Art of Travel

I guess as much as I try to deny it, in many ways I am a habit person. And when I get in a bad habit, I sort of get stuck there. Or when I need to do something that really isn't hard, I put it off as much as I possibly can, which ends up being a ridiculous amount of putting off. The best example that comes to mind is the fact that I still don't have Microsoft Word on my computer, after one and a half years. So instead of buying it or finding some sort of solution, every time I have a paper I write it on TextEdit, and spent an extra, I'd say 5-10 minutes reformatting my paper at an NYU computer lab. When I think of it, this is really silly. How many papers have I written, and how much time have I wasted? Another thing is my organization with school, which is plahguhgdkrghjsldhea terrible. I end up with everything, for all of my courses in one big pile of looseleaf--handouts, notes, readings, papers, tests, all of it. Why can't I find a system that works? And the sad part--I honesly believe, at the beginning of each semester, that THIS TIME WILL BE different. Of course it is not. I still have faith in next semester. I always have a bigger faith about the next semester to come. Anyway, what I am getting at is that I got into a bad, bad habit with this course of not turning things in on time, and now here I am turning something in that was due months ago. It's just a late open topic post:

Wakeboarding on my last day in Argentina
Towards the end of my time in Buenos Aires, I started getting excited to come home to all the familiar places, language, food etc. Now that I am finally home however, there is so much from Argentina that I miss. Argentina is an amazing country, and I am so happy that I chose to study there above all other places. The most rewarding aspect of the experience for me was meeting people from different places. I became very good friends with a group of guys from Costa Rica who were studying in Buenos Aires, and learned so much from them about the Spanish language. They lived in my building, so they taught me how to cook food from Costa Rica every once in a while, and I also became close with many of their other friends. Knowing locals was so crucial to my study abroad experience because, once I met them and started doing non-touristy things with people other than NYU students for once; I really started to feel like I was living there. They took us to clubs where they knew everyone and therefore got us in free, drove us to cool places outside the city that are difficult to get to without a car, and on my last day, took me wakeboarding I Tigre, a small water town outside the city. It was very ironic because before I met these guys, I went on the school day trip to Tigre in which we spent the day on a tour boat. Towards the end of the day we saw a small group of wake boarders. About two months later I was in the same river, but this time in the wakeboard boat complaining about the amount of space the tour boats take up in the narrow river. I no longer felt like the stupid American tourist, but I felt like I was a part of Buenos Aires society, and it felt much more like I belonged there.

I think this course is a great course to take while you are abroad. I like that it is online because, with all the other stuff we have going on all over the world, we can usually find an internet connection so it isn’t too hard to complete assignments while traveling. On the other hand, I wish we had received a syllabus at the beginning of the semester with every blog topic and due date so we could have time to plan out each post. I feel like a lot of times we didn’t get the assignment until Thursday or Friday for a post due on Monday, which made me feel very rushed in decided what to write about. So many of our assignments were based on observation and analysis, that I wish I could have had the time to write about something I really wanted to write about, instead of scrambling and writing about the first thing I saw. It was also difficult to get the assignments done on this short notice when there was a reading involved. For one I am a very slow reader and need more than a few days to read a novel, and for another, there were some instances where I received the assignment after I left the city at the end of the week and left the book in my apartment. Other than the syllabus issues however, I think this course was very valuable for my abroad experience. I think I learned a lot by examining certain aspects of Argentina that I would not have noticed without writing a post about them.

It's difficult to say what exactly I got out of this trip. Of course, like any time in life, I got a number of things, definable and undefinable alike. Right now, more than anything, I feel like I made some solid friendships and learned much, much more Spanish. Of course, nothing turned out like I planned, just like any situation in which you plan things. I had all these little exciting plans which I failed on. I don't really feel sad about this, or glad, just kind of silly for having planned them. They were little things, like "I'm going to take a dance class," "I'm going to volunteer no matter what," "I'm going to floss everyday" and "I'm going to try to read the paper everyday." I know those are trivial, but I get excited about things like that and I sort of let myself down on that level. I think I made up for it though, or something, on other unexpected levels, mainly the social level. In my time at NYU I've sort of been a hater, and really didn't make many friends before being here (especially because I never dormed, and always lived with my boyfriend.) I really didn't want to have much to do with the NYU social life, since I'm weird and skeptical about college life in general, but by the end of last year I felt sort of silly and bad about this. The group here in Buenos Aires is really great (I think), and, I guess it's sort of ironic, but more than anything, I'll be leaving BA with good friends in New York.

Dogwalkers: photo courtesy of my dad Phil. He could not get over the ratio of dogs to dogwalkerWhen I was reading the De Botton piece “On Habit” I was intrigued by his notion of the “traveling mindset.” His idea that, as travelers, we “carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting,” and “irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be unremarkable small details” (242). After reading this, I took a step back and reflected on my experiences here as well as other traveling I have done in the past. I can recall many times in the past when I have behaved like this: stopping on every corner in London to take a picture of something, sitting in the car while my father drove 15 mph under the speed limit in the Bahamas so he could look at everything we passed, running around San Miguel, Mexico and pointing and staring at the Corona bottling plant and every street sign or poster I was proud to understand in Spanish. As I reflect on my time in Buenos Aires however, I have trouble recalling too many instances where I was stopped in my tracks to examine some detail. The first time I noticed my lack of attention to these foreign things was when my parents came to visit me in October. Immediately after they arrived I decided to take them around the corner to a café for a bite to eat and then walk up to Soho to do some shopping. Within seconds of leaving the building (which actually took two tries because the first time we tried to leave, my mom shut the door behind her, leaving my father locked inside behind the front door. Not until we got to the corner did my mom and I realize that my dad was missing, and we had to double back and unlock him), my parents each had a camera out and stopped about every 3-5 steps to take a picture of anything from an old building, the sidewalk, or a couple making out against a taxi.

my bedroom
In reading this chapter, I was attracted to the idea, put forth by Nietzsche, of making a lot out of a little. Travel has a lot to offer, but it does have its flaws. The criticism that one hears most frequently about travel is that it’s a sort of passive stimulation, in which people (who have a sufficient amount of money) place themselves into a new environment, and allow things to happen to them, for adventures to take them away from themselves. While I don’t necessarily agree with this, I can see how it would encourage that mindset. For me, travel is a very active enterprise, and yet I recognize within it the passivity involved in visiting a foreign culture.

