Scrapbook Sunday: First edition!

Scrapbook Sunday is a feature I conjured while in the shower, which, as you probably already know, is a place in which all inspiration is born: I cannot even count how many plots and characters and blog posts and photographs I've brainstormed while naked and soapy. (Sometimes I also sing Disney songs in the shower, but only when something particularly remarkable has happened, like my finally managing to stuff my short hair into a ponytail.)

I keep a travel scrapbook. The book itself is a leather-bound handmade thing that my brother gave me, and the scraps that go inside it range from plasters to old gummy bears to postcards to receipts. I don't write in it; that's for my journal. My travel scrapbook is like a giant found-object collage, jumbled in no particular order, filled with things that jog my memory, sometimes in a good way, and sometimes in a bad way, but all in good fun. Also, I love gluing stuff.

The first page I'm posting here is sparse, but it's one of my favourite pages, because it's so tangible to me: I look at it and I'm back in Rome, in hot April air, under starry skies, shoved up against the Trevi Fountain by hoards of tourists tossing coins into the water (which is a shame for the buskers, really, whose guitar cases are generally chintzy). I remember the neon laser pens being fired at Poseidon's face and the strong meaty stink of street food, and the way the gelato stick cut my mouth when I bit down too hard on it. I never go anywhere without my camera, but photographs pale in comparison to lived things, the things we touched, when we went away. 

Ah, the sweet chemical stench of Pritt-Stick. 

Being polite Canadians, my friends were determined to leave a note behind on the television screen to thank the woman who cleaned our hotel room as best she could, and I say as best she could because the room was pretty fucking janky: a balcony with a broken window, a shower with no door, a bidet with an alarming crack in it, bed sheets thinner than cellophane, and a strange greenish carpet that, should one fall on it, might scuff off patches of skin. I remember standing on that carpet as a friend showed me the tattoo she'd gotten at a studio in Hamilton just weeks before, that was now disappearing before her very eyes like Kool-Aid crystals.

(Just before I left Canada, I met a woman in the library who couldn't stop gushing over my tattoos, and she showed me hers: some unintelligible flowers on her ankle that had probably started out looking lovely but were now fading like all hell after a couple of months. She was extremely upset about it, so I asked her where she'd gotten it done, and she quoted the same studio that my unwitting friend had used, and that I had used for my monroe piercing, which was a massive disaster as two days after I got it pierced the cheap shitty jewellery they'd used popped right out of my face. I had to wear an earring in it until the mall opened and I could rush out and buy something else.)

One of us flooded the bathroom, and another one of us broke the balcony window more, so that it wouldn't shut, and our guilt was overwhelming (mine less so than theirs. I felt bad about it, yeah, but try as I might, I could never quite capture that self-deprecating abstract regret that Canadians have nurtured so well) so we figured we'd leave a note on the TV screen for the maid. The problem was that none of us spoke Italian, and the WiFi was cruel in its apathy, thus we were forced to haphazardly spell, "Grazie", which took several tries but did probably culminate in the maid not cussing us after we left. 

I snaffled one of the failed post-its. That's it, stuck into my scrapbook, with the gelato stick that I jabbed my mouth on in front of the Trevi Fountain, and the two-euro change I got for my fiver.

And so, behold: Musei Vaticani.

Vatican City, like the Eiffel Tower, is the bane of its city-fellows existence: just as Parisians have campaigned for the ousting of the Tower, so too have Romans dubbed the Vatican "a knife in the heart of Rome". This is interesting, considering the hulking beast of the Coliseum that crouches among them, the site of a hundred years of slave murder, but I guess you pick and choose your battles. Being very much not Roman, I opt to keep my nose out of the matter, and to enjoy the almost unbearable beauty of St. Peter's Basilica, and the Sistine Chapel.

I've misplaced my photographs of the Basilica, which sucks, and I have no photographs of the Sistine Chapel, which is typical. None but those sanctioned by the Pope and taken professionally exist. Photography is barred inside the Sistine Chapel, which you can bitch and moan about until you see it, and consider how spectacularly preserved it is, from floor to ceiling to walls. 

And in any case, do you really want a photograph? Do you want to waste time looking through a viewfinder that can't possibly capture brush strokes, or the silence, or the chill in the air? You shouldn't. The Sistine Chapel feels like another planet, like stepping out of the far reaches of the solar system, away from that thrashing sun and the roaring of Roman traffic. It's peace in brick and paint and wood. It's spiritual, and these words are coming from someone who is utterly disconnected from any semblance of religious faith. That you can have a religious experience without the actual interference of religion speaks to how powerful the Sistine Chapel is in its atmosphere.

