Last you heard from this traveling blogger, I was discussing the meaning of a deferral (if you haven't seen it, do check it out, and I hope you guys are holding in there).  But behind the scenes, I was also scrambling to finish my papers, studying for finals, packing up my room at Yale, and jumping through hoops to obtain a French visa (French bureaucracy… yeesh) before the 15th of January.

There are a lot of wonderful things that are attributed to Paris. The people with their engaging French accents and unrivaled devotion to wine, their ever-famous crepes with almost every kind of flavoring from nutella to raspberry sauce. There are also the more physical attributes such as the Eiffel Tower (yeah, we grow up hearing about this one), the Notre Dame Cathedral, and the Louvre, all sights that tourists frequent without fail. But all of these things are synonymous with the outsider.

As the world transforms into a cloud-computing world, humanity has grown increasingly more digitized, more captivated by technology, and more enamored by the beauty of the instantaneous. Don’t get me wrong: I am just as infatuated as any other nineteen-year-old college student. But what if none of it ever existed? What if you could stop sending every digitized piece of your life into the cloud? What if you could touch the clouds?

I've always had a fascination with defying gravity.

One of the best parts about traveling is the food. (As my friend, Uzra, points out, food explains the world.) I am never disappointed by the discovery of a completely different palate, a new array of tastes and textures and smells and ways of eating.