As long as I remember, I've been interested in Other Places. Some of my favorite books when I was younger involved foreign travel. My mom lived abroad as a child and young adult, and the house was full of the remnants of that life- books from Brazil and France, kitchen towels and trinkets from her family trips all over the world, and when I was sick and stuck in bed, she used to give me the postcard box to distract me from the long bedridden hours. It was a shoebox full of postcards that her parents and college roommate had sent from their stops all over Europe. I'd flip through them, lingering particularly over the ones of the little girls in national costumes, and try to insert myself into those turreted, cobblestone venues.
There was also that one time my father went on a trip to somewhere in Quebec and came back with all kinds of ordinary objects from there. Soda cans (in French! I was delighted), tickets, paper napkins, brochures. I wanted to be in one of those places where these other languages were really how people communicated, not just something I practiced in a classroom. Later I collected coins from anywhere I could- forgotten remnants from the dryer traps at my parents laundromat, gifts from friends and family who traveled.
The first time I went For Real abroad I was in college, on my way to an internship in London. I stopped over in Paris before my work began to visited my aunt who lived in the 16th, within walking distance of the Eiffel tower. I can still remember that sunny July day when I called my parents from a phone booth below the Palais de Chaillot. "I'm HERE I'm really HERE!!" The next two weeks I spent doing all the things one does in Paris- I ate loads of lemon tarts and meandered through the parks and went to Versailles and generally marveled at all the things I'd seen in all my dim art history classes, finally come to life in full three-dimensional beauty. What glee to know that the downspouts at the base of the central courtyard at the Louvre had dolphin-shaped openings, to know exactly how the summer light looked through the stained glass arcs of Ste Chappelle.
Six months later, I was back in Paris again, this time to study 19th century French literature. I was one of the hardcore kids in the class who wanted to only speak French all the time whenever wherever. After just four weeks I was almost able to walk into a shop and not plan out what I was going to say beforehand. I started thinking in French, and the French words for objects moved to the forefront of my mind, just in time for me to return to America.
I held onto that foreignness as long as I could, wearing the clothes I'd bought Over There, poring over my credit card bill when it arrived with all the names of the exotic places I'd used it while on my trip. I held onto the timezone as long as I could too, waking early to the fuchsia streaks of a New England winter dawn through the leaded glass windows of my dorm room. It was the early days of radio stations streaming online so I hunted for ones that would give me the flavour of being Continental, streaming them into my dorm room decorated with travel posters and any travel memorabilia I could scrape from my home. My miniscule dorm fridge was stocked with Pellegrino limonata from the Italian grocery store near school, and I thought it the height of cool to invite my friends for espresso. Yup, I was That Girl.
During those first years after college I didn't manage to travel so much, what with living in Boston on a meager entry-level salary, and having only two weeks vacation per year. I did finagle a trip to South Africa via England once, and I remember sitting on the wall at Windsor Castle in the light of Saturday morning, thinking how lucky I was to be sitting there while everyone back in Boston still slept. The rest of the trip was quite memorable for probably all the wrong reasons, but I came home still resolved to get out as often as possible.
When the chance to move to Iceland arose, I grabbed at it, not only due to the relationship but because I saw it as a way towards this life I'd been dreaming of for so long. This might not have been my dream country but it was different, foreign, with a crazy language and totally new customs and culture. In the years since then, I've never regretted the move, and the chances I've had to visit places I imagined so fiercely haven't disappointed. Even after almost seven years of life abroad I still get those moments of wild euphoria when I realize that I'm actually sitting in that fabled city, understanding an ordinary daily transaction in a new language, being part of some ritual that I'd read about once upon a time, or I'm there in front of some long-adored building or work of art.
I promised myself when I graduated from college that I wanted to be sure to never stop learning, and this life trajectory has certainly made learning a nearly daily necessity. There's always a new word to learn, a new obscure era in history to experience first-hand in a tiny village, and now an entirely new language to soak up. It's a bit daunting to think of how much there is to learn lying ahead, but I know that along the way there will always be those thrills that come when dreams become concrete.
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