A First Post in the Time of Covid

All quiet in Paris’ 3rd Arrondisement

I am starting a blog focused on my travel experiences during a global pandemic that has basically placed the entire world on hold. Travel of any kind, for me at least, has suddenly become a distant dream, an aspiration, something that I now hope to be able to do again “one day.” For someone whose constant thoughts and ruminations almost always inevitably gravitate toward travel in some way, this is an incredibly difficult thing to accept and adapt to. 

Let me be clear. There are much bigger problems right now in the world, of course. MUCH. Bigger. Problems. 

My father, who had been battling Covid-19 for several weeks at home, is now in the ICU in New York, fighting for his life after his health deteriorated suddenly and rapidly less than a week ago. There are people who are sick, who have lost loved ones and livelihoods, people who (in the U.S., at least) have the added stress of lacking proper healthcare coverage. There are healthcare and other essential workers who put themselves and their families at risk every day to save lives and keep society running. We owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude. 

But in this space, I’m allowing myself to focus on what might seem frivolous to many and essential to others. I’ve been meaning to start a blog like this for years. Instead, I’ve constantly made excuses and put it off. Mostly because my perfectionism gene has allowed me to convince myself time and time again that no blog of mine could be launched until I’d have it all “figured out” first; it would have to be absolutely perfect even before its execution. I have constantly convinced myself that the writing would never be quite good enough, and that by putting some personal writing out in the world I’d have to subject myself to a level of vulnerability I’ve never been quite willing enough to risk. It felt scary. 

Well, screw it. I’m moving forward. 

Paris’ famous boquinistes, a fixture along the Seine, were shuttered during lockdown.

Perhaps it’s because so many of us have had to adjust to this new normal, to a life of sheltering-in-place and social distancing, where hand sanitizer has become a valued commodity and disinfectant wipes a near luxury good, that I’ve come to really realize there’s even less time to waste agonizing over the smaller things anymore.

And now that travel is off limits, I think about it even more than usual. Obsess over it, even. My finances aside, I’ve started to compulsively dream and plan the next voyage. This is anything but a novel musing and I know I’m not alone. Naturally, I need an outlet.

With a job (fortunately, still) and a toddler, life for me during lockdown does not necessarily offer more calm moments. Yet, cessation of the constant hum connected to many parts of normal life—spending time at the playground, shopping more frequently, running more errands, taking the subway—has somehow offered an additional sliver of quiet in my head, even as I cycle through the busy days. 

An empty street in Le Marais

These are the moments when I indulge in some of that daydreaming about future trips. It’s also the time when I’ve found myself intensely revisiting memories of my previous travels and replaying their cherished moments over and over in my head.  

My thoughts tend to move to the details—the neighbor’s lush green garden with the stone path that I could view from the window of my apartment in Buenos Aires; dancing with a quiet stranger, whose stoic face seemed carved out of stone, at a party in Havana; the remote village where my coworkers and I stopped while driving through southern Georgia, which felt like the edge of the world; the way ice-cold watermelon juice was the perfect antidote to the heat in Bangkok, and the most incredible treat in Kabul. 

I think about the time I stood on an incredibly steep hill while hiking around Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán, warmed by the sunlight and watching the long grass blowing in ripples around me like the surface of the sea. My feet felt rooted there, as if I couldn’t fall, and I craned my neck to try and get a 360-degree look at the view of three volcanoes that left me gob smacked by its beauty. 

I think of the birds that swooped through the air above our heads while my husband and I swam in a hot spring in the Sumatran rainforest, the steam rising from the water into curtain of mist. 

I sift through these memories like sand in a river and new details are revealed to me like tiny stones. Their mundanity is irrelevant; I remember how it was snowing on that drive through Georgia, how the car we were in was white, and how the family we visited in that village used dried up manure to keep their fire going. I remember how I’d lost my grandfather one week before that trip. At one point, when we’d entered an old monastery, I thought of him and started to cry.

When I think about Guatemala, another memory surfaces, one of me standing alone in a cool mist at dusk at the foot of the mountains outside the highland town where I lived. Swathed in low clouds, their peaks were still visible and they looked majestic, pressed up against me like a tidal wave. I am reminded of Martha, my “host mom” with whom I lived during my first month in the country. She was Nicaraguan, a former child soldier for the Sandinistas. When they were about to put her on a flight to Europe, she somehow managed to escape and board one for Guatemala instead. (Don’t ask me how, but the rest is history.) She exuded a kind confidence, donned a buzz cut, and her voice had a see-sawing musical cadence. My first breakfast in her house she asked me if I was a feminist, even just a little bit. 