I feel like this is the essence of the travel scrapbook. Why would I bother with photography, when touching the torn edges of the paper my chorizo baguette was wrapped in can tear me back to sitting at the edge of St. Peter's Square, while some extremely bold Italian pigeons had a gang gathering around my feet? My ticket to Musei Vaticani reeks of the cold dust and absolute silence of the Sistine Chapel, filled with the ghosts of Catholicism's long (and oftentimes volatile) history. The euro and my gelato stick ought to be haunted, with all of the things that live inside them.

HYOH. Photographs are beautiful, but seeing is easy. Feeling things yields a far greater reward.

I really wasn't that jazzed about the mango one

Paris holds the key to your heart, or so we were told, by that movie that everyone thinks is Disney but isn't (but that, like Disney, plays very fast and loose with fairly well-documented history). Paris does hold the key to your heart, assuming your heart doesn't easily palpitate, and isn't yet clogged with cholesterol. (Seriously, don't expect a diet of wheatgrass shots and kale salad in Paris. You could probably manage it, but you'd be eating home alone literally every evening.)

Paris is a city so well versed in tourism that it's almost become a cliché, probably more so than London, which maintains a sort of gritty, rainy reputation, and New York, which is iconic but not quite iconic enough. The American Dream is far more complicated than the French one, or so we've been told, and in any case, New York isn't afforded the same dreamy and romantic quality as Paris, in large part due to all the locals warning us in harried tones not to go there, on pain of death. New York is big, and it's scary, and people jerk off on you on the subway. We'd be naive to think that these pleasantries don't exist in every other city in the world, but New York now almost prides itself on being impenetrable (as much as the USA is). It prides itself on its hard outer shell. New York doesn't hold the key to your heart, but it does wear the stilettos that will stab and trample it to a bloody mush. 

(That said, New York is utterly dazzling. And you'll find entire establishments dedicated to those wheatgrass shots and kale salads that Europe just doesn't put up with.)

Bread and circuses? More like crowds and phalluses. 

Paris requires three staples: your time, your better clothes, and your phrasebook.

Honestly? You can get by with no French. But do you want to 'get by'?

The reality is that you always, always get more out of your social experience if you can bungle a few words of French and prove that you're really trying. You can hunt through blog after blog but the truth is the truth: if you don't make an effort to speak a few words of the language, no one else is going to make very much of an effort at all to speak yours. It's purely a system of reciprocity. Parisians are cursed with a poor reputation for being cold and rude, but this reputation was probably invented by someone who went to France, didn't bother to even crack the spine of their phrasebook, and then expected the locals to leap the extra mile and speak their second language.

It makes sense if you think of it that way. French isn't your first language, but English isn't theirs. They've probably been studying English since high school, turning in drab assignments and fumbling speaking exams, wasting their weekends with noses buried in textbooks, just for foreigners to take it entirely for granted. 

Look, life isn't fair, but give a neighbour a hand where you can.

So artsy it hurts. Feel free to cover your eyes.

Dressing in Paris might at first seem a burden, but...it's kind of fun. It's fun not to feel overdressed in heels and a label-less Mexican dress you bought on etsy. Don't feel pressured - it's your damn body, put whatever you want on it - but don't see Parisian fashion sense as your enemy. See it as a challenge.

I'm not going to lie to you: there's a plethora of intimidatingly beautiful women and viciously attractive men in Paris (and really just France in general) but let the city be your playground. If you never felt comfortable enough to don that tight pink see-through dress in your small Pennsylvania town or clunk around in RuPaul heels in Cupar (honestly, walking in heels in the UK is stupidly difficult, not because of the cobblestones, but because everything slopes) then take it all to Paris and strut your shit. 

Let's be honest: sweatpants and white sneakers might get you some looks. Well, not "might" - they will. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the rules dictate no sweatpants. Part of travelling, and adventuring, is defying rules. Wear what you want, but bear in mind that Paris's penchant for fashion is not an elite party that you aren't invited to. So join in.

Beware the Star Trek lens flare. It's at large.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, give Paris your time.

No two-day rush-arounds. Don't "spend a day in Paris". Wait, gather your money, set aside your time, and live it. The French aren't fussy eaters, and they aren't speedy eaters either: French dinners often take hours, beginning in the early evening and stretching out into the small hours of the morning (the Spanish and Italians court similar traditions). Afternoon tea can take all afternoon, and nobody expects you to grab a cup and gulp it down, or even to take your coffee to go. If you sit down in a coffee shop, you are down. There's no limit (no rule!) for how long you're allowed to sit there, as long as you order at least one thing per hour. Amy Plum explains this lovingly - the idea that you're renting your table, and while you're renting it, it belongs to you.

