Hi, my name is Ellen, and I need your help.

There's a thing about living in a new country and having a grand adventure that most people don't address on a travel blog:

It's hard.

Sometimes it's just really fucking hard.

For me, this is compounded by being unemployed. I'm an externally motivated person, a true extrovert. My creativity and energy and enthusiasm grow exponentially when I can share it with people, or when I am responding to a discussion or when I can talk through ideas en voz alta with another human. Without a job, I'm not motivated to be anywhere by any certain time. I'm left to wander around most days left to my own devices, which, for me, is as exciting as reading a phone book. Which means some days I don't leave the house, or get fresh air or even interact with a barista. Which means my moods get lower and the days run together. There's probably some seasonal affective disorder happening, too, but I don't think that can account for all of it.

However, this blog helps a lot: I enjoy writing, and I can't write seven blog posts about the color of the carpet. (It's like a dark foresty teal. A bit like deep ocean. Or a stormy day on the Oregon coast. Hmmm, maybe I could write seven posts about it...)

So, I'm asking for your help: 

Find something for me to do in London. 

Do a quick Google search. Tell me your favorite pub (or library?) from when you studied abroad. What odd museum is always overlooked by Lonely Planet? If I know someone is expecting a post, I'll actually do it! Leave a comment or shout out on social media.

And don't hold back! I want the most random things you can think of. I've seen Oxford Street. I've been to South Bank. I can see the London Eye every damn day if I wanted to. I'll review the basics, too, but what haven't you seen?

Or, don't. That's cool too. I'll just move on to describing the curtains. They're kind of beige... like the very tip of a hedgehog's spine...

Borough Market in Seven Photos

There's not a lot I can say about Borough Market that the internet doesn't already know. So instead, I'm dropping some photos here and calling it a day.

I did learn that Borough Market has been in operation in roughly the same area in some form or another for *literally* 1,000 years, which convinces me that my history courses were focused on the wrong things if such a glaring omission was permitted year after year.

Anywho, to quickly sum-up, wandering around Borough Market is definitely a fun way to spend an afternoon. If and when I go back, I'll hope to have a recipe ideas at the ready — there is a lot of local produce (here it's called "fruit and veg") and I would love to start buying local again! At the moment I still feel like we're in catch-up mode as we rebuild a pantry and figure out routines. ("Hey what's for dinner?" "I dunno, what have we got?" "Uummmm... yogurt and tomato paste." "Well, f---.")

Okay. No more typing.

Borough Market:

Turn off the Internet, turn off exploring?

The train rise from Köln (Cologne) to Frankfurt, Germany is so far much more interesting - visually - than other routes we've been on (and awake for) this trip. There are mountains, small towns, and a nice winding river that we've followed most of the way.

But, unlike Thalys, Bahn doesn't offer wifi. Which means I don't know what mountains, which towns, or what river I'm next to.

In a world where the information follows is around in our back pockets, what does that do to old-fashioned exploring?

What is new exploring?

Before leaving for my trip, my boss passed on some stories of when he lived in Budapest 20ish years ago. He had books, maps, train schedules and was gathering them all up at home when he realized, that isn't how traveling works anymore. Britton and I aren't carrying big, awkward maps or heavy guide books. It's all in our phones - even this blog post is being typed letter by letter with my two sturdy thumbs.

We're left to speculate uses for things instead of immediately asking Google, "what is that?" We have to memorize directions while we have a wifi signal because we can't refer to our little blue GPS dot when we don't have a working GPS phone.

Some of that has been fun - in Amsterdam there was no possible way for us to remember all of these new sounds so we made associations. 'Turn left on lederhosen, then right on Lichtenstein.'

But as a child of technology, I do tend to feel stunted when I don't have that connection to the info that the Internet provides. It's a conundrum: technology simultaneously moving us forward but holding us back. What's left to wonder, what's left to explore?

European Adventure - Prologue

This will probably be a quick note - more an acknowledgement of having time to myself for a moment than a blog post. Plus, I'm still at my office and I love using the LARGE screen instead of my laptop. Ah, the spoils of doing Good Work.

To say I am excited to finally get to Europe is an enormous understatement. I'm ecstatic, elated, jubilant! But it has all been overshadowed up until now by all of the other Big Life Events - whether they're in my life or another's.

My previous post outlines that pretty well. Since deciding a few weeks ago that we're going to Europe on Sunday, we have been flying through life at full speed - celebrating, traveling, packing moving, dancing, running, talking, planning. It's been tough, frankly, to sit back with the fiancee and remember that we are about to make this big, important leap together and isn't that wonderful! More on our minds is preparing and mapping and trying not to step on each other as we each learn how to live in a shared space again.

(B and I have known from the beginning we're a pretty classic "opposites attract" story. Introvert meets extrovert; left-brained tries to apply logic to right-brained conversations; impatient vs. calm and collected. Planning this trip has brought those to light even more - how we plan, how we want to travel, how we process information is all pretty conflicting.)

I'm grateful that we have a few days to chill out before everything picks up again so that we can really focus on our trip, and on us. (Friday is our Big Day and Saturday will be filled with family and packing, then Sunday morning we head out for NYC before boarding the plane to London!) Hopefully we can sit, discuss, nail down a final itinerary.

I am planning to blog as best I can while we're traveling. My guess is it'll be spotty at best - we have a pretty agressive country list to get through - but if you want to follow, this and Facebook will probably be the place to do it!

Here we go!