15. On habit

The dumbass in the picture above is yours truly. Obviously, I haven't shed my penchant for doing up photographs to look a certian way. I don't like that jacket, I only wear it to make me look like I'm some 1940's writer trying to break in to the film business. Yet I brought it with me. Seems like some things will never change, no matter where I go.

There eventually comes a point when you begin to fall back into the habits that prompted you to study abroad in the first place. And then, before you ever understand that it's happening, home becomes wherever you have travelled to.
 
You fucked up relationships with people you thought were going to be friends, and now you want to escape them. You haven’t been taking care of your domicile, and now you want to leave the mess behind. You’ve seen everything your city has to offer, and now you want someplace new. You want to experience something else. The rollercoaster has lost its vigor. Let me off. I want something else now. I don’t want to continue. I’m hungry. I have to use the bathroom. “It’s December, and I want to go back to New York. But only because I want to start over, because I didn’t do things right here. But I never do things right anywhere. Would it ever be any different?” Sound familiar? Incidentally, I don’t want to go back to New York because I know I only want to go back to escape myself. Kind of a conundrum, eh?
 
I think most people end up forgetting that the experience of visiting a new place is, in large part, a mental one. You open yourself up to the experience of learning and understanding new sights and sounds in the same way that a small child does when he travels to the mountains to visit his grandparents. But is there really any reason that we can’t feel the same way when we go down the block to get groceries, or when we take a subway to go to the museum, or when we find a new restaurant to get lunch? Can’t we view home the same way we view foreign places?
 
“Home, by contrast, finds us more settled in our expectations. We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about our neigborhood, primarly by virtue of our having living there for a long time.” Well said.
 
Let’s put it this way: hypothetically, one could eventually visit every single place on the Earth, and at that point, there would be no more “travel” to foreign lands. You would see everything the world has to offer. You would know every mountain, every village, every cheap bar that has a great happy hour. What would travel be to us then? So long as we keep travel as some ambiguous entity that can only be achieved while visiting a foreign place, it will be alien to us, it will always be outside us. To travel, we will have to traverse grand mountains and sail across oceans. De Maitre seems to have discovered the secret—to unlock the mental beauty of traveling in his very own bedroom, which I think is a great goal for all of us.

           Reading the first section of De Botton's on habit, I almost did a double-take.  His account of returning to London after a trip to Barbados gave me an overwhelming sense of deja vu.
                 I spent my fall break in two paradises: Amsterdam and Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.  I had been looking forward to Amsterdam for as long as I knew what Amsterdam was, and it far surpassed my expectations on every level.  I barely slept- I didn't want to miss one canal, one piece of street art, one joint, one nightclub, one patisserie.  I found myself in tears when I had to leave.
                From Amsterdam, I flew to London, packed my bags, and took a twelve hour trip to Florida.  Oh, the sunlight! Pure, unadulterated, 85-degree sunlight.  It’s difficult to describe, exactly, how utopian this place is.  It’s a university, sure, but really more like a resort for college kids.  It’s on the beach; the campus is scattered with hammocks.  The entire student population is composed of hippies, hipsters, and punks.  Nobody wears shoes.  Everybody has pets.  Everybody is everybody’s best friend.  You can have a huge party on the beach and nobody will stop you.  I spent my time there drinking, smoking, swimming, eating, dancing, reading The Rules of Attraction, and making friends.
                Then I flew back to London.  I was hungover, burnt-out, exaughsted  and heartbroken ( Oh, I forgot to mention, this whole trip to Florida thing was for a guy.) The night before I had stayed up until four am drinking rum and breaking stuff at a punk show.  It was forty degrees colder in London than in Florida.  My room was a mess.  I hadn’t started homework that was due yesterday. 
                It took a few days, but I got back into the swing of things.  Funny, De Botton found release from London by seeing it in a new light. I found comfort in my daily habits.  The guy at the security desk.  My David Bowie poster. The bartender at The Big Chill who knows my drink order.  My reliably senile Wednesday-class professor.   I find that I like London more when I don’t try to see it as a tourism sight, searching for meaning and beauty everywhere I go.  I like when it feels like a home.  A cold, damp, depressing home with bad food, perhaps.  But a home nonetheless.

There is such a stigma on being a tourist. Anywhere I go, I try really hard to look like I belong there, because I know how annoyed and judgemental locals can be about people who aren’t from where they live. But de Botton is advocating a shift to a more touristy approach to everywhere – including your own town, or even your own bedroom. He wants us to “apply a traveling mindset to our own locales.” To see through the eyes of the tourist every day.
 
It’s true that when I’m in New York I often curse under my breath when I get stuck behind a slow group of tourists ambling about on a crowded sidewalk while I’m rushing to get to class. But I wouldn’t say that I am completely habitualized and ignorant of how remarkable New York is. He says “We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about our neighborhood.” I have thought about this before, and try to take moments every day to appreciate a certain block that I may pass by or how cool a new work of graffiti looks. Whenever I pass by tourists craning their necks and taking pictures (probably about 800 times a day), I always turn around to see what they have found worthy of capturing and take a moment to appreciate the fact that this remarkable structure is part of my everyday.
 
Especially being away from New York for so long (I haven’t laid eyes on that skyline since May), I’ve really come to appreciate what I have even more and miss it terribly. Sometimes when I’m in New York I go through slumps where I feel like the city isn’t living up to the expectations I placed on it when I was dreaming of ending up there from 800 miles away. Sometimes these slumps are tied to the weather, like in January when I can’t wait to feel warm again, or to whatever is going on in my personal life. Like de Botton says in the beginning of this chapter, about the connection between what goes on outside of us, in our environment, and what goes on inside.  I feel like I am a slightly different person in Florence than when I’m in New York. I’ve noticed that I feed off of my environment; I have a relationship with New York where it has the power to make or break my mood. But I do feel like my presence in the city is very much lucid. I try to take it in very much like a tourist… just without looking like one (hopefully).

Before coming to Ghana, I had very little interest in traveling abroad or even leaving my native home of New York City. I still can’t remember exactly why I decided to come, but I did and the first week blew by way to fast for me to absorb what was happening and where I was. By the second week, when classes started and my new routine began to fall into place, reality set in. I realized that my life for the next four months would consist of sharing a bedroom with two people I did not know, sweating, trying to decipher English language that I don’t believe qualifies as English, and sweating some more. Needless to say, I was homesick. I won’t lie I cried to my mom many a times on the phone, begging her not to go and to just talk to me about nothing just so I could hear her voice. I had never experienced this feeling ever before in my life! I didn’t feel anything close to this my first summer going away to sleep away camp and I was only nine years old then.

On page six of the text On Habit, De Bottom stated “It seems inconceivable that there could be anything new to find in a place where we have been living for a decade or more. We have become habituated and therefore blind to it.” I don’t really agree with this statement. New York City, which has been my home for all twenty years of my life, intrigues me everyday that I am there. There is always something new to discover. In high school (actually I still do this every so often) when I felt bored, I would just get on a random subway and get out at a stop I had never been to before and explore a new neighborhood, or better familiarized myself with one I rarely visit. Even after living Ghana for three and a half months I still find new things everyday-a new chop bar or a shortcut to the academic center that could have shaved 5 whole minutes off my morning commute.

I guess I would call myself a creature of habit-I like to know what to expect and feel in control in my surroundings. Upon arrival, I felt like I was coming to Ghana completely blind sighted, and every day I experienced something foreign. Some of the trickiest things to adjust to was time. Ghana has its own clock and everyone seemed to tell time on it with ease except me. Restaurants close by 7pm and you won’t find anything open on Sundays. I could imagine myself making it through the entire semester like this. What would I do without my corner store if I needed a snack at one in the morning?! Tomorrow we are having a “re-entry workshop” to discuss what it will be like to adjust back to life in America. even though I’m excited to go back to my friends and family and the fast pace of New York, I’m going to miss this place a ton. I’ve grown to love Ghana in all its wackiness, but in doing so have developed an even greater appreciation for my life in New York.

