My name is Syar (the y is pronounced like an h), I'm 23, geographically confused and confusing. Currently in Neuchatel, Switzerland.
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I saw an Urdu version of this yesterday* at the Globe Theatre for the World Shakespeare Festival happening here in London, and it was FUCKING ACE. There was dancing right from the start, and just before it began Nadia and I realized we knew more about this particular play than we thought, because of 10 Things I Hate About You.
*Put on by Theatre Wallay
(via illustratedladies)
Everywhere on the Internet, I have small chats and big chats with friends I have missed, the heavy weights in my heart, and I tie them to my balloons, kites to carry me forward. The lake in Neuchatel is an excellent crystal ball, the sun and stars through my bedroom window an excellent television, and the black cat tiptoeing along a high balcony an oracle, oblivious as I watch it on my own tip toes from the kitchen window. My heart has begun the process of missing the present.
If ever I write anything more substantial than my jumble of blog posts and tweets, I am sure I will have to dedicate it to Cass, because whatever she does when we communicate seems to unlock whatever it is blocking my hand from the keyboard (the title of this post belongs to her, a parenthetical statement made in our Skype chat yesterday).
I think it’s hard to be in your twenties and go into Europe to travel without at least a small toiletry bag of expectations. There’s a lot of myths fed to people my age and maybe as a young woman who grew up almost entirely in a small country that most people still don’t know about (it feels like), I bought into this Europe myth more than most.
Did I come here thinking it was going to change who I am, that travelling in Europe was going to give me great, juicy anecdotes and adventures - neat and whole narratives I could peg to my self worth, that I could repeat to friends and strangers who will then become my friends because hey, I went to Europe and had all that fun! Yeah, I did. I tried to pretend I didn’t for a while, but I did, I did. I was hoping for a boy, I was hoping for skinny dipping, I was hoping for unbridled joy so big it blew out any of my inherent moroseness and introspectiveness. Even if just for a few significant moments.
This is a lot of “whining” from someone who’s lucky enough to have the resources to travel here and stay here for three months, pretty much no strings attached, with the support of a sister with a pretty good job and stable home life within which she has carved me a space. And after all this is over, I go home to my father’s house, another safety net. I know! Oh my goodness, I know! I’m just in my twenties and I have emotions coming out my ears, forgive me.
So far, there’s no boy, I haven’t yet swam in a body of water (naked OR clothed) and my joys are smaller, deeper and inexplicably hard to explain. They’re not gems I can pour out of a bag so everyone else can see them sparkle, they’re just mine. It’s easier for me to write when I’ve had a few grey days, when I’ve had a streak of duvet caves and dark moods so the stuff that comes out often makes it seem like that’s my whole life, that’s my whole existence in this faraway, wonderful place where I can see the Alps from my window.
So what has “Europe” been for me? I shouldn’t start this list now when I’m still on this trip, but so far I know it is gratitude, excitement, fear, boredom, guilt, awe, humility, melancholy and a constant itch. It makes me speechless, it triggers my camera finger, and it makes me repeat myself. It makes me keep trying to articulate.
Things I’ve missed since I’ve been abroad:
1. My mum’s birthday.
2. The birthdays of three of my best friends.
3. Mother’s Day.
4. My own graduation.
5. The familiarity of my own face.
6. An uncountable number of unarticulated things.
Details from a Saturday trip to Chateau de Gruyères.
I was also very taken by these yellow placards bearing symbols very similar to emoticons that hung from some of the tram and bus cables in Geneva. Lookit their cute faces!
Geneva was very wet and cold (and subsequently very grey and overcast, so none of my photos have any sky and have been tweaked for colour), but I saw the best museum exhibit - a very comprehensive retrospective of Thomas Huber’s work - and got to hang out with a pal, so all in all it was worth being three quarters numb for two days.
I’m a little in love with my bitchface, NGL.
This is the 2012 equivalent of showing vacation slides to friends, but I took a video of my train ride up the Swiss Alps (from Lauterbrunnen to Klein-Scheidegg - the names! THE NAMES) this weekend. I set it to a Sufjan Stevens song, to make the 1:21 minutes go down easier*.
*although the clanking beneath the music is the sound of the train.
More Paris shots! So a few of these are from the Musee National d’Art Moderne, and I wish I could remember the name of the artist who did the piece that yielded the “A Lot He Knew About” photo, because his work hit all my buttons! It’s in my notebook somewhere. Then there’s a couple of photos from Versailles which was where my opinion that the French were opulent as all get out solidified. Marie Antoinette got an entire tiny village built, with a farm house and everything, so she could play pretend in it! Insanity. The other shots are of Notre Dame and the Montmartre area where I stayed.
I’m now in Neuchâtel, after 5 days in Paris. I’m also sick, which is the third time travelling has so wrecked my unreliable body. So I’m just going to dump some photos, which I haven’t even bothered editing in any way, here. They’re mostly from the Louvre, where I took lots of detail shots of marble sculptures and came up with meme captions for the ones with particularly hilarious expressions, which I might save for a later post.
