Cappuccinos and Red Balloons

I will always be an advocate for international travel. To see how someone lives on the other side of the world, to walk on their streets, to glimpse their joys and their struggles - all this gives us a new perspective on how we live in our little corners of the world.

Just before Christmas I spent 4 days in France visiting with my friend Meghan and experiencing a bit of this new country through her knowledge and love of the culture. This was by far my favorite international experience to date, primarily because she and I are similar travelers. We take every opportunity to experience the culture we are in, after all, why not? Why wouldn't we want to make the most of a chance to gain a richer appreciation for the beautiful diversity around us?

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." {Mark Twain}

On a beautiful, warm, (8 degrees celsius!) Saturday afternoon, Meghan and I stopped at little Cafe Esmeralda, appropriately located directly across from Notre Dame Cathedral.  We slid into delightfully delicate wicker chairs, positioned not facing one another, but looking out onto the street. (French culture encourages people watching, so cafe chairs are usual set like this!) Around us life in Paris was business as usual. French teenagers strolled by, giggling and chattering in impossibly fast dialogues, tourists darted back and forth, stretching like professional contortionists to get just the right picture of the massive Cathedral standing guard silently over our heads, and several artistic looking young adults (film students?) were in the process of shooting a commercial on the sidewalk to our left. As the cheery serveur materialized with our order, 2 shots of espresso for Meghan and a frothy cappuccino for me, we settled back to rest our feet and take in the bustle around us. I wondered then how I would ever go back home, spend Christmas on an upstate farm, visit Lancaster County, and then resume school in rather unremarkable Erie, Pennsylvania. But maybe, I quietly pondered as I sipped the decadent foam from the top of my cappuccino, that was the point. What is the good of experiencing life if we don't allow it to change us, and in turn, how we live in the everyday moments?

"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving." {Terry Pratchett} 

On my final day in France we yet again caught the train into Paris, this time to the south end and the Champs-Elysees. As we migrated through an expansive park, the object of our wanderings at the far end, we were arrested by a peculiar spot of color above us. On one of the bare trees lining the walk, someone, (human or faerie folk?) had tied bright red balloons to the uppermost branches. We lingered only a moment to snap a few pictures before resuming our rapid march, but the memory of that sensation lingered even as I boarded my flight home the next morning.

Why, I wondered, would someone go to all the trouble of stringing those decorations high up in a tree along a fairly untraveled walk in a solitary park? Was there something special about that tree or place? [Insert American indignance] Who even has time to inflate that many balloons?

But then, I think that may have been the point. While that city and that park were new and fascinating for me, they were someone's ordinary. Someone lived and worked there, probably passing that park on a daily basis out of routine, perhaps dreaming of a visit to another country far away. But the point is that someone stopped, stepped out of the ordinary, and made something beautiful. They allowed their perspective on the world to influence how they lived in the everyday.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." {Marcel Proust}

As I prepare to head back to another semester of grad school, I want to have learned far more from my travels than how to say "bonjour" and the trick to maneuvering the metro system. I want my new perspective to impact how I live in the everyday. I believe that I will be held accountable for what I do with my little piece of the world, and so I want to leave a few "red balloons" behind me, so that maybe one day someone from another time and place will stop and say, here someone found something extraordinary in the ordinary.

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not." {Ralph Waldo Emerson}