I've been making a habit of visiting London every year during the first week of November. It's nowhere near tourist season so the airfare is cheap, the weather is just starting to get chilly but isn't mind-numbingly frigid yet, and the Turner Award nominees have their pieces up at the Tate. I know where the cheap Internet cafe is in the neighborhood I like to stay in, I know how to get myself around the city, I know where to look to find out the cool things going on and the good places to eat. I see at least two art exhibits every day and spend my evenings seeing movies, plays, Brit pop bands, and DJs. One day I take the train out of London to visit a bona fide tourist attraction. I feel like the only time I stick out is when I open my mouth, and even then I unconsciously add a slightly British lilt to my speech that's cute but doesn't fool anyone.

My mom is a natural-born traveller herself. She was a stewardess on Pan Am and flew all over the world, picking up mementos large and small. She smuggled a slab of marble out of India in her suitcase that became an end table in my room, she bought her notchback Volkswagen from a dealership in Germany and had it shipped back. She had people like Bob Dylan and Lindbergh and Hitchcock on her flights. She flew troops into Vietnam during the war. She still loves to travel and is always dreaming of fantastic places to visit. She fully endorsed my year abroad and all the travelling that I did during that year, and won't let me speak of missing my fall trip to London. She has started to urge me towards branching out from England again, and I'm starting to agree with her. I still need to see the ruins in Turkey and Greece and Italy that I spent so many years studying, and I definitely need to visit Tokyo at some point and just geek out and consume many products.

I don't feel very brave these days, though. Plunging into a foreign country by myself (or even with a fellow foreigner) seems really scary and hard, even though I've done it in the past. I want to go in speaking the language and knowing how to operate the automatic ticket dispensers on the bus, or I want a guide who will take me through. My most embarrassing confession is that I get those huge tourbooks in the mail for vacations planned down to the last detail and they seem appealing to me. Maybe I'll be the first person on earth to write an utterly brilliant travelogue from the seat of a tour bus, but I doubt it.