Marital Negotiations
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Madrid for the week, enjoying familiarity and chilled soups.
Marital Negotiations
People often ask us how we decide where to go—which countries, which cities, what to see or do. For the first few years of our nomad life, the answers were kind of fuzzy; even we didn’t know how we made those decisions. They just kind of happened. I said things like, “We went to Hungary for cherry season,” or “We went to Uruguay for the yarn.” Both of those were true, actually. But sort of random, at the same time.
The pandemic, when borders suddenly became restrictions rather than opportunities, gave us some clarity. Suddenly we both had long lists of things we’d always wanted to see and places we’d always wanted to go that were now off-limits—unsurprisingly, they were radically different lists.
In the past few months, as more and more of the world re-opens, we’ve been ticking a lot of boxes on both of our lists. Some destinations have worked for both of us; some have been driven solely by me, others by Lee.
Algeria, the big chunk of North Africa that sits between Morocco and Tunisia, is a good example of how we’ve made those compromises work.
Years ago, I saw a photo of the Roman city of Timgad, and wanted to see it. But for a long time, Algeria seemed like a place we probably couldn’t go. I didn’t know anything about it, except that tourists don’t really go there. In hindsight, that part is true—there is no real tourism industry here, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to visit. It’s logistically a bit challenging, yes, but not impossible.
In our late-pandemic (I refuse to say post-pandemic, because it ain’t over, folks) burst of motivation, we got serious about the visa application, and waited for approval. And waited. Miraculously, it came through while we were in Iraq. Lee was all for hopping on a plane right away, but he priced out the flights on Air Algerie, and they were prohibitively expensive. We were perplexed.
So he fiddled around on the website, and fiddled some more, and never could make sense of it. We called their offices, in France, in Spain. We couldn’t figure out how to buy a reasonably priced ticket. When we got to Cairo, I went to the Antiquities Museum, and Lee went looking for an Air Algerie office. When we met up for lunch at our favorite koshary place, he had news: a) the crazy prices were because of Ramadan travel, and b) tickets have to be purchased in person. In cash.
So we made several trips to the ATM, then waited in a smoky, grimy office to hand over a wad of Egyptian pounds. In exchange, we got … a receipt. Nothing resembling a plane ticket.
At this point, we were beginning to get an inkling that Algeria might not be the most user-friendly destination, so we made several decisions—we would limit our time (6 nights), we would hire a guide to blitz us through the things we (I) wanted to see, we’d stay at the highest-end chain hotels we could find, and we’d go somewhere easy and predictable afterward—on a ‘normal’ airline (that part was me).
This is what our marital negotiations look like. We’ve learned too many times that the challenging destinations (and challenging can mean many different things, to each of us) have to be balanced with easier experiences.
Lee, bless his heart, has pretty much zero interest in ancient ruins, but he knows how much I love them, and he deliberately uses them to tempt me. It works. I really had very little interest in Algeria—how different could it be from its neighbors, both of which are much more tourist-friendly?
He, on the other hand, likes to add countries to his list. I can’t be bothered to keep a list, but at any given moment, Lee always knows exactly how many countries we’ve visited. I give him a hard time about obsessing over numbers and check-lists, but my Roman ruin obsession is no different. I can totally rattle off a list of countries in which we’ve seen Roman ruins—in geographical order, no less.*
Some destinations are for me, some are for Lee. Always, always, it comes back to the fact that we can’t see or do it all. We each have to find our own internal systems of balance (mine involves keeping tea bags and chocolate in my suitcase), then we have to figure out ways to compromise with each other. Then we fit all of those negotiations into a big, complicated world. Easy-peasy.
*Starting at Hadrian’s Wall, in the furthest reaches of the Empire: UK, France, Spain, Italy (duh), Croatia, Montenegro, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. But there are always more on my list . . .
From my writer’s notebook: Yesterday I visited the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, named for the steel magnate whose collection was once the second-largest in the world. You may recognize the name: the Thyssen-Krupp company make, among other things, elevators and escalators. The museum is a beautiful collection of slightly-less-famous works by very-famous artists. Yesterday it was mostly uncrowded, and I enjoyed thinking about the intersection between museums and private collections, as well as the rarefied social atmosphere in which those intersections occur. I was also lucky to see an exhibit of trompe l’oeil paintings, which was probably the most amusing art I’ve ever seen assembled in one place.
Take care,
Lisa
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