France Archives - Ann Hedreen, Writer Teacher Filmmaker

In Real Time

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:27:56-08:00Categories: economics, hiking, memoir, midlife, politics, travel|Tags: Brexit, China, Condé Nast Traveler, France, Iceland, In Real Time, Korea, United Kingdom|

Home. I’m home. The #TravelBinge2017 Tourist has Halted. However: she lives on inside me, and she has given my brain a much-needed adjustment. I don’t much like the word “tourist.” “Traveler” is the word I’ve always preferred, with its hints of Martha Gellhorn and Graham Greene. But in the eyes of the Chinese, Korean, French, English and Icelandic people who tolerated me tromping through their countries this past month, I was not fancy or special. I was a tourist. And that’s OK. No one would mistake me for a native in any of these nations, except perhaps Iceland. And being a tourist is not what it used to be. Or it doesn’t have to be what it used to be. You can break free of the pack, even in China, even without speaking Chinese. People are ridiculously busy in China these days, but if you flag them down, they’ll help you buy train tickets, or get off at the right stop, or order dumplings. And sometimes, if they want to practice their English, they’ll flag you down. Outside Guangzhou--a city of 12 million in southern China that appears to be adding a skyscraper a day--my friend Lindsay and I were hiking up Baiyun Mountain when two young law students, Carry and Pelly (their “English names”) asked if they could walk and talk with us. It was a national holiday: Tomb Sweeping Day, when Chinese families gather to clean and decorate the graves of their ancestors. Carry and Pelly, both 21, came from a [...]

Imperfection

therestlessnest2012-05-23T11:36:43-07:00Categories: travel, Uncategorized|Tags: Finland, France, Paris, vacation|

I’m having an imperfect moment. My coffee’s lukewarm. It’s a cloudy day. My go-to classical station is playing a composer I’ve never heard of. But wait: this tune is hauntingly beautiful. Balakirev, whoever you are, your Spanish Melody in D Flat is soothing me into seeing this morning differently. I now see that this gray sky is hiding some brightness; look at the way the fifty different greens of the trees are popping against it! Imperfection: It’s a great way to go. I just came home from a gloriously imperfect trip to France and Finland. Our budget was middle-brow: a dollhouse-size room in Paris; 3 to a room in Finland. But I love traveling this way. I love knowing that imperfection is going to abound, because it removes all pressure to achieve that nonexistent, vacation-ruining goal of Perfection with a capital P. We Americans don’t take enough time off. Expedia’s annual survey rates us as one of the most vacation-deprived nations in the developed world. That puts enormous pressure on the time we do take. We want every moment of our trip to be perfect. If we don’t get perfection, we feel let down. If we’ve sprung for a big plane ticket to another continent, the pressure on our precious vacation moments is especially intense. Nearly 25 years ago, my husband and I started our marriage by quitting our good jobs at a Seattle TV station, pooling our modest stash of cash and buying round-the-world plane tickets. We traveled for ten months and came home flat [...]

Immigrant Nations

therestlessnest2012-04-24T23:29:52-07:00Categories: travel, Uncategorized|Tags: Condi Rice, Finland, Finnish-American, France, immigration|

By the time you hear this, I’ll be in one of the world’s great immigrant nations: France. One in five people in France were either born in another country, or their parents were. In the United States, we count differently: “foreign-born” does not include children born here to immigrant parents, who are granted US citizenship at birth. So it’s hard to make a direct comparison. But the US Census says 12.7% of us are foreign-born, as of 2010, which is close to where we were 100 years ago, when immigration was at its peak. And yet former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had this to say in a recent speech: “I don’t know when immigrants became the enemy.” She said one of the greatest disappointments of her career was the Bush administration’s failure to achieve comprehensive immigration reform. I know there’s a lot of anti-immigrant backlash in France, too, and I’m sure I’ll hear more about it on my trip. But it makes me sad to think that our country’s self-image of open arms and opportunity, of the Statue of Liberty lighting the way for newcomers to our shores, has slipped so far that effective immigration reform now seems further away than ever. Condi Rice went on to say our immigrant culture is, quote, “at the core of our strength.” She’s right. And we forget, at our peril, that nearly all of us have immigrant roots. After France, I’m headed for the first time in my life to the country my own ancestors came from: Finland. [...]