During that hike to the hot spring in Sumatra, our guide had led us through paths where branches smacked my arms as we walked up and down hills and over gigantic tree roots. Somehow I’d managed to temporarily lose my fear of insects while camping in the rainforest, ironically while sleeping on a plastic tarp. I don’t think seeing huge millipedes even really bothered me. 

These thoughts feed my yearning for more travel, which has come to feel like a craving for a forbidden drug, as trite as it sounds, and compounded by the fact that I don’t know when I will get to be on the move again. Because there is no clear finish line in this wait, at least not yet. 

But these thoughts are impacting me in other ways, too. They are helping me to gain some perspective. I am an impatient person and, deep down, a pessimist (previously a pessimist in denial). So as someone who loves to travel more than anything else (apart from my husband and my son), normally I am constantly fixated on the amount of travel I haven’t done, the places I still haven’t seen, the adventures I haven’t yet experienced. I dwell on this. I get down about it. 

But in getting wrapped up in these memories, I remind myself that I have been fortunate enough to have traveled to some truly incredible places. I’ve met people who have stunned me with their bravery and taken my breath away with their kindness. I’ve learned from them and I have been fortunate to do so. 

My inherent negativity also causes me to numb to the beauty in front of me, and to take the smaller adventures for granted. The shame of this fact is magnified by the actuality that I live in the center of Paris—an incredible city in an incredible country. It is filled with history that unfolds like a good story, and beauty that often leaves me in disbelief. I first started dreaming about living here when I was about 12 years old. I first came here when I was 15 on a teacher-led tour during spring break, the nine months prior to which I’d worked nearly every day after school in a bookshop to earn the money to be able to go. 

From my hotel room at night, which I’d shared with two (still wonderful) friends, I remember staring at the window each night before falling asleep, listening to the Louis Armstrong that sneaked through my friend’s Walkman headphones (yes, Walkman), and I dreamed of having a window like that of my own, here, one day. Now, years later, I have it. And even though it’s a tiny attic portal, and not a floor-to-near-ceiling piece of elegance with a wrought-iron guard rail, it’s still a lifelong dream come true—and a reality that I often take very much for granted.

One of Paris’ kiosks during le confinement.

I’ve been living here for nearly three and a half years, and I have no idea how long my family and I will stay. In fact, before all of this, we had prepared ourselves to likely leave in the coming months, something that is now completely up in the air. And as our movements are now very limited by the restrictions of le confinement, when I do go outside now—and no farther than the 1km radius we are allowed to traverse—I find it easier to be captivated by the angle of a charming street, the unusual brightness of the buildings, a classic street lamp, or a tattered French flag fluttering from a window box, all just blocks from my home. 

Paris and all it holds is arguably an objectively impressive place, and a place I realize many Americans living in America right now may dream of visiting. My very belabored point is that we easily take for granted where we are and what we have. And while I have considered myself very lucky to be where I am, before this pandemic changed the world, I’d really come to consider it to be too normal. I would walk around while often missing the details, my mind focused on the more far-flung, exotic locations I’d yet to see. 

I constantly think about the day when I can backpack around more of southeast Asia or finally explore New Zealand. But I also now take greater solace in revised daydreams, and of returning to some previously habitual things. 

I like to imagine the newfound appreciation I would have for actually sitting in a park again, maybe with wine, or walking along the Seine, browsing in a store, going to a café for a drink, or just going to my brother and sister-in-law’s on the other side of Paris and watch my son play with his cousins. I think about what it would be like to see a new museum, or even re-visit one I’ve already seen three times. And don’t even get me started on how amazing a simple day trip would be right now. 

But, most of all, I think of how wonderful it would be to just sit next to my father who, fully recovered, could tell me about what trip he dreams of taking next—or about nothing at all in particular.

I tell myself that, once our freedom of movement is restored, I won’t take any of it for granted anymore. I’m not sure how realistic that is, given the fact that I’m human, inherently flawed and selfish, and possessing a short memory for the uncomfortable. 

But I will try. More than ever before. At the very least, I hope to have greater awareness for all that I have.