Time is of incredible value in Paris, and in great European cities in general. Nobody expects you to rush around (though if you do, it's okay, because European cities are so small that we're used to going everywhere on foot. This is why Europeans have two walking speeds: breakneck or grandfatherly. We're either chilling out, or booking it across the city to work).

Don't barge around the city; if you miss your train, there's another one. Don't scream your coffee order; the guy making your cappuccino is European, and if he's not at breakneck, then he's moving at his grandfatherly pace. And that's okay. Don't rush by the glorious things that there are to see; stop, breathe them in, taste the air. Look at the gaps between cobblestones, and the rivets that hold together the Tour Eiffel. Look beyond the art and at the Louvre itself. The way it's been constructed, and has stood for centuries, looked at by millions of eyes. Europe didn't battle through Rome and the Reformation and Napoleon and two world wars to be rushed around, glanced at, taken like a shot of espresso. 

HYOH. But remember that time is of the essence. Not in the way you might think.

I'll have what he's having

Right now I'm lodged in a peat bog of writer's block, so much so that I've been sitting staring at this white virtual sheet of paper with a line of drool from lip to neck for circa half an hour. Though it might not be so much a case of writer's block as writer's burnout, since I've been hitting the query trail like it's going out of style for the last week and a half (it's my bookshelf's fault, for making me jealous). 

Keeping butt in chair in front of the computer during an attack of writer's burnout is futile; that stone will not bleed, no matter how hard you squeeze it. I like to get up, walk around, do something that doesn't involve cranking out half-hearted words just for the sake of it. Let's face it: your effort will be half-assed, so your work will too.

Contrary to common advice, I prefer to really do something to shake off my burnout, because walking isn't enough. It encourages too much abstract thought, which inevitably ends in my lamenting my lack of motivation and feeling like an inadequate layabout. Recently a low spell took me further afield than your usual Dundee haunt - to the hole-in-the-wall Arts and Antiques Centre in Perth (or rather, by Perth; it's not really "in" anywhere but just around the general vicinity).

I'm not a huge fan of furniture, or indeed anything that can't fit in a cardboard box, but I allowed myself to be dragged (which almost always works out for the better, so my advice is to never resist dragging, especially when it's courtesy of the zaniest of your loved ones). 

So the gist is that the Antiques and Arts Centre is like a department store for things previously loved: alcoves are set up per vendor, and around you may waft, tracking small paths cleared between what looks to the naked eye to be dusty crap but is in fact pure treasure, like books from the 1800s and real mink that someone probably died in, tossed down on a forties silk bedspread like the owner's just popped out for a cigarette and is due back in a tick. In that respect, maybe it's creepy, but I kind of like creepy. 

Thumb through censuses, medical journals from the 1920s, gently used German ammunition boxes (one of which I bought) and 90's first editions of Harry Potter (which aren't antiques, because if they are, then I'm an antique, heaven forbid). Well-trod rugs, china sconces, a silk smoking jacket, a writing desk made entirely out of ivory. Look no further for your problematic conversation pieces!

You can almost smell the clutter through the screen.

The best thing about it is that none of this is "vintage"; it's genuine. It's not etsy, charging £200 for a plastic straw with googly eyes hot-glued on to it ("it's a testament to youthful resistance against the Wall Street corporate machine and its systematic usurping of the Earth's dwindling resources"). Antiquing is an almost spiritual experience, to be another set of hands in a long line, touching something that housed tank shells or that some aristocrat creep with a hamster moustache wore while he smoked a Cuban cigar in the 50's. Like I said, it's creepy, but creepy is good. Creepy exists on a spectrum, from The Hills Have Eyes to the dude on the subway who licks your neck to Sharon Needles. It's the Sharon Needles neighbourhood that antiques culture rests in, so relax. This is all good fun. And if an audience boos you off stage, that is simply applause from ghosts.

(Not going to lie, I expected some sort of paranormal manifestation from the ammunitions box I bought. I was not indulged as such.) 

Typewriters are probably the reason for life expectancies being shorter in the early 20th century.

Like I said, I'm not a screaming fan of furniture. It's not quite portable enough for me. But I'm partial to what you might call "trinkets": little things, little pleasantries, smoking pipes or compacts or a quill and ink. The things I keep must tell me a story, be it about myself, or about someone who came well before me, and bequeathed her china set and spooky dog paintings to no one when she died. 

You'd think that, with my surrounding myself with all of these stories, I'd be able to write one without catching fire. Sadly, my story is this: I'm human. 

With all the politics and the mind games

I love skies. Cloudy skies, sunny skies, night skies. Morning skies. Skies that look stained with coloured dyes; skies that are angry with rain.

