My Mostly-Italian Christmas in Paris

In my last post, I mentioned feeling a little uncertain about spending so much time at home with Prune during the holidays. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with enough fun things to do and we would end up being bored at home for most of the week. To my surprise, the full days I spent with Prune flew by quite quickly! We did lots of arts and crafts and Cecile would come home whenever she wasn’t seeing a patient so that I could run and get little breaks which was amazing on her part hahah.

Before I knew it, it was already Thursday afternoon and, as I climbed out of the shower after a run, I heard Italy arrive at our front door. I had heard that Italians are known for being loud, but I thought that was an exagerated stereotype. Well, it isn’t hahaha. 

After getting dressed, I went out to the living room where I met Noo-Noo’s (Cecile’s father) brother and sister,  Giovanni and Giovanna, and Giovanni’s partner, Maurizio. They were visiting all the way from Sicily, and when I go to Italy I will be staying with them in April! Noo-Noo and Cecile’s brother’s family were there too, but I had gotten to meet them about a month before. Cecile’s brother has a lovely wife and two little boys, Gabriel and Timeo, and Timeo and Prune love to play together (albeit very competitively)  because he is only a year older than her. The last guest I met was Maya, the au pair who worked here before I came. She is 22 and from Orlando, Florida! Everyone was very warm and the house was filled with loud voices hahaha. 

While we had champagne and appetizers, Maya and I sat down together to get to know each other. Cecile had told me a lot about Maya, and she was right to say that Maya is very happy and silly and warm! In Chile I would have been a little embarrased to sit and speak with another English-speaker, but I could tell that nobody minded at all. They were speaking mostly Italian and didn’t blame us for not tryng to keep up hahah. Also, I could tell they were happy to see that Maya and I were enjoying ourselves, because it added to the joyful atmosphere! 

We moved onto have the first course of dinner at about 20:30. By the first course, I mean the second round of appetizers hahah. The sort of sit-down appetizers! I am proud to report that I got the chance to try many new food during that course! Without knowing it, I tasted (and actually mildly enjoyed) blood sausage, a food that my well-traveled Spanish teacher said she detested! I also tried Escargot, which was pretty delicious and mostly just tasted like garlic and butter hahah. Then, I was talked into trying a small bite of foie gras which was disgusting (especially after a detailed discription of how it is prepared) and an oyster, which tasted like sea-snot and I was not a fan. I was so happy to be there though. I kept forgetting it was Christmas, but it felt like some other super important holiday. I felt sort of how I felt during my Chilean Christmas, like it  wasn’t Christmas becuse I wasn’t with my biological Christmas, but it was some other special, exciting, and interesting occasion with amazing food and kind people. I also felt really good about myself for trying four scary new foods and even better after realizing that if I gave it some effort, I could understand most of the Italian conversation! During that dinner, I decided that I would learn Italian after I learn French, and now I have my heart set on it. We will see how that goes later, hahah! :) 

At around 21:45, the plates for actual dinner were brought out. To be honest, I am not sure exactly what we were eating but it was absolutely delicious. During dinner, I tried jumping into the Italian conversations a little and everyone was helping me learn new words! I mostly talked to Maya and Cecile though. We had our own English speaking corner of the table and I think we were having the most fun. We mostly gossiped about Maya’s confusing dramas and for me, the funniest part was glancing up occasionally and seeing Fred glare at us from the other end of the table, jealous that he couldn’t be in on the gossip haahahh. When Cecile would start talking in Italian, Maya and I would talk about au pair stuff. We agreed that we had been lucky to end up with the best au pair family in the universe! I am glad she appreciated them as much as I do, for they really are the best! When everyone had just about finished up with dinner, it was time to bring out the cheese. We prepared the table for this, but then someone pointed out what time it was and said Santa should be coming any minute! Up until this moment, I wasn’t sure if they open presents at midnight or in the morning in France, but it turns out that in this family they do it at midnight! It wasn’t actually midnight though, maybe just 23:20 or something, but we sent the children upstairs to do something random and then rushed to the garage to get all the presents and put them under the tree. When everything was ready, we rang the doorbell and then opened and shut the door. Prune, Timeo, and Gabriel came rushing downstairs when they heard us saying “BYE SANTA MERRY CHRISTMAS WE WILL TELL THE KIDS YOU STOPPED BY” because they wanted to see him themselves. However, on the way to the door, they saw the presents under the tree and got super excited! That was when the gift-unwrapping began. It was so nice to spend a Christmas with little children! They were sooooo excited that Santa had come and left them so many things! Santa even left me, apparently, a box of nice Parisian tea and a bottle of orange blossom perfume! I was touched to recieve anything from anyone, but I was suprised to see what nice gifts I had received! Maya also got me a present! A little Eiffel Tower-shaped bottle of rose liquor. It is really pretty and goes well next to my maple leaf-shaped bottle of maple syrup that Jess gifted me the week before hahah. 

