New paintings listed on my Etsy shop, Lakes & Lights!

I'm a perfectionist. If I can't do something well, then I get really frustrated. I'm so much of a perfectionist, that I dread having to practice. When I was a kid starting out learning the piano, I hated practicing because I wasn't able to just sit down and play a song perfectly for the first time. It's still hard for me to be motivated to practice and improve, because I admit, I'm lazy and want to be perfect the first time without having to "waste time" practicing.

When I paint, I hate to waste any paper, so if I sit down to paint and it's not right, then I sort of give up for a while and put the paints away. All my best work has come from times when I've been in a class and been forced to practice my technique. Now that I'm out of school, this has been really tricky because there's no professor pushing me to practice, to waste paper, to get loose. I get caught up in making the dimensions perfect, in getting all my lines straight, in getting just the right shade...but sometimes I loosen up, I waste paper, I scribble, and I make paintings that I'm proud of, which gets me going on a roll.

In the past week, I've made two new paintings, and added them to my Etsy shop, Lakes & Lights, that I've neglected for quite a while. There's a lot of room for improvement, but I'm actually excited to practice.

Enjoy!
Rachel

Siena, Italy

Harlem, NYC

Lakes & Lights is Now Open on Etsy!

I just launched my first Etsy shop, Lakes & Lights, featuring the art I've made in the past few years. After being encouraged to sell my art, I finally put a few things up on Etsy.

I've loved making art ever since I was little. I was the kid who drew a bicycle in kindergarten while the other five-year-olds crowded around, and the fifth grader whose painting was mistaken for the teacher's. By the time I hit high school and college, I became less of a stand-out while other students got serious about their art, and I never really pursued it as more than a hobby, taking an art class here and there when I had time for electives. I've always made paintings and drawings for friends and family, but  I've certainly never been serious about it. I'm still very much an amateur.

I learned plein air sketching and watercolor painting from my fantastic Augsburg College professor Tara Sweeney in Italy in 2011 and ever since, I've always carried a sketchbook with me. She taught me that painting and sketching help you see and experience traveling in a way that cameras can't. Basically everything I know about watercolor and sketching, I learned from Tara.

Lakes & Lights is inspired by my two homes, the City of Lakes (Minneapolis) and the City of Light (Paris), and anywhere in between.

Last Paris video...for now

I finally made myself sit down and create my last monthly video of my thirteen months in Paris. Normally I would have them finished and posted on the first of the month, but this time I just couldn't get myself to put it together knowing this was the last of my footage and the last memories I'll have of Paris...until next time.

Love,

Rachel

Published on 'A Woman's Paris'

My article "Two for the Road" (originally posted here on my blog) was recently published in two parts (Part One and Part Two) on the Minneapolis-based Paris publication, A Woman's Paris! In the article, I document Paris's rich sociological diversity as I cross the city from west to east on the métro's line two.

I've never been published in any way other than my own blog before, so I'm thrilled about the opportunity and look forward to making future contributions to the website. I'm particularly excited to contribute to something stemming from Minnesota, because us seemingly-quiet Midwesterners (Or should I say 'Northerners'?) deserve to have our voices heard in travel!

Rachel

Lost in Translation

     In case it wasn't clear what I've been doing this summer other than traipsing around the Riviera and London, I've actually been working on my thesis, a translation of a book called Paris: Quinze promenades sociologiques (English: Paris: Fifteen Sociological Walks). The second reason I chose this master's program (the first being, well, Paris) was that, like most master's programs abroad, it was only one year in duration—two semesters of classes and one summer session where you write your 25,000-word-minimum thesis. Knowing what I know now, I am so glad that I went this route for grad school, because I don’t know if I had it in me to have done two years back at home. School has always come pretty naturally to me and I’ve always done pretty well when I’ve tried really hard, and okay when I haven’t.

     But grad school is different. 

     I had to work the hardest I’ve ever worked. There was no sliding by or cutting corners. The readings were chock-full of complex ideas by writers and translators who I’d never heard of but that my classmates seemed to have almost known on a personal level. I was the one who showed up to class, barely having been able to get through a dense, forty-page article on what it means to be a native informant in cultural translation, having extracted the most minute kernels of meaning out of it, and then spending the rest of the class period trying to keep my deer-in-the-headlights look under control because I actually didn't understand any of it. Nothing was easy. I don’t think there was ever a single moment of complete clarity where I confidently showed up to a class thinking I had the field of cultural theory figured out in any sort of way. I was constantly thinking to myself, why in the world did I choose this incredibly expensive year of torture over teaching English part-time?

     Almost the entire time, I would keep prefacing that I was new and very green to translation. But, underdog as I was, I am so glad that I did it. I proved to myself that I could get through a year among some truly brilliant classmates and professors who are entirely more passionate about translation than I ever care to be. I’ve always felt completely average in everything that I do and grad school confirmed that to me—but hey, I was able to roll with the best of them. It’s okay and, frankly, almost a relief to not be the absolute best at something. It reminds me of when I got to Augsburg, intending to be a music major and realizing I was no longer the best pianist of the bunch like I had been at home and that I was actually pretty terrible at music theory. If I had to go back and choose a master’s program, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would choose something different, but it is what it is. There was something very humbling and refreshing about learning a new art form (and translation really is an art form that Google Translate will never be able to replicate) from scratch and sitting back and just learning from other people who are dedicating their lives to transferring the experiences of one culture and language into another. It’s a rigorous field that is both underappreciated and taken for granted.

