Tag Archives: travel

Packing is hell.

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As I write this, our apartment looks an unholy mess. My desk is overflowing with books and papers, pens and knickknacks. Our furniture has been sold and given away, and piles of books, clothing, papers, and belongings sit directly on the floor. So many things are seemingly too relevant to throw away, but not important enough to fit in a few small suitcases.

That’s right. We’re on the move again. I have mixed feelings about all this, the chiefest of which is…

Tired, because we just got back from a four-day weekend trip to DC, where we got in quality hangout time with two sets of friends, visited the National Air and Space Museum, and applied for 10 year-Chinese visas at the embassy. We’re also packing everything up, of course, and selling and giving away what we’re not packing/ storing. We’ve done a good job of getting rid of things, so that moving isn’t the exact hellish experience it has been before, but it’s still bad enough to make Steve throw up his hands in the middle of everything, and exclaim that we should just give it all away.

Excited, because I’m pursuing some job opportunities in Taipei (the holy land). Out of a desire not to jinx anything or overcount my chickens, I won’t talk too much about it, but it seems like it may actually be possible to get that perfect trifecta: to work in education evaluation and work, live in Taipei, and be paid a decent salary. We’ll cross our fingers for now…

Sad, because we’re leaving Durham. It’s been a good home for two years if lacking the excitement and hum of the big city like Chicago or L.A. or even Boston. I will more than miss all the friends I’ve made at school in the past two years, but even if I were to stay here, it won’t be the same. What I will ache for sometimes is walking into an airy, vibrant, bright building where friends sit around every corner, and I can poke my head into a dozen offices to say hi to someone I know. I will miss all the opportunities to work on fun things, to make changes for our cohort, program, and university. I will miss running into professors and staff and PhD students who care about the same things that I do too.

More emotions on the way, but sleepiness is taking over. In four days, we’ll be out of here and to Greenville for a few weeks to regroup. I’ll write more then!

Northward on the Crescent.

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Written Wednesday, December 30 – On the Amtrak Crescent (northbound)

Heading out of New Orleans, Louisiana
7:18 am

The Crescent leaves New Orleans in the morning at 7 am, so I made my way to the train station under cover of darkness. I hailed a cab at the hotel and kissed my mom goodbye. I emerged into the train station to find a long line. I found a comfy place on the train, moving several times to ensure there was a wide window view for the trip north. Altogether, the trip to Greenville, South Carolina takes about 15 hours if you take into account the time change between Central and Eastern standard times. We pass through half a dozen states on the way. Continue reading Northward on the Crescent. →

Winter travel beckons…

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November is when North Carolina’s climate deepens into autumn. On the edge of winter, the weather is chilled, but often brightened and warmed by sunshine. The other night, I ventured outside to walk the dog, and saw my breath in the air for the first time! Most days, I wear long-sleeved shirts and a jacket to bike to school. This is a long, long way away from Taiwan this summer. When we returned to North Carolina, I was thankful for every day of low humidity that we were given, and felt I could genuinely feel the difference with every lungful of air I took.

Though it’s not quite wintertime yet, winter travel is on the horizon. Like last winter, my mother and I are once more heading south. We’re opting for another cruise, the relative convenience of being able to just jump on a boat and go where they take us being too much to forsake! This year, we will take a cruise leaving from New Orleans on December 20, and make stops at Cozumel and Costa Maya, both in Mexico, Belize City, Belize, and Roatan, Honduras. We’ll head back to New Orleans on December 27, and spend the next few days exploring the city, before heading back. I’m pretty excited about it all. Next year, I have a strong suspicion my mom will be visiting us in Southeast Asia for the holidays… Steve and I would love to go back to Thailand!

Before that, there’s a lot more to do, unfortunately. I have a master’s thesis proposal to defend, a final presentation, a final paper, and a final exam. Oh, and Thanksgiving and all that stuff too. Well, here’s to dreaming about travel…

When life gives you apples and cows, make cider and stinky cheese.

