Google Baking

How did travel work before Google Translate? I could wax philosophical about all the profound changes technology and social media are having and the good, bad, and ugly about those implications. But let’s just not, all right? In college I found that the best way to survive mid-terms and finals was with the help of […]

October 25, 2011

London Detour

As a self-appointed Road Trip Queen, I think there is considerable value in exploring the expanse of what actually comprises the US. I remember seeing an advertisement for a trucking company in the final stretches of one of my trips. “How far have you gone today? Want to go farther?” I was just crossing the […]

October 21, 2011

Quirky pancakes and sprinkled magic.

No matter how unseasonably warm everyone claimed it was, it was still London in October. I had been standing outside the Holborn underground station for 45 minutes, waiting for a friend. I had a general stressed-out feeling from all things grad school and I was buckling a little under the weight of my first real […]

October 18, 2011

Paris Photobooth: Exam Stress Relief

Graduate school in Paris has turned out to be a bit heavy on the graduate school and light on the Paris. Papers and exams, it seems, are universal concepts and they followed me here. Or, rather, I chased them here. Because I chose to come here and be a student again. Because I really thought […]

October 13, 2011

Graduate school and drowning have more in common than you might think.

Graduate school is structured to demoralize you. By design, it takes a gaggle of people who have long had a certain level of confidence in their ability to tackle academic pursuits, and kicks them in the knees, then spits on their faces. In theory, if you withstand the abuse, it does something really nice to […]

October 10, 2011

Clumsiness Is Not Cute

Romantic comedies and Disney have told us so many lies and given us so many misguided expectations that I could easily dedicate an entire blog to breaking these struggles down one by one. Suffice it to say that reality is thoroughly disappointing. I am slapped in the face with the inaccuracy of one particular lie […]

October 6, 2011

Paris Photobooth

Paris is every single bit as lovely and charming and awesome and all of these other superb adjectives as I expected it to be. However, for all the time I spend saying this, it seems like it might be a bit more productive to actually show it off. I seldom break out my amazing-but-clunky DSLR, […]

October 4, 2011

Moving: worst thing ever? or worst thing ever? Discuss.

Moving sucks. I could try to dress that up and put it more eloquently, but there’s just no way around the fact that the succinct version rings so incredibly true. I found a new place and today I sort-of-mostly moved. I still have another haul of crap and I’ll probably sleep in the old place […]

September 29, 2011

Eat it up (if you can)

“I lived in Ghana for a semester; Paris will be a breeze.” This is indicative of the simultaneously arrogant and naive things I thought before I came to Paris. When I left for Ghana, I had few expectations other than that everything was going to be really ridiculously different. In truth, things were probably nicer […]

September 26, 2011

VLOG: Parisian Apartment Diaries

And now for a vlog update. I present you with a few snippets of my apartment and an overview of the ambiguous terms under which I am being asked to leave this apartment. It’s all very French.

September 23, 2011

Get lost. It’s for your own good.

Getting lost is a given with travel. You can never really know a city until you have gotten hopelessly lost there. Depending on how adept you are with things like “directions” and “maps,” your formula for reaching that magical place where your number of times lost translates into having an actual sense of your city […]

September 21, 2011

It doesn’t matter if you make it awkward. It already is.

If you hate being uncomfortable and have little patience for the absurdly awkward, then travel and living abroad are simply not for you. Fortunately, I am well versed in all things awkward, and I mostly love the fact that every basic task becomes monumental now that I live in a city where my knowledge of […]

September 13, 2011