Twenty-one days spent travelling across Europe. I can’t believe it really happened; it’s transformed back into a distant dream. Now that I’m back in Oxford once more I’m glad I took so many photos on my trip and bought postcards: they’re tangible and ground my fleeting memories, vivid, too beautiful, too many to be true.
The list of stops includes: Brussels, the Loire Valley (in the French countryside), Switzerland, Florence, Rome, and then I took a cruise to Athens, Rhodes, Ephesus, Istanbul, and Naples before flying back to London from Rome.
I’ve always dreamt of travelling. When I was younger I wanted to buy a world map and bright tacks, pinning, claiming each speck on the map I’d been to. Until each continent, each corner of the globe was mine. Until I’d taken those photos that come with the picture frame, too happy, too clean, too cliché to be real life. Until I’d collected memories and exotic experiences like precious souvenirs, to be shown and shared with others.
And of course—I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again—travelling is less glamorous and more work than it sounds. There have been countless times when I’m watching a movie or reading a book that I think, “How much did that cost?”, "How does she look that good after travelling for 18 hours?", “When did they have time to go to the bathroom?”, “Is that really feasible?”. It’s just funny when actually travelling, as an average student on a simple budget, to have to deal with all the practical details, annoying responsibilities, frustrating realities that get left out of an idealistic movie. Getting from one speck on the world map to another, for instance, can be slightly exhausting.
We travelled by rail pass, creating a smooth routine of waking ridiculously early, grabbing a pastry and caffeine, leaping onto our train with luggage in tow, and setting off to the next destination. It oscillated between feeling as though we had been travelling for ages and travelling for mere hours, in sync with my feelings of exhaustion and anticipation for the next place. We switched between languages and currencies frequently and relatively fluidly, the universal arrows, bathroom, and train symbols easing the transitions. It’s funny to enter a new place and realize how utterly far, how completely disconnected one is from any shred of familiarity. Just my suitcase, my purse, and my travel companion anchored me to the new places.
We made mistakes, we got lost, we laughed, we sprinted to catch trains, cat-napped, sought refuge in our iPods, attempted to journal the experiences into safe-keeping, tasted new foods, and tried to stick to a reasonable budget while not fixating on money.
Each place had a new energy and presented new challenges. I day-dreamed about the trip beforehand, imagining how it would feel to be in the different cities, see the different works of art, taste the different foods. It makes me laugh to think about the weird relationship between my expectations, actual experiences, and the snippets I took away from the trip. None of them match up.
Brussels is a city of light, waffles, frites, meandering; the Loire Valley is dreamy, a beautiful spring day, grand, delicious, relaxing; Switzerland is cold, serene, clean, expensive, and cute; Florence is what you would expect, old, Italian, thoughtful; Rome is historic, blasé, fashionable, poetic.
Despite my attempts to savor each moment, to not take any of the places or experiences for granted, my memories have already become blurred. The travelling time has smoothed into one tedious, exhausting, exciting, long train ride in my mind; the French countryside, the Swiss Alps, the outskirts of Rome are all one continuous journey in the space of my memory. My time spent in each city comes first in bright snatches, the highlights.
We rented and rode bikes alongside the Loire River to see chateaux, on a glorious spring day. Riding back, we got horribly lost and the stunning scenery had an ironic beauty: we were too exhausted and rushed to appreciate it, dreading nightfall, wishing we could be safely back in our town. But we made it, safe and sound and completely drained. Switzerland is beautiful mountains and greedy lungfuls of clean, pure air. Oh, and ridiculously good chocolate. Florence is David and the top of the Duomo. I had expected to be underwhelmed by David but he got me. I stood there for who knows how long, gaping, transfixed by the beauty of his form, the detail of his muscles and veins, the magnificence of his stature, the power of his hands. And the Duomo itself is a beautiful building but the view from its rooftop over all of Florence is spectacular, breathtaking, with the warm tones of the city buildings, the trees, hills, and vivid skyline all melding together seamlessly, flawlessly. Rome was a city of overwhelming excitement, between the Pieta in St. Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican Museum, the Trevi Fountain, the Coliseum, and the pinnacle, Palm Sunday mass in St. Peter’s Square with the Pope.
The cruise blends together in eleven days of luxurious relaxation, our belongings unpacked in one room, complimentary room service at our fingertips, fancy dinners every night, movies, games, reading for fun, going out, sleeping in. The cities we visited were wonderful and that would be one of my only complaints about the cruise—we spent too little time in the cities themselves. Athens is simply the Acropolis for me, with not enough time to see much else. Rhodes was underwhelming, Ephesus better than I had expected, with a staggering archaeological site, including the theatre where St. Paul preached to the Ephesians. Istanbul was a city of the senses: the taste of kebap and apple tea, the overwhelming colors and smells and textures at the Spice and Grand Bazaars, and the hauntingly poignant sound of the call to prayer from the mosques. Finally, in Naples we climbed Mt. Vesuvius, visited Pompeii, and ate wonderful, beautiful pizza.
Is this an adequate explanation of the trip I’ve always dreamt of? No, though I wish it were. But hopefully it’s a good beginning, a snapshot, a small commemoration of one huge blessing.
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