My Travel Origin Story
Interning at Cannes & Studying Abroad in London
I often get asked how and why I travel this way… and reliably I answer, “I don’t know, I just do.”
In work and life, I jump straight in. I couldn’t care less about the process, I want to go. I’m extremely impatient and have known that’s worth examining more. It’s part of why I started writing here regularly—to unravel my process—a difficult task for me.
The last six months have been intense. The fall and winter were full of family gatherings around my Dad’s memorial and my Uncle Bob’s death. This spring has brought Dutch friends and family time, along with revisiting the places I first traveled in Europe while reconnecting with the friends I did it with. This has meant a lot of talking about the past, some precious memories and others unresolved and painful. With all the nostalgia and reflection, I’ve noticed these last months have looked drastically different than any others I’ve had while being nomadic, and I want to explore why.
So, I’m leaning into it. In this week’s newsletter and the one to follow I’m digging into my early travel years. This post is about one year, the summer of 1998 to 1999, when I took my first two trips abroad. Who I was, what I wanted, and how that led me here, to a kitchen table in Turin, listening to school kids at recess squealing from my ornate, top-floor balcony.
The Fantasy of Going Abroad
My first trip outside of the US was in 1998, for a month, in the south of France. At 18 years old I went to the Cannes International Film Festival. I worked as an intern for the LA Times delivering newspapers to makeshift company offices that were set up in luxury hotels around the city. Because of my route, I was given a highly coveted all-access badge. This allowed me to enter the VIP areas no other interns, or most attendees, could access. For someone whose favorite pastime is people-watching, I made good use, along with a smidge of abuse, of this superpower.
The job was a total slog, with long hours in the summer heat, but the fringe benefits were enormous: movies, celebrities, and parties. This flashy initial taste of Europe swept me right up. I felt chic buying my cheese and lettuce baguette at the market and relished watching the French with their leisurely white wine lunches under striped umbrellas followed by a little rest in the sand.
Immediately, I wanted more. Once I was back in Florida, I applied for a spring semester abroad in London. Going to Europe wasn’t financially feasible or a priority for my family who didn’t travel much. But because my college had a satellite location in London, my scholarship applied there too. I only had to pay for the plane ticket and food. My Mom saw how much I needed it and moved mountains to make it happen (thanks Mom!).
Coming from a small, southern town and landing an address off the Tottenham Court Road tube stop in Bloomsbury, a stone’s throw away from Soho and the British Museum, felt absurdly cool. For me, it was as good as winning the lottery. On weekends I’d go to flea markets, art galleries, and jazz clubs. I’d walk through bookstores for hours. It was all the culture I wanted, but couldn’t find in Florida.
At the close of the semester, compelled by years of books, movies, and the envy of people who seemed impossibly more cosmopolitan than me, I set off to “backpack across Europe” with two girlfriends. We chose a classic itinerary consisting of Madrid, Barcelona, Florence, Interlocken, Amsterdam, and Paris. I’ve got fond memories of this trip, and I swear every day of it I woke up thinking “I can’t believe I’m doing this!”
The Reality of Going Abroad
I couldn’t know then that my epic backpacking adventure would be a singular experience, one of the few trips of its kind in my life. Despite how much I’ve traveled, I’ve taken very few “vacation” style trips. Instead, I’ve tended to go to places because I knew someone and wanted to visit them, or I merged travel with work. I can see now that my internship and studying abroad served as the foundation of how I’ve approached traveling and would drive my course for the next two decades ahead.
These two initial trips abroad fulfilled my fantasies, but not in the ways I anticipated. Cannes was more glamorous than I could have imagined. I had drinks with Christian Bale, Toni Collette, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers after being in the first audience to screen Velvet Goldmine. I rode in Mercedes limos, drank champagne, and cracked into Magnum bars while dancing in castles overlooking the ocean. I frequented the red carpet at black-tie world premieres and partied on a yacht with the festival judges and that year’s winner of the Palme d’Or.
While the backdrop was glitzy, I was certainly not. My job had a 7 am call time, and by 7:30 I was already drenched with sweat and ink from hauling stacks of newspapers down the promenade. The $17 Express clearance dress I’d been wearing from my mall job wasn’t cutting it, and I desperately needed something worthy of those red carpets. During a short break, I rushed into a store. Exasperated and naive in cut-offs, I couldn’t have been an easier target for the French saleswomen. After ridiculing my shorts and my size, they physically pushed me out of their store, cackling. I still cringe when I think about it, and I’ve remained utterly intimidated by stylish French women to this day.
