A little more than a week before my trip to Paris, I experience one of those nuits blanches of restlessness, fix a cup of chamomile and mint tea and calm my mind with Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. I am struck anew by his thesis — that there is plenty of information available about what to do when we travel but precious little about how to travel well.
Earlier in the day I officially began my Paris journey at the French Market Cafe (2321 Abbot Kinney Blvd., 310.577.9775) in Venice, California in my part of Los Angeles. I picked up a copy of Marie Claire magazine, ordered a velvety bouillabaise and listened to the French speakers at the tables around me to begin re-tuning my ear to the French language. It has been eight years since I was in France; once comfortable getting around in the language, I am now extremely rusty. Over the past few weeks, you might have seen me driving up and down the freeways and surface streets of LA talking to myself, thinking I was — like everyone else — talking in my cell phone when I was actually responding to French tapes in my car radio. Or, rather, I was experiencing extraordinary pleasure in mastering the expressive merde! at the idiosyncratic drivers of LA. But that is another histoire.
From the cafe I drove up to Magellan’s in Santa Monica, eager for a supportive environment of travelers. The claches of chatter were invigorating — a solo Womantraveler on her way to Shanghai for the first time, a man buying shoes for a South American rain forest, a couple discussing their forthcoming retirement to Provence and, coincidentally a French store manager from Montpellier also in the south of France. He kindly let me practice some basic conversation with the gentle correction of a teacher rather than the horrified Parisien I expect to encounter in a week’s time. It is challenging to align one’s thoughts to spoken words in another language unless your language muscle stays very flexed, which mine isn’t.
On the way home I picked up a French film, 8 Women, taking the advice of an American friend who suggested that having the voices in the background without subtitles to rely on is a helpful way of training the ear anew. She was right about that, but when it came to actually watching the film and fearing I’d miss the nuances of the story, I had to open my eyes and cheat by reading the English subtitles.
For me, the how of travel is inextricably linked to why I travel — to be transported to other lives and cultures and capture something of them that becomes a new quality of me — a simple memento, a precious photograph, an evanescent essence I wear like a new piece of jewelry. For six weeks I have been enjoying my upcoming trip through anticipation, and in four more weeks I will be living it through memory. In between will be the actual voyage, but the entire experience is the journey. The how of travel is imagining and preparing, living it, then committing it to memory through a process that compresses, exaggerates, filters, diminishes, forgets, rewrites. The how of travel lies deeply in the subtle reinvention of ourselves from who we were before we left and who we are when we return.