(image source: my own)

De Botton closes his chapter, “Oh Habit,” with the sentence, “Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.” I think that this is a very important idea that can quickly be lost on a student when they study abroad; I admit that I am myself am quite guilty of overlooking my home and focusing more on the adventures to be had in foreign lands. When there’s a whole continent waiting to be explored at our fingertips, it’s sort of hard not to focus on covering as much land as possible in the time we have here.
 
Looking back on my time here, I regret traveling as extensively as I did these last couple of months, but I would never trade it for anything in the world. It’s fairly hard to strike a balance between exploring one’s resident city and the exotic locations one has in mind for a weekend getaway. Sometimes, other factors make it easier to decide, such as a particular event taking place in a foreign city (e.g. Oktoberfest in Munich) or pressing matters that need to be settled back home (e.g. a paper due in two days).
 
With a little over two weeks left to my stay in London, this article has convinced me that I need to look at London with new eyes during the course of my remaining days here. Of course, this is made a little easier by the fact that the city has completely transformed into a small Christmas village. Houses have put up lights; shopping centers are decked out in decorations; Christmas music is blasting from the speakers of every commercial building. The scenery and landscape of the city have certainly changed, which I think will make for an interesting comparison between the two Londons I have seen at the time of my arrival and my departure.
 
In all honesty, I probably won’t make that great an effort to refamiliarize myself with this city (or even my neighborhood, at that) as I would like. There’s just always too much on my mind to notice all the minute details that comprise the world around me. After seeing things once, I feel like there’s no need to see them again. When I’m on vacation, there’s time to think about nothing and take everything in. Here, I would have to set out with no goal in mind so that there was nothing to distract me. As pessimistic as that seems, there really is almost no time it the day for something like that, unless I purposely set aside time in my schedule for an attentive stroll or a journey with no destination in mind, similar to what De Button does in this chapter.
 
When I first got to London, that was all I did day after day: explore the city and take every little detail in. Of course, that was also a period in my life when everything felt new and exciting; now, all I can think about is when the next paper is due or when I’m going to have time to study for all my finals. Perhaps I’ll take an hour or two off in the coming days; rather than schedule a bunch of activities to fill my time, I’ll do whatever the city leads me to do. That sounds like an adventure within itself.
 
Oh yeah, the picture I included with this entry is of a piece of street art I found on the wall of building on my walk home. It started out as just that little alien at the top. Then, a couple of days later, going along the same route, my attention was captured by this larger piece. Some one had drawn a cow being abducted. I wonder what the piece is like now. Perhaps I’ll walk by it on my next stroll and check it out again. 

Botton’s chapter, “On Habit,” provides a very clear and indisputable message:  we often do not appreciate our surroundings. We travel to see new things and to gain a better understanding of the world.  Botton suggests that we do not need to travel in order to accomplish these things. Even if we live somewhere for years, there are details that we have forgotten or taken for granted or even never had the chance to notice in the first place. If we simply open our eyes and act as a traveler in our usual surroundings we will find things that fascinate us.
 
This, however, is easier said than done. Of course Botton can change his routine for one day. He can walk to the Underground while taking the time to notice storefronts and people he has never noticed before, but surely the next day he will return to his humdrum routine and the things he noticed the day before will simply be filed into the list of boring things about Hammersmith he already knows.
 
Perhaps there is a necessity to this kind of habitual thinking that Botton doesn’t recognize in this chapter. The feeling of being settled isn’t always a bad thing. Without it, we might never feel at home. Traveling to new places is exciting and exhilarating, but only for awhile. Eventually one must either settle in that new place and stop considering everything to be so new, or to return to his original home. This isn’t to say that noticing new things in one’s home is a bad thing. Living in New York City I am constantly seeing new things and having new experiences, but those things always fall into my already existent understanding of New York City as a whole. I cannot rediscover the city in its entirety. I can only discover new details of it.
 