And while my address in London couldn’t have been posher, it took a few weeks to dawn on me that I was going to school—in London—but with my fellow American students from Florida State University. This wasn’t ideal, but alas my scholarship wouldn’t have carried over to a British institution. I wanted to be in London to get away from Florida, not to have a mini-Florida in London.
I didn’t get along well with my flatmates and spent most of the semester isolated, taking endless walks to escape. It is here that I got my first taste of that particular brand of loneliness available exclusively to foreigners. It comes when you’re an outsider estranged from all the comforts you fall back on. It’s alienation from what you know, where you are, and who you are, and it’s more disorienting than jetlag. It’s Sofia Coppola’s gauzy, masterful beginning of Lost in Translation before Scarlet and Bill meet. This was my first dose, but I’d come to know this feeling more deeply and intimately in the years that would follow.
Two Different Outsiders
What both my internship and study abroad experiences have in common is that I came to live there. Not visit, not be a tourist, but actually live there. I didn’t pinball across the city to new neighborhoods every day, but rather I crisscrossed the same sidewalks over and over. I saw how they looked at 6 am, at 2 am, and all the times in between.
In each place, I slowly established a routine. I chose a park to jog around and lugged my groceries home and up all the stairs. I found the best cookies and knew what time they’d come fresh out of the oven. I chatted up shop owners and baristas and tried to merge into their surroundings rather than remain intimidated at the edge, an outsider.
While the dramatic Hollywood transformations of Sabrina or Before Sunrise didn’t remotely happen to me, a quiet transformation did slowly begin that year. Thirteen-hour days of grunt work on the French Riviera brought the dream-like Hollywood parties down to earth. Witnessing the duality of these opposing worlds served a purpose for this lowly intern—the rose-colored glasses were ceremoniously removed. I saw the struggles of those behind the camera, the triumph of creating phenomenal art, and the ugliness and sacrifice under the surface of both. With this clearer snapshot of the industry, my dream of working in film eventually pivoted elsewhere.
Coincidentally, travel’s rose-colored glasses also came off that year. My life was officially not a movie montage. London was magical, but it was overwhelming and lonely too. Surprisingly, discovering travel’s hardships didn’t discourage me, instead, it pulled me further into its clutches. Living abroad challenged me in ways I was unfamiliar with, but instinctually it felt positive and healthy.
That year I found out that travel has a duality of its own. That special brand of loneliness I mentioned was paralyzing at first. I thought it was homesickness, and part of it was, but the biggest part of it was discomfort. It’s an unease within your environment, and you can’t escape it because it’s there at every turn. Even though the British speak English, their words don’t mean the same thing. It’s intimidating to try and understand how a culture works when you’re standing on the outside looking in.
But I knew that feeling already. In Florida, I also felt like an outsider looking in, or maybe, I was actually trying to look out. I experienced a sense of confinement and loneliness in Central Florida, and I wanted freedom beyond its walls.
My trips to Cannes and London gave me a glimpse of a world bigger than Florida. One where while I was still an outsider, other parts of me felt more at ease. I could tell I belonged in the city and not the rural countryside. I wanted to be around a creative community, buzzing with activity. I was still lonely, but this loneliness came with a sense of hope and direction.
Today is: A sunny day in Torino where gelato is required!
We arrived in Torino a week ago, which means we only have a week left. Ack, no! I love it here. The giant scale feels grander than Bologna but still has the quiet charm of a neighborhood on many of its corners.
Recently in Oxford, we lost big in the Airbnb gamble with a crap host, but we won the jackpot with this one. Our apartment has views of the Langhe mountains on one side and the Alps leading to France and Switzerland on the other.
The lovely owner has good taste in vintage Fiat art (one of Turin’s claims to fame) along with a massive collection of VW Beetle toy cars from his childhood. Downstairs is one of the oldest, most prestigious bakeries in Italy, and on the way there, is Enrico’s wine shop with 20-something varieties on tap. Suffice it to say, it’s been a good week.
Yes, I agree with you about the whole Instagram-ification issue. Not to mention, it's hard to break through the noise of so many influencers churning out mindless content at a million miles per hour. I'm at a creative crossroads and feel I need to change, but change to what? My desire to be in front of the camera is almost non-existent and turning my joy of travel into work is weighing on my soul. Not to mention, am I even adding anything to this conversation? Am I pushing the art form forwards? Or just regurgitating what's been done before? I used to travel for fun and not even take photos. The times have changed.
Fascinating stuff Erin! Ah, the joys of Film Festivals, even if your cleaning bill was high. ; ) In this and your other posts you really capture the joy and tribulations of what I call 'Un(t)raveling' (bad word pun there) - peeling the onion on a place, trying to feel what it's like to actually BE there, and not just be, yes, an ugly American. Thanks for your unique perspective always.