Dasha’s guide to mindful travel
Posted 27 October 2019, by Daria Belostotckaia
First, you do not have plans.
Second, you travel by train somewhere not very far.
Third, you invest most of your energy in food.
Then you move only (and this is crucial) when you want to.
You eat some more.
If you decide to spare some of that precious food energy on culture, you find a floor to sit on and just stare at paintings without any intentions (we went to see a Van Gogh exhibition, and were surrounded by floating images of nature and sad self-portraits and I didn’t even try to remember anything I’d read in that 800-page biography of his).
You then (if you’re in Paris) take a holy route past the best pâtisseries, and then when your friend turns up you take her on it and repeat it once again, and share in one of those cherished discoveries you collect along your way.
We went to Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore across the Seine from Notre Dame, now covered in scaffolding. I have a book about this place, which was a great inspiration for that part of me that – for three days in a row – hopelessly wanted to open a bookstore of my own. I wanted to buy all the books, but instead, I sat there and just stared and stared and tried to remember all the writers who drank and ate, and slept and read here, but I got overwhelmed. And then I thought what could be better than just buying a souvenir mug and enjoying these memories, all of these memories, my memories and those of the bookshop, while drinking hot tea in rainy England.
After the museum we went to the Père Lachaise cemetery and walked through the graves of many famous (and some not so famous but surely extraordinary, and maybe even some not-so-good) people. And I thought of death, as you often do when you have Jewish and Russian heritage, and also when you’re in cemeteries, and also just because you are, well, human. And I thought of all the sad and profound and heavy things that everyone says or writes or sings about, and I decided that it’s not that simple to just be light, and happy, and alive. So in the spirit of that, we left the cemetery, rented a couple of bikes and rode through endless, tree-lined boulevards towards the best éclairs in the city.