     Matt came to visit me for a little over a week in the beginning of August after his London program ended and then my friend Megan who I’ve been friends with since our freshman year at Augsburg was in Paris for a month-long program before heading off to Bologna, Italy for the year. Saying goodbye to the two of them—Matt goes to school in Indiana and Megan will be in Italy until next summer—was hard. I don’t like saying goodbye and I don’t like being left in Paris, my favorite place in the world, without anyone to share in it with me anymore.

     The latter half of August, I devoted myself to getting serious about my thesis and there were days where I wouldn’t leave my tiny chambre de bonne at all. I started with the goal of only translating about three chapters of the book, and the more time that has passed, the more I've added to it. While we were allotted just the summer to complete our theses, no one in the history of the program has ever finished by September. Even though I participated in commencement, I don’t officially graduate until I’ve turned in my thesis, so I hope to submit and defend it via Skype by December so I can graduate this semester.

     On top of translating from sunrise to sunset, I moved from my room with a view. I moved myself and my seventy-three bags of hell eight minutes away on foot to the rue Saint-Jacques in a studio twice the size of my former room. Let me just say that you can’t really complain about moving until you’ve singlehandedly carried a fifty-pound suitcase among other luggage down the world’s steepest spiral staircase. It gives me a whole new respect for the donkeys in Santorini that I once refused to ride up the 500 steps of the caldera. I feel you, donkeys. I feel you.

     So now it’s two weeks left in Paris to close up shop—cancel my phone plan and bank account, figure out what in the hell I’m going to do with all of my stuff and say goodbye once again to this city I’m so in love with. But somehow, someday, I'll be back. I promise.

Love, 

Rachel

Bright Lights, Bigger City

After living in France for quite a while—a whole year, in fact—I’ve grown pretty used to being an American in Paris. My French has improved drastically (even though I’m usually shy about it), to the point where I’m able to understand voicemails in French—something that I just shrugged my shoulders at when I studied abroad. I could draw a fairly accurate map of the métro without cheating and I could navigate the city in my sleep (Largely thanks to my Vélib’ bike share subscription—biking around Paris is incredible and has honestly changed my life). Beyond the basics of speaking (albeit, with non-fluency) and commuting, I also have a pretty good grasp on some cultural essentials—I don’t speak-scream anymore like all good Americans do in public, I wear almost exclusively shades of black and I know what constitutes good bread (Moi, I prefer baguettes de tradition, or simply tradis: they’re shorter, denser baguettes that are government-regulated for quality and are usually still warm from the oven). Most days, I’m comfortable being, as my favorite pizza-maker at Pernety calls me, the Américaine. I get a thrill out of living somewhere that isn’t like home in Minnesota; Paris feels like home in a different way.

And then I went to London.

Buying my tickets four days in advance, I spent a long weekend in London visiting Matt (He left Paris for a summer program there) at the end of July. For the price of an average dinner in Paris, I bought bus tickets through Eurolines (A European equivalent to the Megabus—in every way) and spent eight hours driving the same route as the Eurostar in roughly four times the timespan. I look forward to the day when I cease to carry a student visa and can afford to travel based on convenience concerns rather than budget ones.

I hadn’t left France in months and hadn’t been in an English-speaking country in over half a year, so I felt quite dépaysée. I was suddenly terrified by the prospect of ordering food, had no idea how the Tube worked or how to act on it and had an almost harder time understanding people speaking to me than I do back in Paris (Almost. Let’s not be ridiculous, we were all speaking English after all). I was back in the Anglo-Saxon World of Rules and Order—the sidewalks were suspiciously clean, and a few stores we went into wouldn’t sell alcohol after a certain time on Sunday.  Maybe it’s because London is seventeen times the size of Paris land-wise and thus has a lower population density, but the city also felt much quieter and reserved in places whose Parisian counterparts would be raucous at this time of year.

I’d been to London before eight years ago, so I didn’t feel any pressure to see anything in particular, continuing that lazy-but-it's-okay attitude towards traveling that I’d picked up in Nice. Matt and I mainly walked around—and with that whole London-is-seventeen-times-bigger-than-Paris thing, it was a lot of walking. I was happy to have a few new experiences, like eating authentic fish and chips from Fishcothèque (I never had it last time!), strolling through the dainty neighborhoods near Hyde Park and looking at art—and, suffering a bout of museum delirium, disrespectfully mocking most of it—in the National Gallery and the Tate Modern. We bought a baguette and beer for a Hyde Park picnic, drank wine I’d brought from France in Trafalgar Square, and picked up fruit in the Borough Market for breakfast. It was fun to hang out in a city that is almost exactly like America for a weekend, but it confirmed to me that Paris is the city for me, with its unmatched beauty, its liveliness—and its dog shit-encrusted sidewalks.  

Maybe see you in another eight years, London.

Rachel