This is my friend, Sarah. We like to sit around playing Scrabble, making and eating cake. She’s a pretty entertaining lady and a new world explorer so I thought, hey, let’s do an interview.

You made your first trip to… well, anywhere recently. Where’d you go?

In 2007, I made my first real trip out of the country in my life, not counting the week I spent in Mexico building a church with my youth group in summer 1991. I went to London and Paris, and fell in love with both, which seems pretty cliche, but things become cliche for a reason, right?

If you had to pick one photo from your trip as your absolute favorite, which one would it be?

I took about 600 photos, so narrowing it down to just one is so hard… I’d pick this one for London.

It was taken from the London Eye, my first day there, sleepless from the plane… we were exhausted, but thought we should take advantage of the sunshine in case it left for the rest of the trip. It didn’t.

I’d pick this one for Paris. It was late at night, crossing the bridge over Montmartre Cemetery. My friend Anne and I were full of wine and so happy. It was almost my 30th birthday, I was in Paris, I had wine for dinner… it was a pretty good time to be alive. We both decided that this tiny graffitied bridge over the cemetery would be an ideal place to be proposed to, if we had to pick a place.

What did you find most charming on your trip abroad?

I think I was most charmed in learning all the little backstories. I did a lot of sightseeing, and I read the guidebooks and everything beforehand, but the best thing I heard was when I struck up a conversation with a very nice older lady verger at Westminster Abbey. I asked her what her favorite story or part of the Abbey was. She said, “Well, I fell in love with Westminster when I was a very little girl. The day after Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, my mother brought me in to the Abbey to visit her friend, who was the Don at the time. Now during the war, most of the peers and peeresses put their finery in storage, and got them out to wear to the coronation without much upkeep, so every time they were to bow their heads during the service, a rain of loose diamond shards fell from all the ladies’ crowns. The next day, we came in to see all of these ladies and duchesses crawling around Westminster Abbey on their hands and knees, searching for their lost diamonds.”

I have no idea; maybe that’s her standard story she tells everyone who asks, but I loved it, and it made me want to hug her for sharing.

I also loved learning which words we traded out — like how in the UK, you say “rocket” instead of arugula and “aubergine” instead of eggplant and “chav” instead of skank. Can I say skank? Anyway, those kind of little details really appeal to the word nerd in me.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 | general