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When we arrived in Normandy, Murray and Julie half-apologetically told us that there was really very little in this part of the country except agriculture and dairy. And by agriculture, they meant apples. So cows and apples, for short. There are not really any vineyards (Burgandy) or chateaus (the Loire Valley) or skiing (Alps) or even glamorous beaches (Marseilles)… but that was fine with me. Having grown up in New England, I have a healthy respect for apples and cows and otherwise fairly austere pursuits. On the last day of our stay, Murray indulged us in what Normandy had to offer by taking us to a cidery, a small picturesque town, and getting us some of the stinkiest cheese in the world. Continue reading When life gives you apples and cows, make cider and stinky cheese. →

The dog days of Normandy.

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Summer is in full flower in Basse-Normandie, and it has brought the funniest weather I’ve ever seen. Murray and Julie joke that there’s no point to checking the weather forecast (or what the French call the météo), since it always has a bit of everything: we wake up to brisk and sunny mornings that quickly warm up to hot middays, and work through cloudy afternoons interspersed with drizzle against the windowpanes. It usually clears up in time for brilliant sunsets around 10 pm, and true darkness only descends after midnight. We’ve been keeping quite busy, with our animals and our work, but finding time somehow to admire the weather and the landscape around us. Continue reading The dog days of Normandy. →

Montchanin and the Chateau d’Eau.

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For the past week or two, I’ve been putting some heroic efforts toward recounting our journeys in early June with our friend Lele, but I’m giving that up for the moment to write a little about the past two days, because they were very special. France is made up of a lot of famous and romantic things, like the Louvre, love locks on the bridges of the Seine, and Roman aqueducts, but it has smaller, more intimate things too. My college classmate Sarah and her boyfriend Sam live and study in Cambridge, England, but they invited us to experience some of those smaller things this weekend. Sam’s family is French, from Haute-Savoie near the Swiss border, and his grandparents still live in the same town where his mother grew up, in Montchanin-les-Mines, or more commonly just called Monchanin.

On Friday morning, we took the TGV an hour north of Lyon, into the heart of Bourgogne (better known as Burgandy) excited about a short excursion into the French countryside, but unsure of what to expect. At the Le Creusot-Montceau TGV station, the train made a short stop before it proceeded on to Paris, and we got picked up by Sam and Sarah in the old blue Peugeot. Ten minutes away, we turned into a street in Montchanin by the impressive name of Impasse de Chateau d’Eau, and were welcomed by Sam’s grandparents. Continue reading Montchanin and the Chateau d’Eau. →

A roosting pigeon.

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I’m writing a very quick post from the magical land of Paris before I blast off for one more day here. Why is it magical? It must be because there is a roosting pigeon not one meter away from me. Outside the tiny balcony of my friend Dan’s apartment in the north of Paris, in the small sheltered space formed by the corner of the wall and the opened shutters of the balcony doors, a pigeon whom Dan has nicknamed Madame Verdurin is currently roosting with her two (or more) white eggs. Madame Verdurin herself is a character from Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a doorstopper of a novel which I’ve not had the honor to read yet, and this avian namesake of hers is one of the small things about Paris that is charming.

Magical it is in other realms as well — I have liked this city much better than I thought I was going to. Many nations’ capitals are busy, dirty, frustrating, expensive, and too big for comfort. Paris is quite a few of those things, and most definitely expensive, but at the same time, it is really quite beautiful too. We have been roaming, walking, eating, and seeing things non-stop. Steve and I are practically asleep on our poor feet these days, and fatigue sets in so easily. If I lived in a novel of the late 1800s, my acquaintances would say that I had a run-down constitution and needed to go out to the countryside for a few weeks’ rest and recuperation. Luckily, neither of us have gotten sick, but we are certainly heading back to Lyon tomorrow with a sense of relief. Continue reading A roosting pigeon. →

Have you ever seen the rain coming down on a sunny day?