This leads me to one of the biggest questions in my life – Is it better to know a little about a lot of things (or places) or to know a lot about one particular thing (or place)? Personally, I think I prefer the former. I could easily have stayed in New York this semester rather than going to Africa. I could have explored the many thousands of places in the city that I have never been and know nothing about, but I am glad that I spent my semester exploring West Africa instead. Of course I don’t know everything about New York City, as much as I may act like it. I could spend all my time in New York and become a real expert, but I would much rather get to know a little bit about many other places. I know a little bit about Accra, Tamale, Cape Coast, Tema, and Elmina in Ghana and Po, Ouagadougou, and Gorum-Gorum in Burkina Faso. And by the end of the year I will know a little bit about Rome, Florence, Vienna, Budapest, Szeged, Prague, London and many other cities as well. I will never regret this year of travel. 

I notice that sometimes when I travel, I'm still in the "traveling" mentality for a short period after I arrive home (back to Prague, that is!). Today, after a bleary, hungover day of travel from London to Prague, I found myself still in the traveling mode on my walk home. Suddenly, the "Stay fucked!" graffiti I pass by every day became funny all over again. A secret artist who made a snow-dragonfly on the hood of someone's car put a big, warm smile on my face. The rush of warmth after entering the first door of my building into the inner-courtyard became a warm blanket welcoming me home. I'm not sure if others have this problem, the delay of adjusting back into "routine" after being in that mindset of needing/wanting to see new things.

As you have probably guessed, I really appreciated De Botton's account of walking through his neighborhood. In the spirit of celebrating community spaces, the picture I've included is the view from our upstairs study lounge, a green-house sort of in-door veranda that is filled with comfy couches and is often ten degrees colder than anywhere else in the building. When I see that breathtaking view, I almost pity myself with the knowledge that I'm just up there to study and not appreciate the views, and that most of my concentration goes towards schoolwork instead of the beauty of my neighborhood. So maybe that's why habit is so easy to fall into, so easy to put your blinders up to the beauty around you. Because we are so constantly focused with everything working towards a goal, a self-improvement rat race with no concrete objectives. Vacations allow us to put down these blockades, especially if we're isolated from our lives back home (and phoneless and internetless, in my case) because we remove ourselves from the stressors of getting-things-done and delve into stressors of not missing anything important.

On my walk home this evening, I was really taken aback with how much I appreciate my neighborhood, precisely because I had been thrust into the busy reaches of Tottenham Court for four solid days. And the fact that the clock is ticking on my time here in Prague, I find that slipping back into "habit" may be significantly harder this time around. I think I just might stay on vacation, except this time it'll be here in Prague.

I think De Botton is saying something interesting about the “travel mindset” in his discussion on “traveling around my bedroom.” It’s the expectation of “newness” and “exoticism” when we travel that we are searching for. This was at first my disappointment when I arrived at London. It wasn’t different enough. But there is something to be said about the familiar. In writing it’s the process of “de-familiarization” where the author takes an object or something easily recognizable but describes it in away that makes it appear strange or different. Imagine if we could do this all the time, if we saw every cup that we drank from as its own individual cup and not just another cup. But I wonder if there is a juxtaposition of specialness when forcefully trying to make something unique. It is also arguable though, that humans, as meaning making creatures always do this, but we do it arbitrarily so. Is there really a difference between the post-card of the Mona Lisa or the real thing? Some might argue that the real thing has an aura and that its replication diminishes this. But I would assert that we simply want to feel something special when we see things that are supposed to be special. 

When we travel we expect to see things that are special, which I find is becoming some what more difficult given the exportation of capitalism, globalization and cultural diffusion. For me the only things that really distinguish cultures are the values and attitudes that have evolved through a previous cultural history that was once more isolated by the mere incidence of a lack of technology. 

Now we all eat McDonalds and drink Starbucks, everywhere. Capitalism is the North Star of the world. It kind of dismantles the mindset of exoticism that we hunger for when we travel and perhaps forces us to stay at home and find new things the way De Botton suggests. 

