Good places, Bad places?

     When Aislynn and I were visiting colleges, we took some time in Oregon to look at one in particular.  I talked about it in another post at the time and don’t need to repeat what I wrote there: it wasn’t the right school for Aislynn, which is fine: that’s why you do these tours, to find out what you like and don’t like, what fits and doesn’t fit.  What I do want to say is that it was also a mother-daughter vacation for us so we also drove up to and through Portland.  We left that city feeling that the city had rejected us at every turn.  We went to the zoo, only to discover you had to have tickets ahead of time and there were none available for that day.  We went to the international rose garden, and all the roses had been cut back to the ground that very week: there wasn’t a single rose to be seen.  We went to the Japanese Garden and it was closed that day for work. We went to Powell’s City of Books and were unable to find parking (a rarity for me) anywhere within a half mile of the store. We tried to go to the Portland Art Museum, but it’s closed Monday-Wednesday and so we could not go.  Finally, we just drove to our hotel.  But we were stuck in traffic that meant it took over an hour to drive the 6 miles to the hotel.  When we arrived, we found it was a dump of a hotel: not a place we even felt SAFE, let alone a place to get clean or to sleep soundly. When we left, we shook the dirt off our shoes and accepted that Portland did not want us and we were okay with that.

    David and I feel the same way about Cardiff where we stayed for the last 2 days.  We are with a tour that had difficulty even arriving at the hotel because apparently the first night we were there, so was P!NK, and so the city center where our hotel was located was packed with people all having come to party and see P!NK.  I don’t like dealing with that kind of huge crowds and David needed to work so we stayed in our hotel room that evening rather than braving dinner in town.  Our room looks over the train tracks and is almost on top of them.

  Additionally, while this was supposed to be a very nice hotel, our bathroom was dirty, there was a piece broken out of the bath, the fan doesn’t work, and the shower is so tight, as well as curved, that it’s hard to stand in it. But more than any of this, yesterday morning I woke up with three giant, very itchy and angry BITES on my face from something in the room. Additionally, we’ve been trying to wash our clothes by hand in our room, and that, too, has been a disaster because they aren’t drying fast enough in this humid room with no working fan, meaning smell sets in: ugh!

    Much of yesterday we had unscheduled time, so since I am here to see gardens, we googled the “best gardens in Cardiff” and set out.  The number one garden listed turned out to be a sports arena.  I have no idea why that came up as one of the best gardens since there was not one garden plant to be seen.  Another was torn up completely, fenced in, with piles of concrete and tractors.  

    A third was a small playground.  Giving up on the gardens, we then went looking for traditional food from Wales for lunch.  We’d been told by our tour guide to look in particular for Cornish pasties and Welsh cake, but we couldn’t find either.

    In the afternoon we went to St Fagan’s National Museum of History.  For my Cleveland friends, it is very similar to Hale Farm and Village.  For others, I’d say there are similarities to Williamsburg in that it is an old historic village.  It was awesome, really.  But our tour guide gave us only 80 minutes to go through the entire area which is over 100 acres of historic sites and buildings. I felt like David and I were zooming through to try to see as much of it as we could, and to my great surprise and disappointment, at the end I found an incredibly beautiful castle and garden area that we did not really have time to see.  I certainly didn’t have the time to truly enjoy it as I would have liked.

    Still, the day was not a complete loss.  Though we only saw the St. Fagan’s National Museum in a huge rush, what we did see was amazing.  In the morning we also visited Cardiff Castle, which was very interesting.  And in the evening we had a very nice dinner with our group that included being entertained by Welsh singers and a harpist.  That was truly lovely.  

    Returning to our hotel then, I was completely unable to sleep since the room was hot, the fan didn’t work, and there was no light sheet I could use but only a heavy comforter that meant I was either too hot, or had no covering. Despite what was positive and enjoyable, then, I felt the same sense of being rejected by a city that I felt when we were in Portland.  I also feel the same sense of “that’s fine” about it.  As I said in an earlier post, I’m not a city girl and this was definitely a city!  

    As I reflected on this, two thoughts came to mind.  First, it is easy to globalize one’s experience.  Obviously the time in Cardiff was really mixed: some wonderful things (the castle, the museum, the dinner), some not so wonderful.  But it would be easy for me to globalize and say it was not a good time.  Similarly it is easy to globalize a good experience, when the reality is that everything is mixed.  We absolutely loved Bath, for example.  But that doesn’t mean the time there was perfect.  One of the less ideal experiences we had in Bath was that our tour guide took us to a “very special English tea experience” where we were going to have “famous Sally Lum buns.”  Yes, we had tea: the same kind of tea I drink on a daily basis. And these famous buns, as far as we could tell, were large half hamburger buns. I love breads of all kinds, but I don’t even count hamburger buns as true bread: white flour, airy, with little taste, only good with something between them and even then, I often remove the top half of the bun because it’s just too much and is more utilitarian than edible.  It was an expensive yet disappointing “tea” experience.  But it was easy to ignore in light of all the wonderful things we saw and experienced in Bath.  I think, then, that it remains important to focus on gratitude and the things that are life giving and positive. I don’t need to waste energy on what was less than ideal.  But focusing on what is good brings me joy.  I choose.  And I don’t always choose for the best.

    My second thought was that there are places that resonate with a person and places that don’t.  I’m not actually sure that the reasons can always be accurately named.  Sometimes it is just the day that one is having, sometimes it is an experience, and sometimes it just comes down to something intangible: a sense, a smell, a sound that leads to one feeling good or not so good about a space.  First impressions, maybe.  For myself, I’ve learned that my first impressions are usually wrong, especially when those impressions are less than positive.  Just as it is unfair to people to judge them based on first impressions, perhaps my first impressions of places are equally to be viewed with suspicion.

    So, while I felt, like I did in Portland, like we were dismissed by the city, I’m not ready to pass judgement (and perhaps similarly for Portland).  And instead of labeling our time there as a bad time, perhaps I can just say, more truthfully, that our time there was mixed.  Even as I write this, I remember that while the gardens we were aiming to view were not the gardens we wanted to see, the walk to those “gardens” was actually quite lovely: we walked along the River Taff, in a lovely green belt of trees and grass, apart from the streets of the city.  Maybe my naming of the day as a “bad day” might have caused me to forget the beautiful part of the walk in favor of remembering the disappointment.  It was a different experience than we had expected, but not, on the whole a bad one.  

    So my lessons for today are to be cautious in my judgments and to focus on the good.  Not such bad lessons.