The inclination towards boredom is something that every person has to deal with, and something that I, personally, really reject in myself. Boredom, for me, is a sort of moral failing, representing mental atrophy. No matter where you are, you should always be able to find something interesting, or something worth thinking about. If you can’t, that probably has more to do with you than with your location. Thus, the idea of making a lot out of little.

As for myself, I can’t say that I would prefer to stay in my room, over, say, taking a trip on the Amazon. At the same time, I think that there is something to be said for staying in one’s room, figuratively if not literally. Travel can help us learn how to do this successfully, by rendering the familiar unfamiliar, and by instilling within us the instinct for observation. Just as Ruskin advocated drawing constantly, so as to promote a more complete knowledge of one’s surroundings, the continual feeling of alienation that one deals with abroad can foster a critical approach to one’s surroundings. With the right attitude, a street in New York City, or even in one of the small towns of America, can have as much to offer as any street in Paris.

I’m really glad that I can say that my study abroad experience is not yet over! But at this halfway point, it’s definitely valuable to take a critical step back, and to think about the past three months, and of the months ahead. First of all, I am so glad that I went through with this. I literally couldn’t be happier. Okay, you can always be happier, but living in Paris is proving to be one of the best decisions of my life. The most rewarding aspect of the experience, I would say, is the way that this trip has challenged me. It has forced me to be more flexible, more adventurous, and more independent. It has also made me less shy, and more responsible.
au revoir les enfants
Ultimately, these are the things I will take away from my trip. At the same time, I find rewards all around me, every day. Somehow, despite living here for over three months, I am still able to get pleasure out of simple acts of discovery and moments of serendipity. I honestly can’t say that I’ve faced any major problems. Homesickness was not an issue, and I have a group of very good friends, who have really helped to make this experience so enjoyable.
More than anything, I hope that years from now I’ll remember the state I’m in emotionally and psychologically, as a condition of contentment that is possible, and which I will probably be working to recapture for the rest of my life. I feel that my happiness is literally a product of my locale, and can’t imagine that I can possibly feel the same way when I’ve moved back to New York. Somehow, I know my anxieties and neuroses will return, and life will quickly become a lot more complicated…that’s how it works in New York City.

hmmm

feast
My Thanksgiving was probably the craziest Thanksgiving I’ve had yet. Usually the holiday is a quiet sort of affair, but mine ended up turning into quiet a party. The holiday began when, at four in the afternoon that day, my friend and I met at the Marche St-Eustache des Halles. We were planning on cooking up a huge dinner that night, and so had a long list of groceries to buy. We spent an hour or so going from stall to stall, and walked away with an enormous amount of food, including cheeses, baguettes, apples, spinach, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, nuts and olives, marshmallows and a whole rotisserie chicken. A second run was needed for the wine, and while my friend was out, I set about cooking. I sautéed onions, stuffed peppers, fried mushrooms, cooked spinach, and stuffed apples for about three hours.
My two friends returned, and it was at this point that things began to get complicated. With the oven going full blast, music playing, and the lights turned out, our fuse had gotten overheated. It began to short out, at increasingly frequent intervals, and, with only a half an hour before guests were due to arrive, we were feeling a little desperate. One of my friends peeled potatoes by candlelight, while I cooked the mushrooms with a flashlight cradled against my shoulder. Somehow, though, we pulled through, and the lights were back in working order as people began to show up.

Though it hasn't always been easy for me to get my posts in on time this semester, I have thoroughly enjoyed participating in this class. Blogging about my travel experiences has helped me reflect on what has been significant about my four months here and what it means to be a traveler or an expatriate.
I truly wish that I had more time to read all of my peers posts and comment on all of them but I have faced typical Ghana restrictions (time, faulty internet, power outages etc.)
Most of all, this class has sparked my interest in the field of Place Studies, a discipline previously unknown to me. As someone who has traveled extensively and experienced many foreign cultures and had to adapt each time, studying and thinking about what it means to be a tourist, a traveler and an outsider. I've also discovered what it takes to make myself somewhat of an insider, especially here in Ghana. It has been difficult, needless to say. No matter how perfectly I speak Twi or know Accra, I am white and therefore will never blend in. That being said, in Accra there is a difference between an "obruni" who has just arrived and an "obruni" who has been living in Ghana for a while. I've come to feel like the latter.
I've also enjoyed being able to share my anecdotes and experiences with family and friends through my blog and not spending hours trying to verbalize in an expensive phone call. I am inspired to write a travel blog whenever I spend time traveling, for myself and for my loved ones.
De Botton was fabulous and I recommend the text be used for this class in the future. I'll miss feeling the pressure to find an internet connection and write my blog and pour out my frustrations and excitement.
Steve, you've been incredibly helpful and understanding when I have had issues with the website etc. I look forward to meeting you in New York next semester!