Living in France as an American means also living under a very glamorous pile of paperwork: birth certificate translations, endless forms brought to you by the French government, hundreds of terrible Photomaton pictures that will, alas, ultimately go unused. When dealing with all of the hurdles of France, I like to reward myself, to remind myself why I’m photocopying every…
Read More
Before I begin, have you signed up for my newsletter? 😉 I greatly prefer wandering hidden streets to navigating crowds at tourist destinations when traveling. My best traveling experience like this was last year in Sevilla, where my friend Sam gave me a list of must sees and eats, as if she were showing me around the city herself. And, in…
Read More
Barcelona from Anne Elder on Vimeo. My Spanish level hovers between what I learned from a 5th grade general language class, Dora the Explorer, and the Taco Bell dog. This proficiency helps exactly zero percent when visiting Catalan, where Spanish rules are more or less thrown out the window. (In a moment of panic at the airport, I Googled “how…
Read More
At the bottom of the hill where the only* Brahma Hindu temple in India sits, we perched at the edge of a basin filled with holy rose water. A man led us in a prayer which none of us could understand or even really pronounce; he translated for us along the way. When the prayer was finished, he rubbed red…
Read More
There’s one question that often pops into my mind as I walk from the metro to the boulangerie down the hill to my apartment — what would it be like to live in Paris not as a student? I so hope to know the answer someday, but that day is not today or any in the near future. We’re right…
Read More
