Enchiladas sounded really good, actually

Since this blog is so young, but is already shaping itself (itself, because I seriously don't feel that I have even a smudge of control over my writing, and it's kind of a problem) into a creature of travel, I've decided that my book talks will all be based around travel books: travel memoirs, travel guides, and maybe even other travel blogs (there are a shit ton, and so many good ones).

I've recently seen a resurgence of my own interest in France, for numerous reasons, some of which make sense to me and some of which don't, and in this flurry of Francophilia I scrambled into the book store like that deer that got trapped in that bar and bulldozed a path to the travel section. I snatched anything off the shelf that seemed vaguely France-related, one of those books being Samantha Vérant's Seven Letters From Paris. I'm not ashamed to say that I enjoyed it immensely. I'm not ashamed to say that while I might stomp around with metal in my face and rip a swear like a trucker on a night shift, I'm a sad sucker for a sappy romance, as long as that romance exists realistically, par exemple, in a memoir. I seldom give a crap about fictional couples, but shit if a true story doesn't get me in the feels.

The gorgeous cover doesn't hurt, either.

Seven Letters capitalizes on the intense romance of travel - of meeting someone foreign, someone mysterious, and being swept into a new culture, specifically one built around a Romance language and a country filled with famously sweeping architecture. Is it a little saccharine? Un peu, but it's no more ashamed of this than I was of reading it. It knows it's an American dream, and it's fine with it.

Mixing romance and travel is an interesting study, because it's become the ultimate fairytale: meeting someone from a strange land, falling madly in love, and spending the rest of one's life in someplace most of the English-speaking world only sees in National Geographic. What we have to wonder is if this is feasible, or if Sam Vérant is the exception to the rule. How many people pursue this dream and fall short chasing it, and are left with very little to show for it?

Or, what do we want to show for it? A good time, or a happily ever after?

I think it's dark to condemn that dream - you know, to throw travel romance like spaghetti at a wall. Is there anything wrong with pursuing mystery in romance? No, and to think that there is, is to shit all over the whole concept of romance. I'm not a romantic, but human lives are damnably short. It just requires degrees of caution, I suppose, and an open eye. Foreign romance, after all, involves foreign people. As a person who lived as 'foreign' for a number of years, I can tell you that it's not an adjustment that's easy. And there wasn't even a language barrier involved (there were, however, dialect hurdles that ended in several skinned knees).

Sam Vérant's story is hopeful and beautiful, but it doesn't question the social roadblocks of foreign romance with any sort of realism, and I think this is both the downfall of the idealists and fodder for the cynics. A person who was born on a different continent from you was also born into a totally different culture, and this hits a lot of people like an electric shock. Like I've said before, sneezing. The looks I got in Canada for sneezing into my hands were caustic. The looks I got for using the slang I'd grown up with were worse.

So I suppose, then, that in foreign romance, you reap what you sow. If you're looking for marriage, and looking for it hard, you may well find it. But if you head out looking for a good time, you can bet your ass you'll get one.

HYOH. And let fun be fun; enjoy the ride. Romance doesn't need to be a battle, and if it is, then it's not the dream. Our lives are far too short.