"Have you ever heard of The Curse of the Traveler?

An old vagabond in his 60s told me about it over a beer in Central America, goes something like this:

The more places you see, the more things you see that appeal to you, but no one place has them all. In fact, each place has a smaller and smaller percentage of the things you love, the more things you see. It drives you, even subconsciously, to keep looking, for a place not that's perfect (we all know there's no Shangri-La), but just for a place that's "just right for you." But the curse is that the odds of finding "just right" get smaller, not larger, the more you experience. So you keep looking even more, but it always gets worse the more you see. This is Part A of the Curse.

Part B is relationships. The more you travel, the more numerous and profoundly varied the relationships you will have. But the more people you meet, the more diffused your time is with any of them. Since all these people can't travel with you, it becomes more and more difficult to cultivate long term relationships the more you travel. Yet you keep traveling, and keep meeting amazing people, so it feels fulfilling, but eventually, you miss them all, and many have all but forgotten who you are. And then you make up for it by staying put somewhere long enough to develop roots and cultivate stronger relationships, but these people will never know what you know or see what you've seen, and you will always feel a tinge of loneliness, and you will want to tell your stories just a little bit more than they will want to hear them. The reason this is part of the Curse is that it gets worse the more you travel, yet travel seems to be a cure for a while.

None of this is to suggest that one should ever reduce travel. It's just a warning to young Travelers, to expect, as part of the price, a rich life tinged with a bit of sadness and loneliness, and angst that's like the same nostalgia everyone feels for special parts of their past, except multiplied by a thousand."

darien_gap on reddit.com/r/IWantOut

REPUBLIC OF INTELLECT

"Reason and desire"

Teute, The Love of the Plants

Reviews for Inside New York Magazine:

Follow the link and have a look.
http://insidenewyork.com/tag/tom-taylor/

Midnight(s) in Paris

A Semester in Paris

It's Thursday evening and my French grammar class has just finished, bringing another week of classes to an end and marking the official beginning of spring break. I leave NYU Paris' terracotta brick campus that is perfectly proportional to the boxy dimensions of the city and walk out onto Rue de Passy.

It is still quite light given it's almost 7pm and so, while tossing around new phrases and difficult conjugations in my head, I stroll down to the closest Vélib station. If you ever needed any evidence that in Paris, fashion reigns over safety, look no further than the increasingly popular Vélib bike-share system. Helmets are little more than an ugly blotch on the well-styled landscape and thus are spared by most cyclists.

I take my bike and ride down to the Seine, passing the Eiffel Tower and the daily stampede of tourists each scrambling to take clichéd photos that will never quite capture the wonder of the scene. I keep my eyes fixed on both the road in front of me and the fleet of tiny vehicles that dart around like matchbox cars until I get a timely red light and find myself alongside the Louvre, lit by the glow of the setting sun.

The ride takes me 30 minutes. By the time I reach my street, Rue Oberkampf, the scenery has significantly changed. Where in Passy the cobblestone streets are lined with high-end boutiques and restaurants, Oberkampf is full of student bars, cafés, and eateries. Where the well-manicured walls of Passy are adorned by gigantic Dior perfume ads, Oberkampf is colored by provocative street art. Where in Passy the streets fill with busy shoppers during the day, it is in the early evening that Oberkampf begins to buzz with energy.

I leave my bike at a nearby station and grab a baguette from a boulangerie where I robotically utter, "une baguette, s'il vous plait," such is the regularity of my visits. Despite achieving more culinary disasters than successes, I optimistically assemble another creation in my kitchenette as the French news plays in the background. The newsreader rattles off names that, after a semester of French politics, are immediately familiar.

As classmates busily prepare trips to every corner of Europe, I look ahead to a weekend of lazy days exploring different corners of Paris. I think about what cheeses to buy from the Friday market down the road, about which vintage stores to raid in the Marais, and whether to grab an afternoon espresso on the left or right bank of the Seine.

In Paris, life doesn't feel rushed. Restaurants are crowded throughout the day, as lunch hour becomes lunch hours and park benches fill with people looking to soak in the early spring sunshine. As much as I have tried to devour Paris with the energy of a typical tourist, I can't resist this unhurried current. I find myself sitting in museums for hours, strolling through art exhibitions, or simply people watching from cafés, which is far more acceptable in practice than it may seem in writing.

After three months in Paris, my French has slowly improved. That being said, I'm still terrible at telling jokes in French and, more often than not, my words fall by the wayside as I clumsily mime my way through stories. In trying to communicate in French on a daily basis, I have come to realize the subtleties and immediacy of my own language that I take for granted. In turn, however, the success of managing to hold a conversation in French, or better still, tricking tourists into believing that I am Parisian, is all the more satisfying.

All but one of my classes are instructed in French, which is at times demanding after two years without formal instruction in the language. The classes vary from Art History to Political Scienceand each offers a window into French society and culture. Fashion and Power, for instance, is cleverly adapted to the culture of high fashion that thrives both on the streets and in some of the premier fashion houses and most innovative companies in the world. Readings for the class illuminate aspects of fashion that are easily notable on the streets, from Spanish fashion brand Zara's remarkable success in 'borrowing' ideas from major designers and reproducing them at half the cost, to the ever prominent legacy of Coco Chanel's revolutionary designs.