After reading De Botton's chapter, On Habit, I couldn't stop thinking about the last line. "Satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen." For me, I took "what we have already seen" as a reference to home. Southern California is my home, which then led me to think of that song by Phantom Planet (also known as the theme song to the TV show, The OC). One of the first verses of the song goes, "California here we come, right back where we started from." In a few weeks, most of us will be heading home, a topic of mixed feelings and one that I can't help, but address. 
I have spent the past three months traveling around Europe and having so much fun I feel like this isn't real life and I'm on vacation. I've been lucky enough to see beautiful places like Scotland and Greece. And after all that traveling it's easy to forget where I started. Even though I'm sad to leave London, I'm excited and ready to get home. There are many places I have yet to go, but there are also many places I have already been, of which the most important is California. Land of my family and friends, where I grew up, feel safe, and list as my permanent address on applications. 
While visiting countries across Europe, I've appreciated home more than ever. This is where I differ from de Botton. He began Chapter 9 with an experience involving London and Barbados. One his home, the other an oasis of new adventures. In the overall ruling, the oasis outweighed home and London's dreary weather seemed unchanged and depressing rather than welcoming and homey. California isn't a fair choice as a point of comparison because the weather is usually fantastic, but London has been my home for the past semester. And I have to admit, while I'm away, I miss it and upon each return, I've felt happy and secure. It is a home away from home. If this blog wasn't complicated enough, it's a home away from home that makes me miss home, but also serves as another home when I leave that home. 

(Photo: I took this photo of my best friend over the summer at the Getty Museum in LA.) 

I robbed that quote from Dr. Seuss and I am about to steal another one, "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go..."

            Dr. Seuss knew the art of traveling. He hints at the same receptivity as De Botton, highlighting that WE are the one’s you know what we know and where we will decide to go. Be that from the bedroom or to the blue and white striped sun flag that symbolizes the nation of Argentina. Dr. Seuss’ wisdom has reminded me that any kind of travel, the travel we do in our minds included, is a journey that we take by ourselves.

            De Botton stressed that our perception of the places we go changes when there are others guiding, observing, or participating in our experience- and to some extent I agree with him. “Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectation of others.” When my English boyfriend came to visit me, he kept making comments on how slow the service was or the filthiness of the streets or how the Argentines can’t seem to follow any order. He noticed little things that had become part of my normal experience. The way I saw things began to shift, my recepitivity to cultural norms faded and I began to see the inefficiencies for what they really were. I explained to him that Argentines don’t work to make money, no tips nor overtime here, and that because of this fact they live and work to survive. It’s the bare minimum here. But on the other hand, in my disagreement of De Botton, my experience reflected what Dr. Seuss had said, “I knew what I knew.” I wasn’t going let my new view of Argentine life be clouded by these new (yet accurate) revelations.

            My habits here change everyday because my life here is transient and has an expiration date. My experience is always mitigated by those around me in varying ways depending on who they are, where they come from, and what their histories are. 

The last chapter of The Art of Travel serves as a good reminder of the disservice our routines can cause for us if we allow. De Botton discusses how, upon his return home from Barbados, he, “Felt there could be few worse places on earth than the one I had been fated to spend my existence in,” (243). This isn’t because London is a terrible place or somewhere not worth one’s time. This is because to him, Hammersmith London is a place dried out by labor and his unchanging day-to-day routine.
            Journey Around my Bedroom reminds us that even in familiar places, there is no shortage of new experiences to be had. There are two aspects to travel. One is physical: moving to new places, seeing sights or going to do new things. The Second is mental: travel is a mindset of which the foremost characteristic is receptivity. “Carry[ing] with us no rigid ideas about what I interesting. We… admire what [locals] take to be strange small details,” (246). For most people, this state of awe is created by the newness of being in a change in setting. De Botton claims that what we allow to happen far too often is, once we develop settled expectations of a place, we loose our sense of discovery and sense of adventure.
            At home in Connecticut, my girlfriend and I have done a good job of putting off reaching boredom by losing our sense of exploration. We continually add to a list of all the things in and around our town we have yet to see and want to explore. Sometimes they’re really simple things like taking a hike in the nearby state park early in the morning (instead of the afternoon, when we usually go). Sometimes our adventures are more complex, such as an hour northbound drive to Kent to see the beautiful countryside.  What I wonder is how we manage to maintain endearment for our small, rural hometown while some of our friends only offer that it is “boring.”
            Fall break seemed to be a hump here in Florence. Since everyone’s return from the break conversation is more often about the things missed at home and how much we can’t wait to return and less about all the things we still want to experience in Florence and in Italy. The workload is increasing as finals near and semester long projects come to a close. At this point what I must do, is learn to retain the receptivity that puts me in the traveling mindset for the final month of study abroad. 

