I was surprised at how relieved I felt when I got closer and realized that this angel, too, was not who I was searching for.
Category: Travel
please, don’t try to impress me
Online dating allows you to meet people outside of your usual social circle. I was curious about the apps that had developed since the last time I was single, so … Continue reading please, don’t try to impress me
the price of travel
If I truly wanted to travel the world, all the blog posts tell me what I should do… Frankly, I can’t do that.
a castle in colorado
“Maybe government regulations aren’t such a terrible thing,” I pondered as the breeze ruffled the Christmas lights at my feet.
Six Months: A Photo Dump
Just over six months ago, I shook hands with Sally Mason and turned the tassel at my commencement ceremony. Here is an obviously classy picture of Michelle and I to show our excitement with our empty folders.
Just about three months ago, that empty folder finally was filled with my diploma and certificate.
In between these two events, I used another very important document. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t go back to Europe until I saw either California or New York – it was a shame that I knew another continent better than my own country. I’ve kept that promise… I just went to New Zealand instead.
In the four months since returning from a month wandering around Narnia, I’ve been doing a lot of coffee-things. Trying out the new position of manager at my coffee shop: admin work, fixing broken machinery, training staff and trying to learn more myself, geeking out at roasteries, writing a new menu, getting cafe crushes when I travel.
Oh, yeah, I’ve been traveling, too. Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Wisconsin. I may not have made it to the coasts yet, but I’m finally learning my own Midwest through weekend excursions.
And learning, lots of learning. Audiobooks when I’m in the car, print books when I’m in the library, even trying my hand at learning how to code when I’m on my computer. Note, I said trying. Regardless, I’m tickled to have the mental energy to learn about things just because.
Life’s kinda cool, you know?
Just a cup of coffee
I’ve spent essentially the entirety of my working years in the service industry, and the last two years have been in a coffee shop.
I adore coffee. I adore working in a coffee shop. The smells, the customers, my shiny machines, the constant education and only sort of joking snobbery. Techniques and questions and critiques and striving for better, more elaborate, more wonderful. Working in a shop like this is the discovering of a craftsmanship.
But you know what?
Sometimes I just want a cup of coffee.
Sometimes I want to rise in the wee hours of the morning and instead of bustling about to open up the shop, I want to savor the sunrise with steam tendrils rising from my mug of coffee. One of my favorite memories took place about three years ago with such a moment.
Mariah was working at a camp out in Colorado for the summer, and some of my friends decided we should go visit her. Four vehicles, 24 twentysomethings, and a 14 hour drive later, we found ourselves breathing in the fresh mountain air, sipping from the streams, and marveling at the expanse around us. We only stayed for a day and a half before whirling back around for another 14 hour drive, but those days were precious to me.
It was my last weekend with my Des Moines friends before moving to ‘enemy territory’, as my home town referred to the University of Iowa. My last hours with people I loved, and we were traveling together. We went swing dancing under the stars, big band music blasting from car speakers. We watched a meteor shower from the warmth of a hot tub. We climbed mountains.
But my favorite moment was early in the morning. I’d finally slept and rose before the sun. I made myself a cup of coffee and sat outside on the porch, watching the sky lighten and wrapped in a blanket against the cool air. Sipping that coffee, I was at peace. Uncertain of the future, but content in the moment with my friends spread out all over the house still dozing.
That is what I miss about life outside of the coffee shop: the ability to pause and drink a cup for pleasure and not critique every sip. I miss summer mornings, sitting with fellow early risers and quietly taking in the beauty of the world around us with a mug warming our hands. Basking in the fellowship and enjoying the aromatics rather than being distracted by them.
I don’t know how I’ve let myself get so distracted, so caught up in feeling antsy or the idea that something else is important to forget to savor the early mornings. The solitude, or partnership. I find my mind constantly racing, trying to solve puzzles for work or figure out the big What’s Next question, or do the math to see how soon I can pay off my debts. When I get bored, I get dangerous – when I get bored, I buy plane tickets.
I think I need to stay still. Not for boredom, but stillness. I think what I really need is just a cup of coffee and the great outdoors.
And she lived happily ever after
My first marriage proposal took place in the wee hours of the morning on the streets of Florence in April 2012.
I was wandering around Europe after my semester in Germany ended and found myself tagging along with some near-strangers to a new city in Italy. On that first day, I was able to get a hostel but was warned that it was booked the following night. “No matter,” I thought to myself and began to sing, “Just a small town girl… living in a LONELY wooooorld. She took the midnight train going aaaaaanywheeeeeere.”
Eleven o’clock rolls around, and my mobile phone hasn’t been allowing me to make calls all day. We wander back to the hostel, exhausted, and I go to check if there are any rooms available. No. Well, my friends have a private room. Can I pay to stay there? No. Are there any other hostels in this area? You don’t know. Okaaaay…
I picked up my bright red suitcase and made my way on foot to the nearest train station, only to discover that the tickets to purchase machines were locked inside the building. With no smartphone and little sense of direction, I began an hour and a half trudge in the dark hours of a Saturday night towards the main train station, getting turned around, staring at bus maps, and starting again. I stopped at several hotels along the way, but everything was full. Finally, the main station came into sight and my relief quickly turned to horror when I realized that not only was I locked out of the building, but out of the tracks.
The homeless population was lined up along the side of the building, so I double checked that all my money and forms of ID were separated and hidden, and laid down to try sleep outside. A construction worker woke me up after a few minutes because he needed to work at my wall space, so I shuffled further down. By this point, I had been awake for about 20 hours, so I quickly passed out again. This also didn’t last long, as a woman woke up and started yelling at me in Italian. Bewildered, I stared at her and she shuffled off. I lay back down to sleep, and was once again awakened by a small, middle-aged man, also yelling. He, however, realized that I didn’t speak Italian.
