The Little Things

Over the summer my boyfriend and I traveled through Europe. It was probably the most rewarding experience of my life. We traveled through twelve different countries over three months. But when you’re with someone for three months straight, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week you really start to learn things about each other. Those once endearing habits start to get on your nerves. I learnt that Joel likes to be in control, know exactly where he is, is a neat freak, and likes to have everything planed out down to a T.

On one particular freezing cold day when we were in the beautiful city of Paris we decided to go exploring. We set off all rugged up with our backpacks and most importantly our map. We had been in Paris for about a week and the area was not totally unfamiliar to us. We had heard the Latin Quarter in Paris was a great place to go for good cheap food and shopping so that’s where we headed.

Joel, as usually wanted to be in charge of the map which normally doesn’t bother me. As we walked the streets of Paris the cold seemed to intensify. Once we got to the Latin Quarter we decide to get out of the cold and get something to eat. We started to explore our way around the area. Joel stopped at almost every street tiring to locate our position on the map. After a while I suggested asking someone for directions but Joel said that we should “just have a bit of a walk around and we would find a place soon enough.”

After what seemed like an hour of walking in circles I asked to see the map sure that we had walked along this street at least three times. Joel reluctantly handed me the map and proceed to look over my shoulder as I tried to locate where we were on the map. I handed the map back to him without locating our position and said “don’t worry we know which direction the main river is we will just head that we and we will be able to find our way back to the hotel from there .”

I started to walk towards the river assuming that Joel was following me. Five paces later I turned around to see him scrunching up our only map yelling “I hate the F***ing French”. At this point I ran back towards him and stopped him from putting our only map in the bin. From then on I always held the map just incase there was another frustration outburst.