-picture taken Autumn 2009 in Huntington Park, Redding, CT

Over the past two weeks, I have felt myself sliding into a dissatisfied habituation with Berlin.  I know the bus routes, I know the train lines, so even boarding a random train and having an adventure somewhere new has become difficult.  The weather has been cold and rainy and it gets dark here around 4:00 these days, so when I walk on the sidewalk, I take up de Botton's original mindset that the street, station, and train are only the means to my final destination.  When you step outside and recoil because the grey sky is spitting at you, your first thought is not to appreciate the beautiful architecture that you've already walked passed a hundred times before.

 

It's a shame that even if we have never stopped to look at a specific landmark, we know where it is and decide that there's nothing to see based solely on the fact that we have walked past it before!  It took me a month and a half to finally look at a huge and colorful mural across the street from our apartment building.  The entire wall is covered in people, landmarks from Berlin, and a giant shark eating money; it's an imposing and political piece of art, but it took me six weeks to realize that they were Euro-bills falling from the shark's mouth or even to see the painted four-story Fernsehturm.  

 

There's a park with a pond across the street from the grocery store that I go to every few days, but the park is sunken and behind a wall, which makes it invisible from the other side of the street, where I always walked.  One day last month, I decided to walk on the other side of the street, looked over the wall, and was amazed to find this park!  It was all beautiful because the leaves were all changing colors and the view back towards my apartment over the pond was kind of breath-taking.  I was so impressed that I ran to my room to get my camera and came back to take pictures, including the one above, of this park that is literally a three minute walk from my front door.  

 

I know that I don't appreciate the sights around me like I should, and definitely not like I did at the beginning of the semester.  I pass things like the shark mural and the secret park so often that I only ever glance at them without really looking.  There's always the assumption that you've seen it before or you'll see it later, so nothing ever piques our interest.  Now, however, I'm starting to realize that my time in Berlin is winding down.  In four weeks, I'll be back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  I may never make it back to Berlin, especially not to live here again, so now with a time limit, everything is starting to look a little more endearing.

 

I look at the Fernsehturm these days with new eyes every time.  I've always loved the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) above all other landmarks in Berlin, partially because it stands above all other landmarks as the tallest building in Germany and I can see it from almost everywhere else in the city.  Now I look for it whenever I exit a subway station, to get my bearings and make sure that it's still there.  One way to beat habituation: Look at everything like it's for the first time, or the last.  Some day soon, I'll get a cab to the airport and stare at the TV Tower until it's invisible to me.  I'm getting sentimental, I know, but a little sentimentality at least means that I will have some fond memories of my time here and I didn't spend the whole time ignoring the city I've been living in.