“Oh, oh, uh, sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he pleaded.
“Ja!” I responded, ecstatic. German, I could get. Sort of.
The man, clearly homeless, went on to tell me that some young men had been trying to steal my suitcase. “But I told them, ‘no’! You leave her alone! I’ll call the police!” Sleep-deprived, when he told me that we needed to get away from the train station, I thought it was a good idea to follow him. After about two blocks, I finally realized what I was doing and that I was about to get lost.
“I’m going to find a hotel,” I told him, still mumbling in German, and knowing full well that all the hotels were booked. He argued with me, and kept offering to carry my suitcase or backpack. I shook my head and went to the nearest hotel, praying he wouldn’t follow me.
“It will be expensive!” he argued, and looked altogether too pleased when I was turned away.
“Look,” I told him. “I’ll be fine. Please don’t follow me.”
“Are you and your boyfriend fighting?” he changed tactics. “Is that why you’re traveling alone?”
At this point, I was single, but as many women in our culture often do, I quickly invented a fella who was stationed abroad – naturally, this is why I was traveling alone.
My Italian guide looked crestfallen. “Oh,” he sighed, and continued, “You see, my wife and I are divorced, and I was hoping you would be my frau!”
With this tempting offer under my belt, I quickly excused myself and found a rank, shadowed corner on a one-way street and huddled up until the train station opened a few hours later, whisking myself off to Venice and leaving the memories of my night on the street behind me.
Over the next 18 months, I also was proposed to by a man from Ghana wanting a green card, an American soldier jokingly wanting to get married so the government would give him more money while he was deployed, and a Brit who wanted an American passport. Apparently I just have one of those faces that looks gullible enough to get married for fraud. But in case it wasn’t obvious – I never said yes.
1274.7 miles
“I’m not trying to hit on you or convert you,” the rabbi assured us as he amiably gathered up his things. “Are you from around here?”
Mel grinned, her curly blond hair flouncing as she turned her hair to look at the gentleman who had been sitting at the next table over. “I am.” He glanced at me, then. “I’m from out of town.”
“Nice to meet you,” he responded. “I’m the rabbi at the synagogue right around the corner and my wife and I just came for a coffee. I just wanted to say hello!”
Nodding his head in a final farewell, we watched him disappear out of Zanzibar.
For half a beat, we tried to return to our conversation that had been interrupted.
“Nope,” I said. “Gotta talk about that.”
“I love everything that just happened there,” Mel agreed. “Absolutely everything about that.”
That’s one of the best things about travel, I’d say: simply the people you meet along the way.
In seventy-six hours, I traveled an absurd 1274 miles visiting with friends that I have known ranging from six months to seven years. I once couch surfed through the formal website, but this was my favorite style. A futon one night, a wooden floor the next, a proper couch the next. The temperature soared from the 60s to nearly 100, and my mind was happily engaged in audiobooks about science and history.
Three days, four states. Friends who love languages, friends who love nature, friends who love aviation, friends who love Des Moines, friends who love wanderlust. People with souls that are larger than life.
We sat outside new restaurants and watched the sun go down. We watched meteor showers from untouched observation decks and plotted the (un)likelihood of a tornado that day. We drank coffee. I chuckled at my Polish friend’s disgust at Americans’ use of ice in their drinks. I successfully navigated Kansas City, but hit a snag in Des Moines less than a mile from where I’d spent a summer (it’s okay, I forgive your directions!). We laughed, we were serious, we learned from each other and of each other.
It was a whirlwind, and even though I am utterly exhausted (and will not try to do such a long trip by myself in such a short time frame again), it was worth it. It makes me feel so alive.
travel always does.
Toska
January 18, 2013
One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with. -Phyllis Rose
As I was watching a clip satirizing experiences on public transit, I was struck by a sudden sense of sadness… because I was entertained by the video. In my wanderings around Europe, I have lived through many similar situations, but nearly all of them have been alone.
I have shared some of my more dramatic mishaps with friends and family, and on occasion will share a less exciting one that relates to my current situation.
But this second hand experience does not compete.
When I first went abroad, I was with a girl named Jordyn. Now, we hadn’t interacted much prior to our trip to Poland, and after a few months, our paths diverged again. But one of the most beautiful things that Jordyn and I had was that a year, two years later, we were able to sit down and talk. We shared memories, dusted off old jokes, looked at pictures and reminisced.
A similar situation happened this last spring break, when my fellow RYE student Amanda and I were back in Nitra, four years after we had lived there. We retraced our steps, visited our old haunts, made new memories in this place we’d once called home.
Every movement we make leaves a trace of ourselves.
I have no problems traveling alone.
But it does leave one… lonely.
No one with whom to recollect the Munich train station when we made a fifteen minute change to go to Rome.
No one with whom to share the excitement of the Parisian train station when it appears in Hugo.
No one with whom to laugh about accidentally riding to the end of the line in Amsterdam and being kindly mocked (and then helped) by the tram drivers.
No one that strolled through airports all over Europe, getting stamps in passports, buying a beer simply because that was the only word you KNEW was the same so that you could use wifi at a pub in Croatia, begrudgingly taking a taxi, then realizing how impossible it would have been to walk this time.
Memories litter my soul.
My words, written across emails and journals, scraps of paper and facebook posts. Sometimes I am afraid that those words are the only thing convincing me that it was all real.
So as my retro suitcase sits unused in my closet, I shrug my shoulders.
It is rather lonely, but I still wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Simply Eliska 