Everything I Loved in December: Travel Edition
Monthly recommendations to listen/read/eat/buy/do/be
I just got back from my honeymoon in Vienna: a very beautiful, and very (surprise, surprise!) human trip!
There was food poisoning involved, lost luggage, and two days of travel due to canceled flights which inspired a truly impressive breakdown in the Paris airport in which I was crying so hard that people asked me if someone died. (I’m still married, for the record!)
There’s just nothing like travel; it miraculously combines the bleakest of all human experiences (struggling to eat wilted salad on a tiny beige plastic tray-table without permanently wounding your seat mate) with the most magnificent (insert flowery description of standing in wonder at the sublime here).
I’ve done it a ton and it never seems to get easier (in fact, much harder!), but I remind myself that there’s nothing natural or normal about zipping through a few time zones in under a day and therefore impossible to “beat jet lag” but just embrace it as another side-effect of truly bonkers modern technology.
And travel teaches us something that only it can, so we keep doing it even though I suspect it is actually an insane thing to do.
Here is what I loved in December, while doing this insane thing:
READING
Children’s books
Ken Jennings, who won the most money on Jeopardy ever, credited children’s books to his secret for accumulating a lot of knowledge on a lot of subjects.
If you’ve ever asked anyone to “Explain ____ to me like I’m five” (me with everything that has the word “tax” or “finance” in it) then you know the allure of complex subjects told simply.
Children’s books come in handy when traveling for this very reason: A good children’s book on your destination will be far more illuminating and memorable than descriptions in a guidebook.
I found this lovely overview of Vienna at one of its art museum gift shops, and could actually tell some of the Habsburg palaces apart by the end of it!!!
A novel set where you’re strolling
If you’re spending much time in one certain city or country, it’s a pleasure to explore stories that set the scene (then you can really pretend you’re in a movie while you’re there).
At the Freud Museum in Vienna, I picked up a novel about a tobacconist apprentice’s friendship with Dr. Freud and it’s as strange as it sounds. It’s also thrilling to recognize the street names and cafes mentioned. Makes me feel like a genius.
Side note—this is a great gift for someone about to travel or move abroad! My dear friend Kiki gave me a novel about Spain before I spent a month there and it was a sweet gesture that very much enhanced my imaginative experience of Andalusia, as though I could see it far beyond my own eyes.
BEING
Disappointment is on the itinerary!
When I moved to Chile years ago, I learned there was a fee of about $300 to enter the country. I also learned that you only have to pay this once, in your whole life, so keep that in mind if you ever leave and come back. You get a $300 discount!
When an American friend of mine returned to Chile after spending Christmas at home, she complained about the $300 fee, and I got to be the first to inform her, with a very slight twinge of schadenfreude, that she didn’t have to. She scammed herself!
Her response made a big impression on me: She shrugged, and said, “Abroad tax.”
“Tax? What?” Was there some other fee I needed to know about?
She responded, “No, it’s just what I call the inevitability of paying too much when you travel or live abroad. You’re definitely going to overpay for a few things. I think of it as a donation to the country for letting me live there and enjoy it. It evens out.”
Now this friend was older than I and had more money to toss around as accident-donation hybrids, but the sentiment stuck with me.
As an avid traveler and an even more avid person-who-gets-disappointed-extremely-easily, I’ve used this philosophy over time to help me find humor in the BINGO card of travel mishaps. If you get out of town enough:
-You WILL pay too much for something
-You WILL encounter a rude person who will ruin your afternoon
-You WILL order the completely wrong thing
-You WILL get sick, or hurt your ankle, or experience your very first allergic reaction, or get a ginormous pimple on your nose
-You WILL forget to pack something, or you’ll lose something, or you’ll get something stolen. Be free from material things!
-You WILL have a transportation snafu which will range from mild missed-your-train-stop, to the more catastrophic flight-delayed-and-you’re-stuck-in-Hanoi, or even the rare but traumatic case of the ol’ There’s-a-global-pandemic-and-you-can’t-get-out-of-South-America conundrum.
Once you accept this, you can game-ify your disappointments rather than be bogged down by them.
Has this worked for me? Not really!! I am still terrible at accepting the most minor of misadventures!!
But it’s slightly easier for me to surrender to travel disasters when I’ve baked them into my itinerary already.
Sort of like when everyone told me I would get mugged in Brazil, so when it finally happened, it was liberating. Like, check! Now to the next thing on my list!
I feel disappointments very, very deeply, and I’m attached to absolutely everything. “Lowering expectations” isn’t going to happen in this lifetime. “Not being attached to the outcome” is an absolute joke to my brain.
But what I can do is introduce a bit more play and humor to this affliction, and travel is a good time to do so. (Although why does everything seem to happen to meeee!?)
Learn from your phobias
I can’t stand turbulence. I don’t know how people can do it.
I am always heaving-wailing with my head in between my hands during the slightest hiccup upon descent, whereas everyone else around me is calmly savoring their tomato juice without so much as a spill.
