if you say it loud enough, you'll always sound precocious

I have an issue. I like to travel. I like seeing new places and learning new things. I like meeting new people I'll never see again and for one brief period of time sharing something with them. The time period is meant to be brief, though. 

I'm writing this entry not from a cafe or a cool little river-side bench or any of those picturesque locations that just evoke Europe in your mind and make you wish you were there, but I'm writing this entry from inside a hostel as two Spanish-speaking girls pack up their bags and probably prepare to leave tomorrow. I'm sitting on my little bed with its red sheets and dark blue lockers next to it, listening to the song I want playing when I die (or at the end of a particularly tragic movie), and wishing I was back in France.

Why do I want to be in France when I'm here in Slovenia, in a country that most Americans couldn't even find on a map? As much as I like to travel, I'm also a creature of habit and I like my own bed. I never understood how people can travel for months at a time. I get tired after a week.

In the past week, I've drunk German beer in the beer halls and gardens of Munich, relived a concentration camp experience at Dachau, pretended to be Julie Andrews in Salzburg, wondered at the sheer grandiosity of Vienna then took a calming boat trip to the tiny little Bratislava which, although only an hour from Vienna, could not be more different. 

I suppose I'm just tired. I need to be rejuvenated. Yesterday was Easter Sunday and we spent most of it sitting around in a cafe in Vienna, although I did have the most delicious strawberry dessert. It's erdbeer season, don't you know? Today was Easter Monday which means that most stores are closed in Europe, although I did spend a good majority of today on a train.

So I'm here in Ljubjiana, the capitol of Slovenia (part of the former Yugoslavia in case you have no idea what I'm talking about. No, it's not Slovakia), and after a week of incessant sun, the weather has finally cooled off to a respectable April temperature. I'm trying to decide where to go next. I have a week before I'm flying back to France and I don't know what to do with myself.

This must sound so horrible, right? "Oh, I'm in Europe with all of it open to me. All I need to do is go buy a train ticket, but all I want to do is sleep and I can't decide where to go." How whiney. The other day, the people I was traveling with (they went back to France today), were discussing hanging around Paris for the day because of the way the trains worked and they said, "How sad is it that we're complaining about having to spend the day in Paris?" That's what our lives have come down to. It's so commonplace to just 'spend the day in Paris' that we don't even think twice about it.

In twelve days, I will be home and I don't know when the next time I'll get to France will be. It could be years. It could be decades. I could spend the rest of my life talking about "that time I lived in France" and it will only be a story to people I know. Parts of my life are already like that. Parts of my life have been that way since the very first time I moved - I was five years old when I started to have "when I lived in" stories. 

I know I travel a lot and sometimes I feel like I'm doing it wrong (a wrong way to travel?) but I know that I'm ready for it to be over, at least for a little while. I'm ready for stability and I don't even know if I'll get that at home, but I'll at least have my own bed and that's something I've been missing for months now.