"Or... you could spend a month with a distant relative you've only met once...in a foreign town you've never heard of..." That was the alternative my dad gave me when I asked to do a month-long study abroad program in France. It was the summer after my freshman year in college, and firmly within the narrow window of time when a person is most likely to go along with a scenario that sounds like the plot for an episode of "Locked Up Abroad". On the surface, my dad's plan seemed pretty solid, but there were plenty of unknowns only people under the age of 25 would be willing to ignore. As a fully formed adult, you couldn't pay me to share plumbing with a person I barely know for a full month, with no smart phone, no car, and a weakly-conversational grasp of the local language. To my dad, though--it was a discount solution to an otherwise expensive problem. In his defense, the university-sponsored trip would cost multiple thousands of dollars, while his...
As a woman, I’ve spent a good chunk of my life waiting in line for the bathroom. I simply don’t have the patience to wait in line for much else. Museums, like many other tourist attractions, require exactly that: a lot of line-waiting, slow-walking, and a whole other level of patience—not to mention time. Personally, I’d rather spend all my patience and time eating, drinking, and being in a place, rather than fighting my way through a group of Italian tourists for a distant glimpse of a tiny painting I’m supposed to care about and don’t. That’s right, Mona Lisa. I’m looking at you . Or more accurately, I’m looking at the bald spot of the man in front of me who’s taking pictures of you with his iPad from 100 feet away. During study abroad in college, I had the luxury of visiting places like the Louvre and the Musée D’Orsay as “field trips” and it ruined me for life. These were school-sponsored surgical strikes where you’d visit a set loop of works you’d been studying and then ge...