THE TRAVEL DATING GAME

           

At times, traveling can be a lot like dating.  Some places seem like they’ll be oh-so-right, the perfect match – maybe even true love.  You read their bio and they seem right up your alley.  Other places you agree to see because, frankly, nothing better has come along.  

But sometimes, Mr. Right turns out to be Mr. Pain In The Butt, and Mr. Not So Great sweeps you off your feet.

On paper, Barcelona and I should have been a great match.  Many of my friends loved it so it came highly recommended.  Reading about it made me think that this could be the Great Travel Love:  the architecture, the location by the warm and beautiful Mediterranean, the culture and lifestyle.  I could see it all.  Barcelona and Beth, sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

Rennes, on the other hand, was one of the last-minute add-ons of this trip.  It was chosen solely to accommodate Max’s burning desire to visit France since he has been taking French in school since his pre-kindergarten days.  I confess that I’ve never had a great desire to travel in France.  The only time I’d been in France was as a graduate student when I didn’t have a spare cent, and I went to Paris with a friend in January and stayed in a nasty cheap place that was freezing cold and got even colder when it started to snow.  France, Schmance.  Plus I don’t speak French and anticipated haughty condescension every time I opened my mouth.  Haughty condescension I can get plenty of in DC.   I don’t have to travel to find that.

So I looked forward to Barcelona, elegant city by the sea, and shrugged my shoulders over Rennes.  But Barcelona turned out to be a place that was difficult to love, mostly because it was just plain difficult.  It was one of those vexed travel experiences where everything is hard and nothing goes easily.  We stayed in Barcelona a few days on our way down to our house exchange on the Spanish coast, and we stayed in it on our way back up from the coast.  The troubles ranged from the irritating – having trouble finding restaurants that were good in the neighborhood around our hotel – to the potentially catastrophic:  Jeff and I, on separate occasions, nearly being pickpocketed on the metro.  I’m urban savvy to begin with, and I also knew that pickpockets were rife in the Barcelona subway, so I kept a firm grip on my travel purse and Jeff put his wallet in his front pants pocket to keep it safer.  Nevertheless, I still found a woman’s hand on my purse unzipping it and reaching in, and gave it a good slap.  Jeff found a man’s hand in his pocket pulling out his wallet – the front pocket of his shorts, no less.  Jeff grabbed his wallet out of the man’s hand, the guy jumped off the train and car and ran into a different train car, Jeff followed him onto the train and thumped the guy in his chest and called him colorful names while issuing dire warnings.  Face it:  It’s hard to truly love something that keeps trying to steal you blind.

Then there was the imbroglio of the train tickets.  I tried to get tickets from Barcelona to Paris on the Spanish train website and couldn’t do it because the Spanish site couldn’t book French trains.  The French website advertised the train and walked me through the entire booking process only to refuse to allow me to purchase the ticket on line because they wanted to mail me the tickets, not allow me to print them off their website. We went to various train stations in Spain to try to buy the tickets; we tried calling and buying over the phone – no dice.  We went back to the Barcelona train station and couldn’t buy the tickets because there were so many people trying to buy train tickets that they’d overwhelmed the clerks, who responded by closing up early.  When confronted by high customer demand, go home – there’s a motto to work and live by!  So we returned to the Barcelona station the next day and found, to no one’s surprise, that the day we wanted to travel was already booked, so we chose the next day, went through the ticketing process and got to the end only to have the clerk smirk and inform us that we had to buy the tickets in cash, which amounted to roughly $500.  Like I’d walk around Barcelona with $500 in cash – I’d be robbed before I had a chance to pull the money out of the ATM machine. Of course, the sole ATM in the station refused to issue money; we searched the neighborhood and found one that would; and finally bought the tickets. By this point, I was longing to leave Barcelona.

And so we did.  So much for Beth and Barc, kissin’ in a tree.  It could kiss off, as far as I was concerned.