NYU Paris offers a wide range of programs and activities to complement the classes and help us better understand and relate to the city. Aside from weekend trips and organized outings to the theater or the opera, I audit a class at SciencePo, one of the most acclaimed political science universities in France, and participate in a language exchange with students from the University of Paris. France's dedication to cultivating its cultural and performing arts scene, especially among young people, is similarly remarkable. All students get free entry to museums and art galleries, and significant discounts everywhere else. The grassroots music scene is diverse and thriving, and on any given night, crowds from the bars around the city spill onto the streets.

While Abu Dhabi is truly a world away from the cobbled streets and baguette-dominated picnics of Paris, there are also little reminders of our adopted home. Remarks from Paris-Sorbonne students (like NYU, Paris-Sorbonne has a university campus in Abu Dhabi), the huge placard in the Louvre displaying the design for the Louvre-Abu Dhabi, or even an off-hand question about where I study, prompt long and affectionate stories about NYUAD and my fellow students.

As the end of semester approaches, the realization that life in Paris is not as timeless as it may feel sinks in. In these short months, favorite restaurants, quickest routes, cheapest cafés, best lookouts, most dependable wifi spots, and least-pretentious vintage stores have all been duly noted. More significantly, my mental map of Paris is highlighted by memories of encounters with strangers, lovers, and friends, and while they may not form the basis of our senior year Capstone Project, they might just get us through it. Then again, I've never come across an ethnographic study of Seine-side picnic-ers…

Published: http://blogs.nyu.edu/nyuad/salaam/2012/05/a_semester_in_paris_1.html 

“Tea and Tattered Pages”

24 rue Mayet
Montparnasse

On a overcast-afternoon wander in Saint-Germain, desperate for something warm and cheery, I discover this small, quiet yet vibrant coin de Paris, safely tucked out of sight on a plain, cream brick street - as if unwilling to be found.

Opening the door, I am greeted by the soft clanging of doorbells and then a slight nod and obligatory bonjour from an older French lady who sits reading behind the cluttered counter. Conscious of my stuttering French, I blurt out salon de thé and she points me into a backroom, past piles and piles of unsorted literary gems. The salon is similarly cluttered but feels remarkably familiar. Unlike the darker front room, a large window lights up the few tables that sit expectantly, lining the wall of books. The menu is simple and cheap, as are the endearing plastic tablemats however it is the selection of teas that really excite the imagination. In a setting that feels something like your (good) grandma’s kitchen transplanted into the middle of a grungy, West-End bookstore, a few bucketfuls of tea seems wholly appropriate.

There is of course, no wifi to speak of, nor any steady flow of customers - in a good few hours there only one other person entered the salon - and thus if the literature brimming from the walls doesn’t interest you so much, speculation on how such an underrated coin de Paris makes anything resembling a profit will certainly keep you occupied. Better still though let yourself get carried away by the thousands of mentors and their words and ideas that sit patiently waiting on the crumbling shelves around you. 

It is 1am and I am sitting in bed, utterly soaked in tiger-balm. I am hoping that the smell of the ointment might do something to annul the lingering smell of onions in the room and my thighs that still ache from a hit of social volleyball three nights ago (I am doing well to sell myself as a potential husband).

I have class in a few hours across the other side of Paris, a good 45 minute commute. Most likely I will wake up at 7:30, hit snooze once, then crawl out of bed, maybe check facebook, abcnews and any spam I have at one point signed up for in the hope that that man from Ghana would send me that Amazon Gift-card, while drinking lukewarm tea that is oh so romantically heated in my microwave. I will then sort through the pile of clothes on my floor for pants, a t-shirt and boots most likely. Given the sun still won't have risen by this time, I will don my thick jumper, jacket and a beanie, anything to battle through the -6 degrees outside. I will slurp down some muesli and then leave, ipod in, blasting some pop-trash to help things along in the waking up process. I pass the boulangerie and the homeless man who sits on the corner, in the freezing cold. I always try to avoid eye-contact with because that means have to face up the reality that less than one hundred metres from my cosy, and (for Parisian standards) spacious apartment, sits a man that braves the freezing cold, his hands held out, ever polite, "sil vous plait, Monsieur". The inconvenient realities of the world.

I then travel to Passy, changing once. The metro is filled with tired faces, bodies that leave their homes before the sun is up and return after the sun falls. The metro is silent at this time, nothing but the sound of the train clacking along the tracks and if you are lucky, a loud, heavily lip-sticked, Parisian woman complaining about a work colleague, a treat for those who had forgotten their i-pods. And then, as any invigoration that an Earl Grey and Gaga had pumped into me starts to wear off, the train traverses the Seine and behind rows of apartment blocks, the Eiffel Tower reveals her brilliant self for a few seconds. Soon, as the train pulls into the next station, she disappears again, at times peaking over the stunted skyline of Paris. Paris has mastered the art of 'surprise landmark'. Surprised by Paris, every morning.

Across Land and Sea

"At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear, and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, prakabar. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep." 

- Gregory David Roberts 

A Blog in Paree

I was told recently that 85 million tourists visit Paris every year. I haven't bothered to verify this statistic, and although I am almost certain that it is many millions off the correct figure, the sentiment remains. I am one amongst many millions of sheep that has been happily herded into Paris (by the likes of Amelie, Gustav Eiffel and so on), and while my story is a lovely conversation starter, especially if I am carrying a map or the other person is as keen to play the 'friends in common across continents' game, I run, walk and trudge along the same path as so many others. So here is my attempt to mark that path through these eyes, or maybe more importantly, to mark those times where I might have tripped, stopped or ventured from that path.

Please read, comment, advise, criticise and encourage.