Salut, everyone. Are you still reading this? Hooray! Welp, I have made myself a new blog, un-France related but hopefully still entertaining, and it is here.
Go! Read! Or do something productive with yourself!
Well, le jour de gloire est arrivé, mes amis. I’m quitte-ing la France. All that remains for me is a nebulously-defined checkout procedure with the fruitcake-eating securityman, an hour-long trainride to CDG, and a long plane ride. Also, a croissant may occur in there somewhere.
I’m sad, obviously. For all the fairy-tale crap and intense angst that is the prescribed right of the Student Abroad, it was actually an amazing time. I learned Things About Myself. And things about l’articulation d’un paragraphe, I suppose. And I saw more castles than my memory has room for.
So what have I got to show? I don’t know yet. A better accent, let’s hope, and a hard drive of 1700 photos. I don’t really want to be sentimental yet, or maybe ever, because as much as I ended up liking being here, I know that I want to be home.
Looking at these pictures for 11 weeks is not the same as being with people. Studying in France is like being in a long distance relationship with everyone I know in North America, including my dogs. It’s tough. And they are awesome, let me tell you (the people and the dogs).
Bon. Thank you for reading this. I really liked writing it. I know that blogging (ugh, what a word) is an inherently narcissistic endeavor, and that yes, I just did it because my mom asked me, but every time I heard that someone enjoyed some dumb post I wrote about baguettes or getting a fork stolen by a security guard it made me feel like I was actually making something nifty and worthwhile.
And so I leave you, but only to come back to you. À bientôt, everyone. Can we go to Wawa on the way home?
Internet, I never went to the Eiffel Tower. Forgive me.
My mom has said once or twice (I think jokingly) that it should be the mother of the birthday person who gets all the presents and credits, seeing as she did all the work. She has also pointed out (usually as I am berating her for something stupid and teenagerly) that she doesn’t deserve to be sulked or screamed at. She’s just somebody who had a baby, once.
Well, I am that baby, and today is my birthday. And as I am unbelievably lucky enough to have survived twenty-one (oh God) years on Earth, I would like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due.
Mom: if you’ll forgive me for being corny, thank you for everything. I’m glad that once upon a time you and dad were crazy kids who wore yuppie sweaters and loafers with no socks and decided to start a family. Maybe today I’m a Real Grown-Up, but it’s still hard to be away from you. Especially today.
Thanks for being the great weird kind of parents who raised me to do this; this being everything from going to college to studying in France to writing romance novels to drinking screwdrivers when I was only 17 to covering me in Christmas bows when I was two weeks old and using me as a centerpiece.
And look! I have a kind of real life now, and I can sort of speak this other language, and I am going to turn out all right, I think. So, here’s to a long succession of Decembers eleventh and my continuation as your project and your kid. One day I might even have a yuppie sweater of my own.
Classes whose final exams I could probably pass today, based on the kind of studying I did yesterday:
Classes whose final exams I actually have to take:
Since my parents may read this, it’s probably not wise to admit that I can’t focus on a damn thing lately. Reading for class, which ordinarily sort of goes in one ear and out the other, so to speak, is now almost utterly incomprehensible. Don’t ask me about le structuralisme. I can assure you I don’t know what it is.
But I am still making a valid attempt to profiter from my last days in Paris. I’ve been doing productive things like eating croissants, going to the movies, and wandering the Champs-Elysées in the rain.
It was all very charming and Parisian, but hard-nosed non-romantic that I am, I couldn’t help but bleat incessantly about losing feeling in my hands.
Luckily, I found a cure.
Santé, tout le monde.
Let me show you something delicious.
I know! You’re like, “Blair, is France really so awful that you are going to off yourself by ingesting a deadly legume spread? Have you completely lost your mind?!”
Answers: No, and kind of.
For starters, it’s not peanut butter! Ha ha, I have fooled you with my excellent trick photography and the fact that this does, in fact, look a lot like beurre d’arachide. So much so that I still feel a little nervous eating it (what can I say, I’m a creature of habit).
Speculoos are gingerbread-esque cookies that are often served alongside cups of coffee here. That or chocolate covered almonds, go figure. But! Some brilliant genius figured out how to get all the sweet and somewhat spicy taste of ginger cookies into a spread. And it’s delicious. And it goes so well on crepes. And spoons. And, like, my finger straight into my mouth.
Is this what Nutella is like for you normals? This magical substance that you can put on anything and make it tasty? Because if so, putain but I’m jealous. I just had to discover this with only 6 days left in France.
The downside is that unlike Nutella or other similarly semi-continental snack foods that have migrated to Whole Foodses across America, Speculoos spread hasn’t really caught on stateside.
No worries, though. This should tide me over for most of winter break. Hopefully none of those professional 4th-amendment violators and amateur frotteurs at the TSA will have a sweet tooth and relieve my checked bags of my cache. I will totally sue.
Somehow, France has made my downward spiral into crunchiness even more of a chute rapide. See:
At least they don’t sell Tom’s of Maine toothpaste here, or I might be tempted to brush my teeth with that crap.
Nantes, aka the fifth-largest city in France and also aka where my dear friend Erica is passing her semester* abroad, is quite lovely. I would say it was lovely despite the fact that I had to get up so early that I saw the sun rise on my two-hour TGV ride, but I actually like doing that.
In other words, the whole day was great.
There were oodles of Christmas-themed things. According to Erica, Nantes is super-duper Catholic (laïcité be damned) and so they kind of go all out.
Her host family invited me over for lunch, and proceeding to be the nicest people ever. It was a great moment of feeling competent enough in French to enjoy getting to know people (and of tactfully sidestepping any uncomfortable political discussion when I admitted to liking Pres. Obama’s intelligence. It’s pretty indisputable that he’s smart, no?) I had fleeting moments of jealousy, because in my experience when living with a host family is good, it tends to be great, and these were definitely folks of the latter school. They fed us a 4-course meal with things I don’t usually consider delicious (fish) and things that are universally known to be tasty (cheese, chocolate éclairs).
But it was really wonderful just to get to see one of my oldest friends again. When her host mom asked us how long we’d known each other, we couldn’t even remember. And now we’re both in France. How about that?
Unfortunately, I could only stay in town for like, 8 hours, due to the train schedule and the dissertation that still awaits completion (I’ve made great progress! I swear!), so we spent a bit more time walking before heading to La Cigale, the most beautiful ornate restaurant in all of Nantes, for coffee. And since the Gods of Karma had granted me such a wonderful day, it was fitting that my train had a one-hour delay going home. Grande vitesse, mon cul.
Not that I’m complaining. Quite the opposite.
*She gets way more bonus points for the length of her stay. Three and a half months?! Incredible. I would die. I just would.
Given my recent post, I feel that I’ve come off as unfairly negative towards France. It’s not true! There are definitely some things I like! Despite the awful UHT milk and 8€ pints!
Take today, for example.
Crossing this bridge, and looking at all the locks stuck on here as a monument to the True Love of many many couples (except those that used combination locks. Come on!), I was struck by how damn Parisian it all looked. In a good way, of course.
Great Thing #2 was this store, which was positively stuffed with kitchen things. Copper pots and pans, itty-bitty little ramekins, whisks of all shapes and sizes, a Dutch oven large enough to cook a labrador-sized pot roast…it was awesome and confusing all at once. Especially when the salesguy, realizing we were Americans, just started throwing random celebrity names at us, starting inexplicably with Justin Bieber.
The point is, I’m going back there next week to buy myself a 50€ knife, and damned if I’m not excited to do it.
And finally, I have an incurable fondness for the Monoprix store-brand canned goods. The design is super snappy and very typographical, and I enjoy the little quip at the bottom that says “When we’re bored, we peel tomatoes.” I’m glad you do that for me, Monoprix guys. Merci beaucoup.
Hi. I'm Blair and I'm studying in France for 11 weeks. Here are my feet in a bunch of Parisian leaves.