After opening all the gifts and cleaning up the wrapping paper, it was time for dessert. Yes, Christmas in France is mostly spent eating hahah. But I mean, can we really blame them? If you don’t have a Thanksgiving you’ve still got to over-eat at some point! Maya had gone back to her appartment in La Defense, so I sat down on the couch next to Cecile and tried a bunch of delicious exotic fruits with the rest of the family. I remember being so happy on that couch, eating that fruit. I was surrounded by love and warmth and I had a belly full of delicious food and I was sleepy but that was okay because my bed was 20 feet away and I could go to sleep whenever I wanted to. I think I will remember that moment on the couch for the rest of my life as one of the greatest in 2015. At about 1:15, I crawled into my bed and fell asleep, feeling like I had the best Christmas I could have possibly had in France. 

The next morning, I got up at about 10:00 and I was one of the first people up! Everyone else had stayed up a bit later than me, so that made sense haha. I helped Fred and Cecile set the table as the others stumbled out of their rooms for breakfast. There were so many options of what to eat! So much fruit and yogurt and bread and granola and pastries! Noo-Noo had also snuck out and brought us fresh croissants and pains du chocolate! After breakfast I snuck out of the house for an hour to run while Cecile took the family on a tour of her office. When I got out of the shower after running, I could smell more yummy food being prepared. After getting ready, I entered the living room and was completely amazed by the table that was already set and filled with a lot of beautiful sea-food dishes. When the rest of the family got home, we sat down to have our champagne and appetizers before lunch. This time we had a normal 4 hour long French lunch hahah complete with Cheese and dessert and coffee. Lunch, however, was a bit difficult to me. I do not have much experience eating crab or lobster, so I had to watch carefully to know how to eat it, but that didn’t turn out to work so well. The first crab leg that I tried to crack open flew across the table, which made everyone laugh, but they laughed a lot harder when they realized it had happened because I was holding the cracking tool upside-down! Cecile began to help me with the cracking part so that all I would have to do was pull out the meat with my fingers. I, however, apparently sucked at that too because the first leg I tried to break with my fingers sliced open my thumb and I began to bleed a lot hahah. I went and got a napkin and applied pressure, but it didn’t actually stop for about 15 minutes! After that I kept trying to eat, but everytime I went to pull something apart, salt-water would get into my wound and make it difficult to enjoy. This whole experience was hilarious for me, though hahah. I wasn’t upset at all! I didn’t end up eating much of the sea-food, but that just meant more room for cheese and dessert. 

 

Lunch ended late, at around 17:00, and shortly afterwards everyone took off. Cecile and Fred seemed relieved to finally have the house back to themselves, and I was too. It was nice and quiet after a couple loud and exciting days! That night, Maya ended up spending the night and we fell asleep to a funny movie. It was weird to have a sleep-over after four months of never sharing a bed hahah but we had lots of fun and the movie was hilarious. We slept in late the next morning, and shortly after we got up it was time for Maya to go home and for me to eat lunch with the family. After lunch, I hadn’t planned anything to do with my day so I decided to leave the house to go into Paris for the first time in a while. I decided to go to the Louvre because I hadn’t actually been inside of it yet! I walked around the Louvre for about 4 hours while listening to music and I really enjoyed myself there. It was nice going alone because I didn’t have to worry about how much time I looked at each peice of art and I felt no pressure to act like I was more cultured that I acutally am hahaha. After spending all that time at the Louvre, I was feeling pretty tired so I went to Sarbucks to get an iced coffee and hangout for a bit in the Tulieres gardens. There, I sat on a chair by a fountain and people-watched as I enjoyed my coffee. When I began to get cold, I left and took the metro back home where I ate Christmas left-overs with the family for dinner. They tasted even better the night after, hahah. :)

This morning, I had planned on going to my favorite cafe to blog in the morning, but cecile invited me to go to a different city with her and Prune to visit her brother’s house and have lunch with the Italians. I had been looking forward to a calm day, but my inner-exchange student couldn’t say no to a family outing hahah. As I blog, I am feeling INSANELY carsick as we drive home to Paris. I am so glad I came though! We had a delicious sea-food pasta lunch and then went on a walk through the Christmas market in Reims and got to see a beautiful cathedral! I am always impressed by how incredible my host family is and I feel so lucky to always be invited places with them. :D 

Well, if I keep blogging I will actually throw up on my computer and I don’t want that!

 

 

Sooooo good day, all of you! I hope you all had a great Christmas and will have an even better New Years! 

 

Almost Christmas

This last week has been very Holiday-ish and fun! It was my second week of not having school every morning, and I think I did a pretty good job of making the most of it. :)

Last time I blogged I wrote about how I had completely lost my voice while in Geneva, and Monday, since I was still feeling pretty exhausted and my voice still didn’t work, I spent most of the day cuddled up in bed and resting. 

