Adventures of a Curious Woman

Sometimes, in the course of my reading, I come across passages that articulate my feelings about something precisely—oftentimes it’s an idea that I haven’t fully thought out, but when I see it in print, the thought is crystallized in my mind. I came across just such a passage when I was reading Educating Alice, by Alice Steinbach. In relating her writing workshop experience, she writes:

…listening to literature read aloud—poetry being the exception—in no way approximates the experience of reading a writer’s work on your own. To become fully engaged in a story, I need to see the words on a page, to see how they fit together, how they shape ideas and meaning, and how they sound as my thinking voice says them.

‘Nuff said on that.


I’m inspired by Ms. Steinbach. I read her first book, Without Reservations, about 4 years ago and loved how she heeded the impulse to temporarily abandon her daily routine and responsibilities to travel and seek a new life. I love too, how she wrote herself postcards while traveling and mailed them back home as a reminder of her experiences.

In Educating Alice, she travels the world taking lessons and courses. I’ve always maintained that if I ever won the lottery, I’d go back to school, just for fun and study whatever interested me. After reading her book, I realize that my fantasy was too small and conventional.

Ms. Steinbach traveled the world stopping in cities like Paris, where she learned to cook at the Ritz-Escoffier Ecole de Gastronomie Française; she went to Kyoto and studied traditional Japanese arts through the Women’s Association of Kyoto; her course in Florence through the British Institute enlightened her about that city’s Art; while studying at the University of Exeter in England, she explored The World of Jane Austen; in Provence, she discovered secret gardens; and in Havana, she familiarized herself with Cuban architecture and art.

One of my favourite chapters was the one of her stop in Prague because many of the places she wrote of where familiar to me. I was last there in April and stayed in Mala Strana on Nerudova Street. I walked up the many steps to Prague Castle, explored Stare Mesto and Josefov, browsed the designer shops on Parizska Street and hung out in Ebel Coffee House in Tyn Square sipping a Hot Apple…those were a fun 3 days in a city where just about everywhere you turned, there was a beautifully-restored art nouveau building waiting to be wondered at…