I sat shyly on a hostel roof in Cardiff while a crew of Australian rugby fans got drunker and drunker, making jokes about my skirt being see-through until I skittered back to my bunk. I whittled these experiences into the best copy I could muster - as if having a good story to tell would retroactively make the whole experience more exciting than it had actually been. I amused everyone when I tried to pronounce pretty much anything, especially the town of Machynlleth. I visited an island of Cistercian monks who made perfume and chocolate in their Italianate monastery. FRANCE DORDOGNE FULLI ate a gooey slab of Welsh rarebit under low wood-timbered ceilings in a 16th-century coaching inn perched at the edge of Hay-on-Wye, a tiny village full of cobblestone streets and secondhand bookstores. And sometimes, it approximated these visions. Or at least, that was how I had imagined it: drinking ale in cozy pubs camping out in lightning storms under the cover of ancient rock formations scribbling poetry in the woods overlooking Tintern Abbey, on the Welsh bank of the River Wye. Noah was a rabbi-in-training, a deeply organized, constitutionally pastoral human being, and I - traveling alone, living out of a dirty backpack, ill-equipped for the gig, still somewhat terrified by the idea of talking to strangers - lived for those packages, and for the reminder of our relationship as a context in which I felt known and seen for their reminder of his touch, his laugh and his solidity. I was covering Wales for a budget travel guide, and my boyfriend sent me care packages that waited for me at various points along my route. Large chunks of my 20th summer were spent waiting in line at Welsh post offices.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |