Pre-Departure Thoughts

With Kristen whipping up fajitas in Paris, Becky ruminating on "pain au chocolate" in Poitiers, and various other friends scattered throughout the blogosphere abroad, I decided recently it was time to tip-toe into the world of study abroad blogging. Now, I know there are blog critics among you; Alex has already voiced his complaints, and another friend explained via e-mail recently that she has been "raised to make fun of blogs." Let me explain.

My impetus for "blogging" — for my parents: "web logging," get it? — originated in a I took a year ago with Barbara Ganley. Every student in the class was required to keep a blog; we posted writing assignments, responded in writing to each other's work, and used our "mother blog" as a sort of virtual blackboard for posting class assignments, syllabus updates and the occasional interesting tidbit that we wished to share with one another. We posted summer reading recommendations at the end of the semester or shared links to poetry readings online.

I myself came to blogging a bit reluctantly, in part because I was distrustful of the technology, but ultimately found it made for a unique classroom dynamic that I haven't seen duplicated since. Our classroom expanded as the discussions that started in class spilled onto the blog, as new discussions popped up in cyber space. I found that blogging provided a uniquely thoughtful approach to creativity in our lives — all in the company of others, of course. Some of us were more enthusiastically tied to the blog, but on the whole it fostered informal learning and passionate discussion. But this was the sort of class for blogging; we turned to the blog as writers learning about writing and writing about writing. The blog was suitably self-conscious, suitably meditative.

This is not to say that every class would not benefit from a bit of blog action. But for me, blogging was about writing and communicating within a community. And I do not know that every undertaking is well suited for blogging. Barbara — ever a thoughtful blogger — may be quick to disagree, and her experience is far more extensive than my own. But for me, I appreciated the blog while our class was in session, and enjoyed being part of a community of writers. And when our community was disbanded, as all classrooms eventually are, I shuffled back — a bit sadly, but in part relieved — to the solitude of writing on my own.

So with the exception of a few posts made in German during my Language School summer, I resisted blogging once school let out last spring. The linguistically imposed isolation of my summer at Language School, where I spent seven weeks speaking (and writing) nothing but German, made blogging with others tricky. And the rigors of the academic semester left precious little time for the sort of "slow blogging," as Barbara terms it, that I was most interested in pursuing. More than anything else, however, I resisted blogging without purpose. The sort of blogging that appeals most to me, I think, is blogging within the parameters of a well-defined project. I didn't have a ready-made community for my thoughts. And I think I feared hurtling my reflections on the sometimes tedious process of day-to-day learning into a void; perhaps, I worried, it would be self-centered of me to write about something so ordinary.

This is all a long-winded explanation, I suppose, for my trip back to blogging. I thought for a good long time about whether or not I was interested in taking up this sort of writing while abroad. Then Barbara coaxed me into Blogging the World, a project she started last year to connect students writing about their study abroad experiences. And I recognized the fervor with which I read blogs — those of my friends abroad, in particular. Writing projects aside, they make for interesting reading, and I’ve enjoyed following my friends’ adventures abroad from their blogs. (Perhaps this is because our lives become extraordinary during these few months -- or at least extraordinary in the conventional sense.) Rather than than long e-mails from Mainz, expect the occasional update here. I imagine I will approach this blog as a work in progress; this is to be a virtual notebook, a sort of collection of drafts of thoughts cultivated abroad. Not a journal, necessarily, but rather the rough outlines of a project that I do not yet quite understand.

Enough, for now, about blogging. I leave for Germany a week and a half; I fly on the evening of February 27. Until then, I am at home. Home, for me, is Steilacoom, Washington. I am without a car most days, so I don't venture far. I eat my cereal at the kitchen table and read the sub-par Tacoma News Tribune. I listen to NPR or re-runs of This American Life. I bake. I'm collecting recipes from the Food Network, and putzing about in the kitchen. (I made my first lasagna a few nights ago.) And I walk The Dog, a good-natured, rusty-colored pony of a dog; we amble around the neighborhood. We like best to walk in the woods east of Steilacoom, on trails used by Fort Lewis soldiers for training exercises. At home, I read my book, or watch old Sidney Poitier films, and The Dog and I nap intermittently until the rest of family comes rumbling home.

I have grown very fond of Washington. My family landed here when I was twelve or so, the last stop on my father's extensive string of military tours. When I was in high school, he retired after nearly twenty-five years in the Army, and we moved the fifteen minutes from Fort Lewis to Steilacoom. I have lived here substantially longer than I have lived anywhere else, but only in these last two or three years has Washington begun to feel like home. This realization came, I suppose, when I left again, this time for college on the other side of the country. And now I consider myself a proud Washingtonian; the state may well be the hub for the collections of essays I plan to write as my senior creative thesis.

What strikes me as odd, then, is that on the verge of planning a five-month romp through Europe, I am more preoccupied with details of home. I spent last summer holed away in Vermont, a state I love nearly as much as Washington, but what this means is that I have spent little time here at home in the last two years. And two weeks from now, I'll cast off again. This is not to say that I not deeply excited for my trip. But it is to be an anchorless sort of adventure, and I trade the familiarity of home — the repetition of names and places, the certainty of my traveling companions here — for something unknown and impermanent. I find myself a bit melancholy that I will miss June — a cool, wet month — on the Olympic Peninsula, or at the cold southern beaches of our state.

Home aside, Alex (my boyfriend, traveling companion for the month of March, and fellow Mainzer-to-be) and I are planning the first (and grandest) of our trips. March is to be spent wandering in Europe. The logic for front-loading our traveling abroad is a little convoluted; with friends already well settled in foreign countries, I think we are both a little anxious to be on the move. On top of that, this bit of February and March is something of a summer vacation; the German university system, rather than operating on a fall-spring semester schedule, has only Winter (say it with a niced, strong "v") and Sommer semesters. Our classes don't start until the middle of April, and we won't be finished until the end of July. By then, I imagine, I'll be tired, and rather wanting my breakfast cereal at the kitchen table and walks with The Dog. And our friends, whose apartments and dorm rooms we will be invading on and off throughout March, will have packed up, vacated their conveniently-located and affordably-priced housing, and headed back to the States.

We are still largely without a plan, but off we go at the end of the month. We'll descend on friends in London and Italy, rendezvous with my roommate of two years, Alison, in Austria, and dabble for a bit in Slovenia and Croatia. I'm hoping we'll make it to Dublin and its environs as well. When our month is through, it's on to Mainz, just outside of Frankfurt — precisely the place where we kick off in late February. Mainz is the capital of the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate and is located on the infamous Rhine River. The small city is one of the centers of the German wine trade and is, believe it or not, the only German state to have a wine minister. Throw in some Roman ruins for good effect and a good measure of history. Mainz also happens to be the one-time home of our favorite Johann Gutenberg, inventor of the modern printing press. Wine and books, then: all signs seem to indicate that this city will suit me well.

And so in April, the study bit of study abroad kicks in. (I'm just hoping my rusty German does, too!) Until then it is back to reading my guidebooks and baking my cookies and walking my dog. If you've made it this far, thank you for sticking out an exceptionally long post. Expect an update again once the March trek is underway.