It's funny to think that we're all under the same sky, even as far apart as we are, and with all the different lives that we lead. I like this about travel; no matter how far we are from home, the sky is still the same one that we look at from our bedroom windows. It's still the same one that all the people we miss can see.

That sky doesn't look very paxful. 

Whenever I'm going anywhere I (a) always take my camera, and (b) always try to photograph the sky, no matter if it's black and spoiling for rain or utterly blue and cloudless. With all the monuments and cobblestones and temples and gardens, rivers and domes and mosaics that rest at or below our eye level, we tend to miss the glory of a good sky: ever-changing, never the same way twice. The sky is as alive as we are.

It's always sunny in Montmartre. I hope.

My grandfather was a painter and a draughtsman, and his passion was clouds. He would sit outside in his patio in Woking and watch the clouds for as long as anyone could stand, and when he painted them, they were filled with that life I see in them. He saw the clouds as art, and the sky as a canvas, and rightly so.

Next time you're pointing your camera at your feet, stop and turn it upwards. What you will capture is something no one will ever see again. 

Standing still is hard

So today I was thinking about motivation. And the fact that I have none.

Well, not none. I have some. But my motivation is like rain in the desert. It comes in spits and spats, and doesn't do much to hydrate the landscape. And when the skies do open, there's nowhere to go with it: my motivation runs before it can walk, so I'm motivated to do huge life-changing things but not the small administrative tasks needed to achieve those goals.

I'm not sure how many others out there do this: chronically bite off more than they can chew. I emigrated twice, and might perhaps do it a third time, but I can't force myself to go to the library to print off CVs. How can that be? I felt frustrated by this, so I started to panic, and when I panicked, it made me anxious. It was a downward spiral.

Part of the problem, I think, is that nobody is willing to live in the moment. Nobody is willing to do something just because they feel like it, and bonus if it helps get things done. I read recently that one of the most beneficial thought exercises to try when you're feeling overwhelmed or unmotivated or guilty for being one or both of those things is to think, "Life is fine." It's to accept the way things are right now, and say to yourself, "Life is okay the way it is. I'm fine."

I think for people like me who internalize everything and panic incessantly about the future, so much so that our fear paralyzes us, can seriously benefit from this. Along with that refusal to accept the way things are comes guilt and self-loathing; feeling like a failure and feeling like life itself is insurmountable.

We won't ever get everything done. Our to-do list will never really be complete. All you can do is your best with what you have. I'm not sure if this advice will help anyone else, but it greatly helped me, to realize that it's okay, and you're doing fine, and stop treating life like you're the greyhound and its the little squirrel thing that they chase along the racetrack. When you worry and stress through life you miss the best things: not the huge obstacles or earth-shattering events but each tiny step along the way. Blue skies or a really good sandwich or when someone tells you their dog's name. These are the small moments that make life amazing, so slow down and enjoy them. Don't loathe your time on earth, or treat it like a job to be done. We're only here once, and for a small speck of time. We must be grateful for what we have.

Mother Nature doesn't want your stress tears on her upholstery.

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.

This game is so hard because I always forget about Suriname

I'm not sure if beaches are the first thing that leaps to mind upon mention of Scotland, probably because tourism has boosted the visibility of inland attractions: Edinburgh Castle and the Wallace Monument, cobbled streets and window boxes and swords. Tearooms are big, and so are forts, and Hadrian's Wall. But beaches? No.

And it's a shame. Scotland's beaches rock. They're not white sand and you can't lie on them in a string bikini, but shit if they're not beautiful. I greatly enjoyed lakeside beaches in Canada for their swimmability (is that a word?), their lack of jellyfish, and their fresh water, but it's a different experience to stand at the cusp of this little island and taste that stiff salt in the air. It's different to look across the water, perhaps across the River Tay, and see the green humps of Fife's hills across the way. Scotland's beaches aren't the same as beaches in North America; they're not better or worse, but they're different, and it's a good sort of different.

And the water's blue as hell.

We took our posse of dogs to Broughty Ferry beach, which runs along the edge of the River Tay, juxtaposed with the east-Scottish city of Dundee. They had a blast. It's a quiet beachfront, and nobody really heeds the 'no dogs' rule - you'll meet plenty of dog walkers along the way, all of them friendly, as Dundee people tend to be. Most of all, it's a sweet place to watch a sunset.

Take a walk, and a sunset.

That's another thing about Dundee: it's the sunniest city in Scotland. Even when it's cool, the sun peeks out. Living in Canada, the evenings stayed light until about 9 p.m.; here, dark doesn't fall until after ten. Long evenings are Scotland's boasting point, because while the summers might be considerably cooler, the days stretch out gloriously.

HYOH. But take a break from cobbles and castles, and head to the beach if you can. It's worth it.