6 posts tagged Travel.

Shakespeare and Company, an English bookstore along the Seine, has become Angie and I's refuge for the past two days. It's comforting to enter after a long day of walking and seeing, to grab a book and curl up in one of the seats upstairs.

Spring is in Rome! While I sit in the warm sun amidst budding trees leafing through my book, I wonder why I hadn't read more in the past springs. It is wonderful to feel my body soak up the sun and my imagination spin with fictional worlds!

In Michelangelo's most famous Sistine Chapel image, The Creation of Adam, God's outstretched hand is about to touch that of Adam's and give him life. The gap between their fingers foreshadows the impending contact, depicting the ethereal current of "celestial life surrounding God ready to flow into the waiting body of Adam."

I first learned about Naples in my Italian class during the height of COVID. Our professor showed us a travel video where a young couple tried sfogliatella, babà, and attempted to defy Queen Magherita's curse at Piazza del Plebiscito. I watched the cream ooze out of their pastries as clouds floated above the sea, and found myself romanticizing Goethe's famous saying–vedi Napoli e poi muori (see Naples and then die).

The next day, we departed Rome for Tuscany on a fieldtrip. We first arrived in Montepulciano, a quiet hilltop town surrounded by vineyards and lush green hills. Walking through cobbled stone streets flanked by artisanal wine shops and luxury real estate agencies marketing villas to English-speaking tourists...

Paris feels like a contemporary dance. To me, it is the rearranging of desks and chairs in Finn's studio apartment, meandering through streets and boulevards and avenues, peering into boulangeries and browsing outside vintage map shops.