I have watched billions of YouTube videos explaining turbulence, but logic doesn’t communicate very well with fear. My primal animal self (the same self with a residual caveman tailbone?) is terrified of bouncing around the earth’s atmosphere, and no amount of visualizing the plane in thick jello is going to stop me from literally telling the plane “Stop!” when it starts rattling. It’s so scary for me. I hate it!
So while the plane was tossing and turning my insides while we descended into the greater Vienna metropolis, I was whimpering and gripping the armrests, while most everyone was dozed off in Dreamworld.
A flight attendant taking a final lap around the cabin saw me and said, “Are you okay?” Which of course I had to answer with “Yes” even though we were all actively dying.
It helped that she was older, tiny, and French, and had the soothing aura of a storybook character. She put her delicate hand on my shoulder: “It’s a little bit cloudy right now, but it will pass.”
As a turbulence expert, I know that beautiful big clouds are usually to blame for bumps. But her simple explanation was like a sip of tea for my screaming nervous system.
It’s a little bit cloudy right now, but it will pass.
The bumps continued, but as soon as we emerged into cloudless clarity, they stopped. It did pass.
The silver lining of those dang clouds is that sometimes the vulnerability of fear opens us up to cliched but necessary reminders, about turbulence, and, yes, life.
EATING
What vegans know
Even if you are a raging carnivore T-Rex person, I highly recommend special-ordering the vegan meal for a flight. They’re higher quality, and it feels good to eat vegetables in an airplane when plantlife is scarce to be found. The vegan meal is almost always curry and rice, which is one of the very few foods that translates decently from earth to clouds.
A hearty meal upon arrival
I used to track down a salad or guzzle a green juice after a flight because it feels like restoring a little bit of my spirit that was lost between the security line and the fifth hour of watching baking competition shows in my plane seat.
But Ayurveda teaches that, upon arrival in a new place, we should eat a hearty, dense meal so as to literally ground us in a new place. I’ve started going for a big plate of mashed potatoes or oatmeal or cheesy pasta as soon as my feet hit new soil, and it feels good!
BUYING
A monochrome flight outfit
My hairdresser once told me that, to look rich, one should dress in monochrome. I love this idea, though I don’t ever have the occasion to want to look rich?
I DO, however, value feeling and looking put-together, especially throughout the indignity of running through an airport while being clobbered in the face by my own neck pillow, or chowing down on Chex Mix in coach.
So, I looked to my trustiest loungewear site, Aerie (which I think is a brand for teens but who’s regulating this), and refined my search by a single color (which they called “heather frost”).
I bought sweatpants, a tank top, a henley, hoodie, and even a scrunchie in that same color, all for about $50 total, and thus is my perfect travel outfit.
I also like topping it off with a giant scarf/blanket hybrid, which makes you look like you’re on an interesting voayage. You can throw a big scarf over your head like a ghost in lieu of an eye mask on a red-eye, and I can guarantee no one will bother you!
A craft
I’ve always thought that people who bring knitting projects on planes are operating at a much higher level than the rest of us who merely catch up on our celebrity gossip or watch Erin Brockovich for the thousandth time, but it’s actually quite simple to bring a craft on board!
This is such a soothing way to spend time, and it doesn’t take the high echelon of operation that I had assumed. On my last flight, I brought my needle-felting supplies, and I was enraptured by it for the two hours I would have spent watching the flight tracker and realizing how much I need to review midwest geography.
Other flight-friendly crafts: block printing, paint-by-numbers, and paper quilling. (Look up “craft kit for adult” on Etsy, and find more than you can begin to imagine.)
Then you have something you’ve CREATED with your hands IN THE SKY, and you can give it to your seat mate as a parting gift.
MZ Wallace Bag
I have been told that this bag is “basic” but LISTEN: I have tried every carry-on that has ever existed and this is by far and away my favorite. I would marry it and take it on its own honeymoon if I could.
I used a fabulous Guatemalan woven tote bag for a long time, which makes me very happy to look at, but there were just a few too many spills during that part of security when everyone is elbowing you while you’re trying to put on your shoes after hopping around like a flamingo, and I couldn’t take it anymore. Also, one can only lose so many headphones in a lifetime.
I’ve used other backpacks with lots of color-coded zippers and compartments and doo-dads, but the shape and size and feel of the MZ Wallace one wins over them all. In my daydreams of becoming a millionaire off my needle-felting fortune, I own an MZ Wallace bag for every purpose. For now, the carry-on will do just fine.
Rosewater and Nasya Oil
I’lll repeat my love for my two favorite Ayurveda products which I use obsessively (excessively?) on a plane:
Rosewater to keep my face and eyes moisturized (sooo much better than eye drops!):
And Nasya oil to politely dab in my nose, for obvious reasons:
Both are life-savers in the dry dead air on the plane, and they both have the slightest hint of aroma that makes you feel just a little bit more like an ancient Mesopotamian queen and less like a dehydrated potato.
I will also share here my most embarrassing but most essential plane item that is well worth all the judgmental looks: