Paris.

I know that everybody knows that Paris in the Springtime is something special, but I think you really have to be there to fully realize it. Both of my other trips to the city have been during the winter, and though wonderful, they were also cold and gray. We were lucky enough to arrive into Paris with blue skies and t-shirt weather. Since we had all been before our days weren't rushed and we meandered around the city on a continuous search for twist cones. We picnicked and laid out and just enjoyed relaxing which is something you forget about after countless 'MUST SIGHTSEE' trips.

The Parisians probably think it's incredibly tacky but I am in love with the Eiffel tower light show. We were strolling by the Seine and stopped to snap a picture of the tower from afar when it burst into the show, surprising all of us. Although it went off while we were climbing it in February, seeing it from afar is a completely different experience. Being up close is a total shock to the senses. It combines with the surrounding city, lit up for the night and almost overwhelms you.

From the Seine it's more of a sparkle.

My favorite is when you look just to the left or right of it and let it slip out of focus and it's more like a diamond catching the light or the sun hitting the water. I don't know, for some reason it gave me a sense of perspective. Sometimes you just have to move yourself out of a situation and look at it from a different place. It's really easy to panic about study abroad ending, or coming up to the beginning of senior year, or all the unexpected things that roll your way but I guess one thing I've realized from this whole experience is that things always tend to work out. You miss your flight, you make new friends and have the best tapas of your life, you have a bad night and your nouveau amis talk you through, and even though people leave, you find ways to keep them close or ways to get through it.

Tomorrow Lauren, Coder and Jackie leave early for Amsterdam and Vicky doesn't get in until seven, which makes it my first day exploring a town on my own. As much as it probably won't feel right to picnic alone, I think it will also make me wish I'd taken a little time to travel by myself...except for the lack of jumping pics. We'll see, we'll see. Regardless, I'm so excited to see Vicky and explore three new places together...Amsterdam, Turkey and Greece.

I guess I have a big butt.

My mission all spring long has been to find a cute, wild European bathing suit and I had almost given up until this afternoon. We were in Cassis, saying goodbye after a dip in the med and what did we run into but a shop with said suits. Unfortunately all they had on display were larges, so I asked a saleswoman in broken French if they had any smalls. What she did next needed no translation. She pointed to my butt, raised her eyebrows and said, petit??

I. Kid. You. Not.

I awkwardly shrugged while she shook her head and rummaged through a pile of suits off to the side while my friends cackled with glee in the background. She found my small and I tried it on, only to discover that the pockets puffed out and it was indeed too tight on my crepe fed butt. She came back to check on me and could not contain her giddiness at my suit that did not fit. When she had finally composed herself she said she would go fetch me a medium. I tried it on and it fit much better. She saw my approval, raised her eyebrow again and said...

Large!

I looked, and sure enough the tag had a big 'L' on it, and she positively beamed. I went back to change out of my new suit and I was later informed by my friends that she pointed to my butt once again and giggled to herself as I entered the changing room. She continued to smile as I purchased the suit and I managed to make it two steps out the door before bursting out in uncontrollable laughter.

I'd take a picture of my new suit but my backside probably wouldn't fit in the frame.

Haha, what a day, what a day.

Last Day of Teaching

So it was my last day of teaching the French kiddies on Monday and as much as I dreaded walking to that school every Monday it's also a little sad to be done. For the last class, we were of course sans a lesson plan as usual and we decided to have the kids draw their families. In a hilarious turn of events they ended up drawing pictures of my teaching partner and I. This sassy little one named Anouk came up to me, ordered me to stand still, and demanded a 'rouge' marker to color in my nose. I told her that I had gotten 'beaucoup de soleil' over the weekend and she popped her hip and said 'moi aussi'. Haha! I totally got dissed by a six year old French girl.

The pictures turned out great, most of them showed Danielle and I in castles (hmm?) with hearts around us, and in a couple of them we were pooping. Ok, I laughed, a lot...I never promised to be a mature teacher. With 10 minutes left and nothing to do I saw that they had music sheets on their desk and told them to sing for us. It turned out to be the best moment of my life when they one by one stood up and joined into the circus tune that went a little bit like this, 'Blim Blim, Bloum, Bloum, Tra la la la Lere' and went on to talk about French clowns and such. Even the little badass with the rat tail that said his name was 'toilette' in the beginning of the semester was singing along and it was probably the cutest thing I've ever seen. That was until the little girl that told me I was sunburnt gave me bisous to say goodbye. Oh the French. I'll miss those little punks!