Off we went to Rennes, via Paris.  It was a lovely train journey.  We got seats on the top floor of the double-decker high-speed train, which rolled through gorgeous country on the 5 hour journey to Paris.  Up the coast of France the train chugged, literally going through estuaries and shallow bays – the tracks went through sheens of water on either side, the Mediterranean stretching out on the right hand side while tranquil back bays and marshes stretched out on the other.  Then the train turned and headed up the Rhone River valley, and kicked into high speed.  Farms rolled by, and once again I saw the colors that I had seen through the train windows in England as we traversed its spring-time fields. 

But we have traveled from one season to the next.  We began our trip in early spring, and now we are in the full heart of summer.  The aching green of spring fields in England are now replaced by the shining green of corn fields in France.  The purple of England’s wisteria is now the shimmering purple of fields of lavender.  Acres and acres of golden sunflowers are the bright yellow that the mustard seed of England was before.  The colors are the same but the terrain, the season, the countries, the time of year are not.  We have traveled through the time in which the days were just beginning to get longer, into days of almost endless light.  At 10:00 at night it is still light outside.  I get tricked into thinking it’s only 7:30 or 8:00 and then realize that the day is nearly done and yet still, the sun shines.

Up the Rhone River valley we traveled, the fields going by in brilliant patches of color, the occasional castle appearing on a nearby hill, mountains appearing and disappearing in the distance.  Into Paris we rolled, and we carried our massive packs through the metro to a different station, where we boarded the train to Rennes.

And now we are in Rennes, in a house exchange apartment that is absolutely gorgeous and is located in the heart of the equally gorgeous medieval town.  The apartment is two stories and renovated last year by our house exchange partner, who is an architect.  It is straight out of architecture magazines beautiful:  exposed old beams, cunningly placed windows, skylights, glass stairs floating between downstairs and upstairs.  And right outside of the door is a remnant of the medieval town’s old city wall, a massive stone turret.  Rennes is so lovely, so friendly, so filled with wonderful elements of city living that I am swooningly, head-over-heels in love with it.  I blush at the thought of my earlier infatuation with Barcelona.  Rennes is true love.

It has streets lined with half-timbered buildings, the brown wooden beams interspersed with white plaster.  Some of the plaster is colored red, or pink, or green or a burnt umber.  The houses lean at a bit of an angle, a combination of age, gravity and settling causing their former right angles to assume less straight-edged poses.  Rennes was once the capitol of Brittany which for a thousand years, was its own nation until its unwilling annexation by France.  Everywhere are signs of the power it once exercised:  a plethora of churches, massive abbeys, formal gardens, grand plazas.  Now it is a vibrant university town, with modern touches that are interesting and forward-thinking.  Like its free bicycle ridership program, its cheap and effective subway, and a network of city buses I can only dream of.

Rennes is also a city of great food markets that present food as an artistic statement.  We shopped in a market similar to Eastern Market only twice as large and twice as pretty with a selection of fresh and prepared foods that was like pages from a high-end foodie magazine come alive.  We bought artichoke pasta and salmon tarts and local new potatoes, and lots of French wine.  Then today we went to the Saturday outdoor market, which spreads out over a big plaza where jousting tournaments were once held.  The plaza and adjoining street are lined with vegetable and fruit stalls, and edged with buildings that hold cheese, meat, poultry, bread, wine and you-name-it shops.  There were cheeses wrapped in pretty dried leaves; a display of home-made preserves that would make an artist cry; breads and butchers galore.  And outside, stand after stand of lovely fresh fruit and veg.  Max has dived into the challenge of using his French, and I am very impressed by what he is able to ask for and negotiate – and with real vendors selling real food, not picking up pre-packaged antiseptic packages in a Safeway.

So Rennes has emerged as my true travel love.  Or should I say, “a” true travel love?  Because I have not been faithful to Rennes.  I have also loved Slovenia, and swooned over Sardinia.  But Barcelona?  Nah.  Turned out to be more frog than prince.