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Billboard

 
 billboard
 posted just outside
 Cochin India
 Get Away to Paris
 Where Romance is in the Air
 

 there is most certainly
 its twin
 posted on the curved Metro wall
 Come to Colorful India
 Where Romance
 Is in our very Air.

Inspiration:  Freeway billboard

Wherever we are, there is somewhere else we want to go.  As we drove up from Cochin to Mumbai,  I was struck by the language on billboard advertising a romantic trip to Paris looming over the many lane freeway.  And I knew, without a shadow of a doubt that there was a twin somewhere in the metro in Paris assuring the commuter that better, more romantic days could be found in India.

Even though the reader LIVES in one of the most romantic cities in the world. 

But daily life is so different from vacationing.

I try to remember this as I recklessly fall in love with another city, another country.  I love the old elegant buildings leaning into each other, the street access, the hills, the stairs.

I forget the poor plumbing,  hauling groceries and briefcases up five flights.  Spotty internet.  No attached garage. Street parking.

What is charming and picturesque while on vacation, can be read as annoying, shabby and a neighborhood nuisance in real life.

We want to go, we want to stay, we don’t know what we want.

So we keep traveling as if we can’t help it.

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CatharineBramkamp

Catharine Bramkamp is a successful writing coach and author. She has published over 300 newspaper and magazine articles in publications like Modern Maturity (AARP), SF Chronicle and Santa Rosa Magazine. She was a contributor to two Chicken Soup Books and has published anthologies of her work, non-fiction works and novels. Her work has also appeared in a number of poetry and fiction anthologies. She has experimented with the self-publishing world since 2001. She has published and self-published seven books through companies like Author House, author assist companies like 3L Publishing and through traditional publishers like Write Life. Her poetry collection, Ammonia Sunrise, will be released in August 2011 by Finishing Line Press and her mystery novel, In Good Faith will be released by Write Life in 2011. Catharine holds a BA in English from UCSB and a MA in English from Sonoma State University. She is a 25 year member of California Writer’s Club. She is an adjunct professor for the University of Phoenix. She works with authors of both fiction and non-fiction to make their dream of producing a book come true. For more information on that, visit her at www.YourBookStartsHere.com Catharine has lived in Sonoma County for 25 years and considers wine a food group. She is married to an adorable and very patient man who complains he’s never featured in any of her books. Her grown children who are featured in a few of her books have fled the county.

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