Toulouse, Je t'aime

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

-Maya Angelou

What comes first: being happy or smiling?

Socially, I dominated middle school. There are a number of reasons why. I had a clique. I had a girlfriend. I still believed I was destined to play professional soccer (Brazil 2014!). Adults, teachers, fellow students older and younger; there were few people I felt uncomfortable talking to.

My high school social life didn't exactly live up. Some new realities had set in. There's a list, but most of it revolved around puberty. I was surrounded by the same people as middle school, but something had changed. I wasn't having the same social success. Sports became more difficult and I found myself struggling to keep girls' attention.

For a long time I externalized the blame. Fate, my parents, my school, my community: everything was fair game. Even into my twenties I blamed everyone and everything except myself.

Not long ago I came across an old photo album from that time in my life. Flipping through, I was unaffected seeing myself Boy Scouting, wrestling, playing soccer, or standing on stage. Towards the end of the album there was a pouch with all my old school pictures.

I never loved school photos, but I never feared them either. For some reason I'd always liked my photo from 6th grade. I wore a white, long-sleeve shirt with Michael Jordan silhouetted over wacky 1990's colors. I looked young but not infantile. For once, my unruly hair was tame. But what struck me more than anything was my smile.

I looked...happy. My smile was genuine, honest, welcoming. I recalled seeing the photo sometime during high school and trying to remember what it felt like to be in that moment and feel what that smile felt like. I remember failing. Pictures of that smile don't exist from high school.

I've never forgotten that photo. Thinking back, it's the way I wanted people to remember me, and I'd never understood why. Much later I realized it was my smile.

Please don't think that my smile is anything special. Everyone's smile has this power. A smile does a number of things well. First of all, it projects confidence. Two, it makes other people feel good. This combination creates a powerful attraction. In "Blink", Malcolm Gladwell talks about a famous study that found the act of smiling has a reverse effect. In other words, we smile when we are happy, but we also become happy when we smile.

On Tuesday I arrived in Toulouse, France. It's a big sprawling city with a gorgeous downtown and a extremely pleasant night-time atmosphere.

When meeting French people here, I have limited resources at my disposal. I don't speak French. I don't know anything about the city. And my host and I are still relative strangers.

And yet, I'm having a great time.

It could be French culture. Or maybe I'm blessed to stumble upon a group of people that make me feel so welcome. It could be I'm a curiosity because I'm foreign. But if I had to guess, I'd say smiling shares some of the responsible. Feels like middle school again.

Rule #4: Smile

Devendra Banhart - Can't Help But Smiling

A Traveler Humbled

Time for an ego check.

If you've read my stuff before, or ever met me, you might have heard me talk authoritatively about travel. I retract everything. One week into EuroTrip 2010, I've managed to break all but the most cardinal rules of travel. Let me explain by speaking even more authoritatively. During the next month I'm going to dish about some of the do's and don'ts of travel. This is PaxPangea's:

"EuroTrip 2010: If Only I Practiced What I Preached"

Rule #1: Be anal

No seriously. Be really, really anal. Let me explain: Traveling is about variables. Just like life, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Your only recourse is to be as vigilant as possible.

The interweb is a glorious fount of information on things like visas, news, and whether or not your train ticket from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, that you bought well ahead of time in the U.S., will be rendered useless because there is track maintenance on the day you were scheduled to leave.

Rule #2: Keep everything

In 2008 I was traveling with a Peace Corps buddy of mine through West Africa. We planned to meet in Accra: the capital of Ghana, spend a week there, and cross the border into Lome, Togo. Whereas Ghana has recently prospered economically, Togo has not. A pseudo-dictatorial regime runs the country, the GDP is low despite abundant natural resources, and during the rainy season Togo's main highway is almost always out. In 2008, the 50 most dangerous cities in the world went: 1) Detroit, 2) Baghdad, 3) Lome.

I broke a rule by not doing my homework ahead of time and therefore not getting the all-important Ghanaian Visa. "No worries," I thought. I'll buy it at the airport, problem solved.

We rolled around Ghana for a week and came to the Togo border. My PCV friend had warned me what to expect: a run-down, militarized border where people were known to have been beaten for taking pictures. No smiling.

We cautiously walked to the shack outside the menacing archway, with a menacing watchtower, and menacing guards. It was, in a word, menacing.

The office was busy with people moving in and out. There were people dressed in uniforms and tourists whose perplexed faces mirrored our own.

The woman behind the counter didn't look happy to see us. She was equally unhappy about seeing our passports. My friend was first. He got his back without issue.

Then came my passport. She looked at it. Then she showed it to her friend. Then she checked something and looked at me. I looked at my buddy, sitting on the edge of his seat, eyes drifting quickly from perplexity into fear. He came over and she asked him something in French. He smiled the smile of absurdity, the worst kind of smile.

It's the smile you smile when you are forced to pay full price for parking because you lost your parking stub. It's the smile you smile when you are forced to walk through the entire airport departure maze when no one is in line. It's the smile you smile when a Togolese border worker asks you for the receipt for a visa payment you made about 500 miles ago, when the visa is clearly visible in the passport. My friend turns to me with the frown of hopelessness.

I wish I had a picture of his face when I told him I still had the receipt. It was the smile of elation. The best kind of smile.

Keep everything.