You Can Be a Tourist, Not a "Traveler"

I took my Grand Tour when I was 20. I strapped on a backpack, bought a copy of Let's Go Europe and a Eurail pass, and went. I spent months eating bread, cheese, and meat; laundering my underwear in communal hostel sinks; gorging myself on cathedral art and chocolate; and generally doing what I insisted was Travel, Not Tourism. It was the time of my life.

Night conversations in the hostels usually revolved around where to find booze, the places to "do" next, and reveling in the idea that one really could "do" Europe on $25 a day. All of we hostel folks would shake our heads at the idea of traveling the conventional way, our parents' way, with suitcases and hotels and rented cars and stuffy Fodor's books. I swore I'd travel this way forever and always.

I just went to Europe again and did the unthinkable. I rented a car, I brought a suitcase with wheels, I stayed in hotels and ate at restaurants for nearly every meal. The only locals I met were a museum curator and a fellow at the train station who loaned me his cell phone for a call. And yet I managed to learn more about Slovenia in my ten days there then I did about, say, Italy in the three weeks I'd spent there twelve years earlier. More than that: I slept on my own schedule; I didn't have to wash my underwear in a sink; I ate carefully prepared local food that extended beyond meat and cheese. Somewhere along the line, I'd become a tourist, not a traveler, with my fancy camera and a guidebook that featured bars that weren't mobbed by American college students looking for a deal.

Somewhere along the line, I'd become an adult.

I can't say there isn't a part of me that doesn't long for the heady sort of way I made my way around Europe back then. But I also know that even though I told myself I was soaking up culture, I was really insulating myself in the hostel circuit and supplanting it with the attentions of local men. I think back to a delectable seafood pizza I had on a pier in Naples, then recall told by the fellow who had taken me there that I was expected to pay for that meal by doing "what American girls do when you come here looking for fun." I think of wiling away the night at a Roman wine bar, then looking around at other patrons and seeing withered copies of Let's Go adorning two of the tables. I think of arriving in a strange city after dark and not being able to find a place to stay that I could afford, and having to get back on the train just so I could sleep, winding up in a different world.

Exhilarating? Yes, in a way. But so was driving into a tourist farm in Slovenia, being treated to a glass of wine produced on the farm by the owner (who had no expectation that I would sleep with her), digging into a delicious meal that was, yes, local, and falling asleep in front of Slovenian television. A quieter magic.

I couldn't have afforded it financially at 20; I wouldn't have appreciated it either. But it's open to me now. And I'll take it.

Discretion

I've always been a somewhat private person. Partly because I strive not to be one of those bores who shares details nobody else cares about; partly because I like to think of myself as terrifically glamorous and therefore mysterious.

But manalive could I kiss and tell. To the point where I once wrote an online series detailing every man I'd ever slept with (and no, I'm not linking). I saw it as my right: I'd lived these things, dammit, and I was going to share them. So the guy who put scrunchies around his dick (it was the '90s; men wore scrunchies, okay?), the Spaniard I got busy with whilst parked outside of a bullring—fair game. This extended to areas other than sex: In a misguided period of thinking I was Kathleen Hanna, I scribbled words on my wrists in black Sharpie and embroidered my jeans with statistics like my weight*.

Then somewhere around 30, the joy of the tell-all (or tell-more for those of us who fancy ourselves a bit Garbo-eseque), I stopped reveling in telling people about who I was dating. I started to feel like it might even be nosy for them to be asking. I'd answer questions, truthfully, but started keeping the answers vague. The first words out of my mouth when asked "What's new?" were no longer words like Andrew, Eric, or Mark.

I read something about tantric sex about how when all the energy that was created in sexual buildup goes back into sex instead of being released through an orgasm. (Bo-ring!) I don't want that in the bedroom, but I began to feel like that about myself. I stopped wanting to leak out the trials of what he did this week that put him in the ix-nay zone, or how maybe we were cosmically linked after all. I still ruminated (read: obsessed) over some of those things, but by keeping those little minnows of thoughts within, I was able to wait until the fish grew to something sizeable. (Apologies to Virginia Woolf for the fish metaphor.) The relationships didn't necessarily grow, but my outlook on them did.

Confessionals still appeal to me, both in reading and writing. But instead of being a collection of minutiae, they feel like something more substantial. Keeping things in allows me to actually share the stuff that matters most, because I can separate the wheat from the chaff.

*I never wore these out of the house.

Dinner

I went to the Italian place down the street for dinner the other day. It wasn't a big deal—my dining partner and I were hungry, and wanted pasta, and he hadn't been there, so hell, let's go. We each had a glass of wine; I had a pasta entree; he had some sort of rolled chicken thingie. Both were delicious. I was telling him about how this was a special place to me—I celebrated my 25th birthday here. As I talked, I realized that I spent my 25th birthday there because it was a special-occasion place—and now it's just Sunday night dinner.

Part of me misses the way things felt back then, when anything more than a slice of pizza for dinner felt indulgent—there's a magic that accompanies the financial situation that makes a $17 pasta dish feel extraordinary. But then I think of the actuality of those "indulgences": ordering an appetizer instead of an entree and feeling like the waiter was glowering at me, holding my breath while nitpicking over every dollar on the tab and hoping that nobody would be a jerk about the bill (myself included), forcing myself to "love" a dish that may have been mediocre just because I'd spent five times my usual dinner allotment on it.

My financial situation now isn't so grand as to let me order $17 dishes every night of the week and not have it take a noticeable toll on my bank account. But I have the freedom now to have a dinner out just because I feel like it. There doesn't need to be some sort of bar of specialness that needs to be met before I can plunk down a $20 and be done with it—I don't need to justify my gourmandise with a birthday or a promotion.

There's a friend I dine with about once a month. We pick a fantastic restaurant, we order whatever we feel like, we taste each other's meals, we ooh and aah. We order wine. We order dessert if we feel like it. And it is a celebration, of sorts: We're celebrating our friendship, our love of excellent food, the successes we've had that enable us to have these dinners, quietly tuck a few bills into a leather folder, and leave feeling as though we've nourished our spirits.

I never needed to spend money to nourish my spirit, of course. But it's nice to have the choice.