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Since we got back to Zagreb, the skies have opened up. We were dreaming of spending happy afternoons walking everywhere in this fine city, enjoying beers and sandwiches in the parks here, newly greened under trees with their spring foliage, but were only able to do it once, thanks to the frequent showers. Despite that, however, it has been a joy to be back here in this city, which is blessedly flat in comparison to Dubrovnik. We even saw a corgi two days ago, which Steve and I both regard to be the height of auspicious signs.

Drawing tulips with my new supplies!

To briefly illustrate our (mostly boring) activities this past week, we’ve been doing housekeeping and shopping, catching up on the things that we’ve been too busy to take care of these past months. I found a great art supply store half a block from our apartment and went on a shopping splurge, buying a real watercolor pad with heavy watercolor paper (the kind that’s 300 g/m^2), three brushes of varying sizes and shapes, and even blank watercolor postcards so I can draw some scenes for those at home. Price tag? $30 USD. Watercolors have turned out to be a great hobby to pick up — it appeals to my sense of creativity and the steep learning curve has taught me a lot, from how to mix colors to using perspective (something I haven’t done since Mr. Harris’s 8th grade art class) and how to hold a brush. But more importantly, since I find a lot of inspiration in our surroundings, it makes for a beautiful record of our time here. I have to thank Steve’s best friend Andrew, who is an awesome designer, for giving me a push and nudge in that direction!  Continue reading Have you ever seen the rain coming down on a sunny day? →

On travel.

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Long term travel is like a marathon. Now I haven’t actually run any sort of race in my life (not even a 5K) so you know, take it at face value. But from what I’ve learned about exercise and how to push yourself, my take on it is that it is a mental challenge as much as it is a physical one.

I am reflecting on what it means to be traveling for a whole year (when it already feels like it’s been half a year) thanks to a video I first watched several years ago. Christophe Rehage, a German, documented a year of walking through China from Beijing to Urumqi on his camera, and stitched the scenes together with two lovely songs (“L’Aventurier” and “橄榄树/ The Olive Tree”) in French and Chinese.

As crazy as a year around the world sounds, I feel like our plan is a lot more tame than Christophe’s, because we’re not actually sleeping under the stars or trekking 30 km a day on foot. But the mental journey is similar. On his blog, he wrote about what pushed him to do this journey and why he stopped. He originally planned to trek from Beijing all the way to Bad Nenndorf, where he grew up in Germany, but he called it off a year in for personal reasons. He talked about how he looks so free and unfettered on the road, in the desert and under the sky, but how he was also just living by a set of rules that he had constructed about his trip. Occasionally, he felt like even taking a short bike ride and not walking every single step was cheating. Sometimes living under a different set of rules is freeing, and sometimes, you just have to put yourself into a really different environment or frame of mind to discover that there are elements of yourself or elements of life that you can’t escape.

Continue reading On travel. →

Overthinking It: the science of packing.

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Like many travelers, we have discovered the truth of packing light; there’s something about travel or when the rubber hits the road (no pun intended whatsoever) that makes you prioritize about your luggage. No matter how little you pack, you end up making it work and what’s more, there will always be something you don’t end up using. When Steve and I were contemplating our choice of travel luggage, Erin, our BFF and dogmother to Stella, was the first to advise us not to purchase a large backpack, because we would simply fill it. So I got a 46 liter Osprey Porter,  and Steve got the 22″ Osprey Meridian, which have both been great!

Rolled up clothing in my Osprey Porter.

A few days, while we were getting ready to go to Shanghai, I was worried over the issue of how to fit my birthday presents (a beautiful green windbreaker/ raincoat and two new dresses) into my bag. Steve was also packing, albeit carefully rolling his pants and shirts into small cylinders. I knew he had a theory about this sort of thing, but wasn’t too clear on it, and as I watched him pile his clothing this way on compile all of his clothing this way, I couldn’t resist asking: why does rolling your clothing save more space?

Continue reading Overthinking It: the science of packing. →