.
(click photos for full size)
A side note to you, my loyal few: Thank you. Thank you for taking a few minutes of your time to read this, or just to look at my photos. I appreciate that. I know there are a lot of things screaming for your attention on the web. And I may or may not have anything enlightening to say, some days, who knows. But I do hope you like my pictures. And maybe every once in a while I will make you smile too. Or make you want to write something, or share something, or go somewhere you've never been.
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