I really liked the idea about habit that de Botton discussed in this chapter. It’s very interesting to consider the idea that travel is based more on a state of mind than on actually going to visit a new place. The things he said about how we start to tune out the details of the places we live really struck home for me. As much as I like to bitch about how annoying the tourists in New York are I still have these moments from time to time where I have to stop and say “Oh my god. I live in New York City!” When I’m struck with these moments there is nothing I want to do more than wander slowly about the city while staring upward, snapping pictures, sneak in a visit to one of the famous sites, and all those other activities that we’re so quick to fault the tourists for. But on far too many days I’m just like de Botton rushing to his Underground station, rushing off with barely a passing though for all that surrounds me. I’ve noticed some of that same oblivious attitude popping up in Ghana as well. Many times when I’ve asked for suggestions about things to see the response is prefaced by “Well, I’ve never been but most of the tourists seem to like…”
I think that one of the good things about being away for so long is that it can really refresh your attitude to your home. I don’t think that I’ll be returning home to Boston and New York with the same dreary sense that de Botton returned to London with. Rather, I’ve been talking with my friends about all the great little details of these places that we now dearly miss and many of us have started to make plans to visit some of the sites that we have yet to check out. I’d like to say that I could always look at my home with the excited attitude that de Maistre is able to approach his bedroom with but at the very least I think that my time in Ghana will refresh my attitude. Hopefully it will also remind me of the importance of maintaining this attitude in the face of all of the day to day life details that I get so caught up in.
 
(The picture is mine. I thought the idea of these kids turning a plastic bag into a kite was a pretty good example of approaching something we see everyday with a new attitude)

My family is coming for Thanksgiving and they land in Prague tomorrow. This means a number of things...but the most alarming is that it means Thanksgiving is here and the semester is almost over.

I was wandering around and listening to everyone attempt to come to terms with the fact that we will soon be back in the United States--where it's ok that we'll be under-age because the beer isn't worth the $8 it costs anyway-- and then I read our article for this week. An expedition around one's bedroom? That sounds as exciting as cleaning out that desk drawer that collects all the business cards and event flyers that wind up in the bottom of my purse. What a wonderful idea!

No sarcasm here; I'm really that kind of person. And I really needed to read this article this week. Now I know how to combat the urgency that I suddenly feel when I move through the city. Showing my family around will force me to look at Prague through the eyes of a new-comer, the way I did our first week here. Doing so after taking an excursion around my room and another through the neighborhood promises to be somewhat soothing. Yes, I'm leaving soon. But I haven't taken a moment of my time here for granted, so it will be fine to leave. Beyond that, going home to the familiar will be an occasion for another series of sednost-focused excursions...which will make the reverse culture-shock much easier to bear.

De Bottom suggests that receptivity is one of the keys to traveling successfully. On our fall break, I got to learn first hand that not only receptivity, but also a positive and tolerant attitude (especially when traveling with a group) can significantly improve your traveling. My friends and I had to wake up every morning around 5 a.m. in order to catch our next flight to our next destination. We all knew that this was going to be hard, but we also knew that this trip was going to be one we would want to remember. So, everyone made a conscience effort to keep spirits high and up beat. This atmosphere, along with being open to new surroundings, made the trip really enjoyable. I think in Athens and Dublin especially, we really took time to admire the little things, as De Bottom would suggest you do. Since Athens was closed for voting day the day we were there, we spent the day taking in the Greek culture. Dublin doesn’t have a lot of tourist attractions, so we once again spent our time there really getting to know what Irish life was like.
 
I find myself still doing this in England. I love just staring at the architecture here. It’s so grand and old, in a way that few things are in America. It tells a story, looking at the buildings. Occasionally, I’ll find myself just going through the routine of walking to class or eating lunch, and I’ll stop and try to notice things around me. If I walk on a different side of the street than usual, I’m shocked by the things I never noticed before. I love finding new places to explore here, and it feels like there are enough of them to last a lifetime. I’m really going to miss walking these streets, and I will probably try to bring some of my receptivity to New York. But, I already know that a lot of what you get when you really stop to look around on your walk to class in New York isn’t great. New York assaults your senses in a way that I’ve never experienced before. The smells, the people, the noise… it doesn’t feel like you’re even able to notice anything because you’re so over stimulated. I’m going to miss the calm here. The way you can walk to a park in 5 minutes from almost anywhere in this city. It’s strange that I feel so comfortable here, but yet, I don’t think I’ll ever really get used to how beautiful it is. 

(photo by me)