Real updates on life coming soon.

Things are ending and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

I like Bordeaux.

With half of our second day of vacay already planned for us, all Lauren and I only had to figure out what to do in the morning. Bordeaux made it easy for us by giving us a gorgeous day to explore the jardins publique. We of course stopped at Paul for our daily coffee and actually ended up accidentally running into the gardens. Madame T. had lived in Bordeaux for two years before Aix and highly recommended the gardens and I could immediately see why. Although the rest of the city was still on slow Sunday morning time, the gardens were bustling with joggers, bikers and adorable old couples all out enjoying the morning. We did a little exploring and ended up unknowingly beginning a theme of the trip, feeding ducks. It’s unreal how many times we gave our old bread (or bought new baguettes) just to feed these crazy critters.

We caught some great videos of swans, ducks and odd colored geese fighting over scraps of bread we tossed their way. Some highlights include one particularly fiery goose that was all business in a showdown with a gray speckled goose with a messed up wing. I think when it came down to it, some tiny sparrow ended up with the bread but it was a riot to watch them charge each other. We took turns feeding the geese, getting dangerously close to letting them grab it from our mouths but we took a step back, realized we would probably get goose flu or lose an eye, and moved on. The botanic gardens were beautiful as well, but still needed a bit of time to hit full bloom, leaving a lot of empty patches here and there. There were some nice wisteria trees and bright pink flowers that looked like koosh balls, and there might have been some more ducks. I’m not proud of it.

When we finally snapped out of park mode we realized it was time to book it back to the hostel, make embarrassing stop number three at Paul’s for sandwiches. Right after Paul is when the real magic occurred. That's right, we found our mega pain au chocolat! It was almost five euro and the size of about 10 normal pastries but we saw it, glistening in the sun (or florescent lights) and HAD to have it. It was melty and flaky and everything I imagined it to be. We ate it in the shadow of a gorgeous cathedral with blue skies and puffy clouds and seriously...it's one of my favorite memories of the entire break. After that we realized we really had to go and made it to the office of tourism with enough time to listen to some tunez while we waited for the bus. The tour took us to one of the oldest vineyards in Bordeaux and included wine tasting and a pretty in depth guide to the wine making process. We learned the types of terrain best for growing particular varieties of grapes, which regions were famous for what wine, and an explanation on wine aging. Lauren had an incredibly apt light bulb moment of realization about the word vin-tage connecting with wine age while we sipped our three varieties of vin rouge. Our guide was great and part of the family that had owned the vineyard since the 1700s, joking that the only time the wine had decreased in quality was during the war and for two reasons. First, the bombings, second the fact that the women took over the wine making. He also made a crack about wine production in other regions, dissing the Loire Valley (our next stop on the honeymoon) pretty harshly. Oops!

After the wine tasting we headed to the medieval formerly walled village of St. Emilion. As we illegally gorged on our sandwiches on the bus, an older French woman (who may have been a little tipsy from the tasting) came up and told us that eating was forbidden and then giggled. She went on to describe her breakfast and how she had eaten KELLOG’S CORN FLAKES. She highly stressed that, and talked about how she really liked to eat them with sugar. We were both windblown and awkwardly trying to chew our sandwiches while responding, it was a mess. Anyways, the town was gorgeous and played well off of the gray skies and interesting clouds. Our tour guide was apparently pretty VIP because she got the keys to the catacombs of the old church and took us down to explore, resulting in some truly haunting pictures between Lauren and I. We snuck off from the group shortly after that to accomplish our goal of trying the small vanilla soaked cakes that are famous in the region and shock, we loved them. We were pretty beat after that and headed back to the bus just as the dark clouds started rolling in, making for an oddly comforting bus ride back. We once again cleaned up and headed to a little Italian café with great lighting and large portions, what more can you ask for? We were crushed to find out the gelateria we had been dying to go to was closed so we ended up getting an overpriced strawberry ice cream sundae thing from the restaurant. Exhausted, we once again crashed as soon as we could since we had a heinously early train to Tours the next morning.

Sand dunes and midnight trains

In my opinion, any vacation that begins with Journey is guaranteed to be at least moderately successful. In our case, we got really lucky and it turned out to be one of the best trips of my life, and here in several parts is a recap that I hope can nearly do it justice.

One Lauren J. Metz and I took a midnight train to Bordeaux last Friday night. No matter how many terrible trips I have with cramped overheated (or under-heated) night busses or trains, there’s always a sense of allure and mystery to the whole experience. I don’t know if it’s the quietness of your surroundings or the difference of the scenery lit up by moonlight but for me it’s an interesting mix of calming and exciting. This combination of emotions usually leaves me staring out the window for hours, alternating between thinking about my life and planning the upcoming trip in my head. This trip was easily the most painless of my night travels (aka not Venice) since we had sufficient legroom, cushy seats and “Don’t Stop Believing” at the ready on my ipod. We both managed to sleep for most of the ride and got the pleasure of waking up to a beautiful French sunrise from the panoramic train windows. Bordeaux at 8 AM was impeccably clean, impressively grandiose and completely empty. We found our way to the hotel pretty easily and dropped off our bags until check in. From there we booked it to the Office of Tourism to get our bearings on what exactly we’d be doing that weekend. In a surprisingly easy encounter we decided on visiting the Atlantic coast that afternoon and booking a wine tour for Sunday. Thankfully cafes started opening up around this time allowing us to get our morning fix of caffeine and carbs. When sufficiently revved up for the day we took to exploring Bordeaux, finding the staples of an early morning classy French ville…barred up stores and empty streets. We stumbled upon a cool church and some possible dinner locations before heading back to the hotel to officially get settled in. Our room was cute, with a window view of a garden, a real shower and of course our double bed since a couples trip through the wine and chateau regions of France is basically a honeymoon. On a tight schedule we booked it to the train station and missed our train in a startlingly similar fashion to the whole Alicante debacle. This one was a whole lot easier to clean up and just involved us waiting another hour to board a different train. With our newfound time Lauren and I took to the streets to search for the legendary pain au chocolat that’s supposed to be as ‘big as your tête’. While our pastry remained illusive, we found quite the array of seedy shops in the area of town the guidebook deemed ‘dicey’. With our quota of bad punned rubber duckies with ‘duck me’ signs on them we headed back to the train station to ensure a seat on train number two. It had been a drizzly morning and we were excited to see that the train to Arcachon, a city on the lower Atlantic coast was heading towards nothing but blue skies.

The guidebook which became our Bible of the trip, gave Arcachon a rave review that made us pretty excited to get a taste of the town and sink our feet into the largest sand dune in Europe, but again timing wasn’t going to make it easy for us. The bus we needed to catch was leaving four minutes after the train arrived and we had no idea where anything was! Lauren used her map sense to point us directly where we needed to be and BAM we were on that bus with three minutes to spare. We weaved through some of the most interestingly designed houses I’ve seen yet in France but I couldn’t find a common aesthetic to link them other than a slight feeling of off-season abandonment. Most of the homes in the city have daring landscaping or wacky names engraved on the walls and more often than not empty driveways and shut up windows, which makes me think that they’re mostly summer homes. As it does in any country, the first glimpse of the ocean doubled our excitement and made us bounce in our seats, ready to go. The bus schedule back became an afterthought as we raced towards the colossal dune we could see poking through the pine trees. Fearing we wouldn’t make it up without a little sustenance we grabbed some lackluster paninis and made our way through the touristy shops that sold shirts with cat faces and leaping dolphins. No matter how much you prepare yourself for a natural phenomenon like the redwood forests or Rocky Mountains, they always has a way of knocking your socks off. In this case, the dune literally did take our breath away and compel us to pack up our shoes and socks and ditch the staircase to climb up the side like the wilderness people we are.

Whoops, a few problems.

First and foremost, the only thing wilderness about me at that point was that I had forgotten to shave that morning and had a minor case of windblown hair. For some reason dune climbing inspired me to wear a black wool sweater vest and my new leather bag. Lauren wasn’t much better off with pants that refused to stay rolled up and her leather bag which doesn’t have a zipper. Enter rain. As soon as we got to taking the completely necessary jumping pics at the base of the dune the light drizzle turned into a steady rain and before we knew it we were soaked and sandy halfway up the steepest dune I’ve ever seen. From this point on, the entire dune experience becomes a wonderful blur of dark skies, laughter and lost inhibitions. You know when you’re in a situation that is just so incredibly ridiculous that everyone experiencing it has the exact same “are you serious??” look on their face? That was how this was. The wind was blowing so hard that it didn’t matter a grown man was running around in a diaper. The clouds were rolling in so fast and dark that it wasn’t a big deal that people were tripping down the side of the dune headfirst. So of course when the hail started pummeling all of us it definitely didn’t matter that Lauren and I were screaming our heads off, laughing uncontrollably as we tumbled and jumped our way around and down the dune praying our cameras would make it past the first day. At the base of the dune after having to go back and find a rogue Liongirl Peterson buried in the sand we realized that we were wet and cold and wanted to be on the bus that left in approximately six minutes from the front of the park. Unfortunately down at the bottom, how you acted actually did matter and we didn’t quite transition fast enough to fit in. Still shoeless, soaking wet in our somewhat dressy attire we sprinted past gawking families and barking dogs, trying not to squeal too loudly about how heinous we must have looked. Literally steaming from the humid day, we made it to the bus on time and gingerly put our shoes back on our sandy feet to appear somewhat civilized. There was absolutely no way to do so while reviewing the pictures, so we gave in to being terribly embarrassing Americans in hysterics on the back of the bus. That’s something I should probably clarify right now, for some reason when Lauren and I left Aix en Provence, our French ‘attempt to be quiet and sophisticated’ mindsets stayed put leaving us completely out of control ninety percent of the time. As much as we were stared down-nosed at by the locals, it only enhanced our experience and Lauren helped to remind me that you only live once, so go ahead burp on that park bench. (Or drop that change in the hostel as much as you want Sabrina!…Or 20 euro in the popcorn machine…Or go all out and grab an ear?)

We were all set to catch an early train back to Bordeaux to clean up and get some downtime before dinner but then we saw the skies clear up and the ocean sparkle right in front of us. We pounded the stop button immediately and waddled off the bus, shoes in tow once again. Although we now had blue skies, the wind was still pretty strong forcing us to keep our jackets on while we took our inaugural first toe dips in the other side of the Atlantic. We saved some oysters lives, enjoyed the sun and suddenly there we were standing in front of the largest beached jellyfish I’ve ever seen! It was clear orange and humongous and I’m pretty sure we gawked at it for a solid twenty minutes taking a series of escalating photos climaxing with Liongirl touching the jellyfish. With the backdrop of the sand and ocean available our next move was pretty natural, setting up my tripod and taking tandem jumping pics. Unfortunately I haven’t mastered taking multiple shots at once so after every shot I had to run to the camera, set it up again and run back for the shot.

We took about twenty-five.

There was a family sitting on a ledge nearby, obviously somewhere between amused and disgusted at our blatant disregard of any and everyone else. Aside from the already outrageous scene, almost every jump set us off into another round of breathless hysteria ending in a poorly timed collision that probably sprained roast beef of my left foot, evening out my already injured right ankle from a field jump gone wrong the week before. A surprisingly low number of the pictures turned out leaving us to snap close ups of billowing scarves or dramatic black and whites instead. When we were too wind burnt to stay at the beach any longer we opted to walk the rest of the way back into town, photographing the beautiful houses and trees that lined the quiet streets of the city. This took quite some time and when we finally reached the heart of the city to find ice cream we were walking (and looking) like zombies. All our trials throughout the day were rewarded by stumbling upon the most incredible crepe/ice cream/gaufre stand ever, producing an impossibly delicious nutella et chantilly waffle that left us in a food coma, covered in whipped cream smiling with satisfaction. I’m pretty confident that with our food smeared faces, dirtied damp clothes and large bags we could have made some phat cash playing the homeless card but we sadly we had to move it on back to Bordeaux.

