Year of the Dragon

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (like Oscar Wilde, he seems to write in little quotable snippets.)

The next year or two are going to be a lot of new things for me, and since I am absolutely horrible at keeping in touch with the people I love, and I have always had a secret dream of keeping a blog, this will be my way of letting people know what I am up to.  I suspect more of the time I will just post pictures or short comments on things that catch my interest, but we’ll see what shape this takes. How could I be a credible expat without a blog?

I graduated Harvard in May, hid my brand new diploma in a spare closet at my sister’s house in Florida, and packed everything I would keep with me in a single red suitcase I got as a graduation gift. The previous November, after a couple of months of intense senior year anxiety in trying to decide what to do with my future,  I was selected as one of the recipients of the Michael Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship. In one of those amazing “is-this-real-life” moments that sometimes happen to me, I was given the complete freedom (and funds!) to travel to another country for one year and develop a personally meaningful project. Real life was postponed, and I was set to go to France in mid August. 

But of course, it couldn’t possibly be so easy. I applied for the requisite long-term visa, and even now, well over four months later, I don’t have a response. In July, I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, where I was working with the Harvard Idea Translation Lab developing a project to connect day laborers with employers. I then got a short stay Schengen visa that let me come to France for a one week conference also with the Harvard ITL, and decided to stay a couple of extra weeks in Europe.

Right now I am in Paris, and will be traveling to Spain at the end of the week. I have to return to Colombia in September 15th, when my visa runs out. I will then have to decide on a new plan of action, whether to keep begging the French for a new visa, or, most likely, to completely re-think the next year. For now, I am living day-to-day. I am choosing my travel destinations based solely on where I have couches I can crash on. I eat mostly baguettes and try to resist the urge to drink coffee so I don’t have to pay for it. I walk around all day staring in awe at this magnificent city, take hundreds of bad pictures, and pick books for my Kindle old enough that I can get them for free (as you can see, Walden is the current choice).

I seem to have completely lost the ability to plan much more than two days in advance, and though I often whine about it (ask my poor boyfriend Robb), it is kind of nice. We’ll see where this goes, and for random updates from the road, keep reading this blog.