All posts tagged: destinations

First Stop: Opening Closed Doors in Paris

It’s hard for me to admit but I do believe in signs, messages from the universe that I am in the right path. In Western secular culture a binary divides people into believers (be it in religion, a creator, or superstitions) and the so-called logical persons who don’t. But even the non-believers see logic in Murphy’s law. Ever since I bought my ticket to Colombia, I’ve been thinking a lot of about these signs. After I left the hairdresser in Istanbul, with a confirmed ticket sitting in my inbox, everything seemed to be going eerily smooth. The day before arriving in Paris, a family that I had only met over three days in Spain last year invited me to stay with them, relieving me from a last-minute hostel search in Paris. I was picked up from the bus station in Étoile and quickly ushered into a lovely Shabbat dinner with shrimps as appetizers and delicious cheese as dessert. My first night in Paris was capped with draft beer and entertainment from a group of French boys …

Me, my hair, and my bag are off to Colombia!

It was an arduous journey filled with tortuous deliberations. For the last few months, I traveled the entire world, twice or three times over. In my head, that is. As I continued to tie up lose ends of my sedentary life, finalizing the end of my 5-year job and making sure my mailbox at home wouldn’t explode in my absence, I also had to decide where I was actually going. South America was the first destination I decided upon. I could be learning Tango in Buenos Aires, or loosing sense of time in Parachi, Brazil, which looks like my kind of paradise according to google images. But I could also go hiking in Nepal or feel strange among a hippies in Goa. Meanwhile the weather was getting colder in Patagonia and the ski season nearing its end in the Northern Hemisphere. I seemed to have the open-buffet syndrome: standing before me was all the tastes of the world and I seemed to have only one small plate and a flimsy plastic fork. Which one would I …