Other than our mutual train crush and the bottle of wine we weren’t sure we were allowed to have on the train, the ride back was pretty uneventful and we were both on a path to rid ourselves of the sand that had worked its way through every article of clothing we had on. After showers and an episode of Arrested Development we were finally ready to get back to civilization and have our first dinner of spring break. After much indecision we ended up sitting outside at a cute café looking out at a big square with a fountain, basically the ideal setting to begin with. We splurged and did a three-course meal with wine and just enjoyed the evening. With another busy day planned, we headed home early and crashed as soon as our heads hit the pillows.

No. More. Rocks.

Unfortunately I just finished day one of the weekend spanning archeology field trip to the gorge verdon. Initially, I was angry because although it’s gorgeous, I had already visited the gorge and felt like I was wasting time. Upon arriving at our destination I was surprised at the lack of stark cliffs, blue/green waters and heavily treed forests. We were in the middle of a field near a lake that my friend Kaitlin aptly compared to a summer camp in Pennsylvania. On the agenda that day was a trip through the museum of prehistory, a lunch by the lake and a visit to a reconstruction of a prehistoric hut village. We entered the museum and were excited to see life size stuffed mammoths and saber tooth tigers and an entire exhibit dedicated to the mythical yeti. Unfortunately that was all downstairs and we breezed right by it to go look at case after case of arrowheads.

It was like driving past Disney World to go to a match factory.

With our hopes of wooly mammoth photo shoots and caveman reenactments crushed, we moved on and listened to our professor lecture on and on about the evolution of prehistoric arrowheads for an hour and a half. We walked from display case to display case yawning over rocks that honestly looked no different than the ones we had stumbled over in the parking lot, which makes me question the validity of the museum as a whole. For all we know the employees could spend their evenings looking for pointy rocks to trick tourists into believing were ancient arrowheads. If I had to spend all my time in that museum, I think I would stoop to such acts. By the sixth display case the entire class was finding creative ways to sit or lean against things so they could relax while feigning interest. At this point I snapped an entire series of ‘(name)…is bored’ photos, capturing some candid gems of yawns and ‘are you serious’ faces.

We finally reached the light at the end of the tunnel and were allowed an hour and a half for lunch, which we eagerly took advantage of. With lunches in tow we booked it to the lake where in a few weeks they’ll undoubtedly start kayaking and canoeing up a storm, but as of now it was just us…and the swans. One of few things I learned from this field trip is that swans are major d-bags. A male and a female swan came swimming up to us at a speed that made me nervous. My nervousness heightened when the man arched his wings to create a more intimidating form. They continued their charge and eventually ended up at the edge of the dock we were sitting at, flapping their feet in the water, looking angry and mean. Thankfully we held strong and they went off to harass a weaker target, a lone student sitting on the opposite dock. I looked over a minute later and a swan was literally biting his shoe. He ended up ok and only lost one toe to the whole experience. Moral of the story, don’t mess with swans.

The sun was beautiful and we basked for the rest of the lunch, which is wonderful but incredibly tiring. All worn out and suffering from mild sunstroke we had to sit through an hour long lecture about six different types of prehistoric dwellings. We entertained ourselves as much as we could…but you can only take so many pictures pretending to live in a prehistoric hut. It was honestly the most pointless day trip I’ve ever been on, and what’s even worse is that we have to return tomorrow, at 7:45 AM. I’m hoping that although the hour is blasphemous to everything I believe in, the day turns out to be more successful than the first. Day two includes a three-hour hike to a prehistoric cave, lessons on making fire from flint and an instructional course on spear throwing. I’m secretly hoping they have life size replicas of wooly mammoths as targets so we can pretend to be cave people on the hunt and not just be boring old javelin throwers. Either way, it’s supposed to be beautiful and I can’t believe I won’t be at the beach.

Some words

So I just found out I didn't get the internship I was hoping for with Hallmark this summer.

Not going to lie, I'm kinda bummed but I guess in situations like these you have to look at the positives. I finally made a resume and wrote a pretty cute poem about old love for the application...in honor of my lost position here it is!

We’re full of contradictions

We’re grumpy then we’re kind

I laugh, you scowl

I pout, you grin

I’m near deaf, you’re going blind.

I bake, you mow

But we both know

That after all things said and done

This old love still has room to grow.

I’m half. You’re half.

We’re one.