On Tuesday, I woke up early for what ended up being a very long day of baking a looooot of cookies. I had planned on making some chocolate chip cookies for my friends, and when I told Cecile she said she wanted me to teach her the recipe. We went out to get a bunch of cookie ingredients together in the morning and while shopping around, we found a gingerbread man cookie cutter and I told her I knew a gingerbread cookie recipe that would be fun to prepare with Prune! Since I only needed about ten cookies for my friends, we decided to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies to bring to a potluck at Prune’s gym class and a batch of gingerbread cookies to decorate with Prune so she could bring them to her classroom on the last day of school. I was able to hold off from eating a bunch of cookies while I baked, but dealing with so many cookies made me feel kind of sick hahah. It did, however, also make me feel very warm and christmassy and happy that soon a lot of awesome people would be eating all the yummy yummy cookies I was baking! When Prune came home from school (Cecile went and got her so I could get everything else ready) I had set up a cookie decorating station and we spent a long time drawing on the gingerbread men with frosting and giving them Smartie (kinda like M&Ms) buttons. Prune was really bad at decorating cookies but she is four and that’s okay because she will learn hahahah. 

 

On Wednesday morning we took a bunch of the chocolate chip cookies to the gym potluck and they were a total hit! I think people ate more of my cookies than anything else and I felt really good about that! At the potluck, I also discovered that one of the moms who I thought was really friendly because she smiled at me all the time (and yeah, Parisians just don’t usually do that) isn’t actually a mom at all but another au pair from Spain! She is 27 if I remember correctly, and her name is Sandra and she is super nice! We talked in Spanish for a long time and when I mentioned how nice it was for me to be able to practice my Spanish, she said she has a whole Spanish speaking community here in Asnieres and that after the Christmas break she would invite me to hang out with them!! I was so happy to meet another very sweet au pair, and now I have someone to go to the library with while Prune is at gym class on Wednesdays! 

On Wednesday night, Cameron, Olivia, Jess, and I got together at Olivia’s flat to do a little Christmas gift exchange. We each brought a gift to play White Elephant and I brought some cookies for us to munch on and it was a lovely little evening. I had mentioned to Olivia one day that I had never used a Christmas cracker before, so she got a bunch of those for us to play with too! They had paper crowns and games inside so after playing White Elephant (during which I, being the luckiest, won a little bottle of genuine Canadian maple syrup from Jess WOOHOOOOO) we put on the crowns and played the games and laughed and talked and enjoyed each other’s company. We knew it would be the last time we would all be together for awhile, so we enjoyed it as best we could. Cameron is moving back to London this break because his au pair situation didn’t work out, but we know he will visit us when he has time and money hahaha. Olivia is going back to England for the break but she will be back in January and I can’t wait! And Jess, well, her mom came to visit from Canada on Thursday and after spending some time in Paris, they will be traveling during the holidays, but Jess will be back after the break too! Anyways, it was just nice to have a lovely little evening with those three fantastic friends of mine. They LOVED my cookies, too! 

 

 

On Friday I woke up early to go to Prune’s school with Fred and Cecile to watch Prune sing with her classmates. Unfortunately, I thought it started at 9:00 but it actually started at 8:30 so I ended up being too late to go with them. I decided to go to the post office instead to pick up a package my mom had sent for me! Everything went smoothely at the post office, so I brought home the package and couldn’t wait to open it. I had, however, promised my mom I wouldn’t open it until we could Skype so she could watch me open it! Later that day, when my mom got home from work, we were able to skype and inside the package there were soooo many cute little gifts! I was so happy because she had sent Prune and I little Christmas pajamas (which is sort of our tradition) so we could wear them around the house and dance to Christmas music together. Hahaha, I miss Molly and Stella and Katie so much, but having a little sister figure in Christmas elf pajamas by my side made me feel a lot better, and I think that was my momma’s intention. :) Cecile absolutely LOVED the pajamas and made Prune and I take a bunch of pictures next to the Christmas tree hahah. 

 

On Saturday, I went to Montmartre to meet up with Jess and her Canadian mom! I was honestly a little worried that seeing Jess and her mom would make me jealous and homesick, but it didn’t at all. Seeing the two of them together after missing each other for four months just made me feel happy for them, and excited for when my mom and Molly will visit. I also liked seeing how impressed Jess’s mom was with Paris, because I know my family will think it is a beautiful place, too! We wandered around Montmartre and Sacre-coeur and stopped at a crepe place for lunch! Jess bought a selfie stick from one of the street vendors, and we had a lot of fun with it hahahah. It was a nice evening, and I was home before 17:00 for an evening of babysitting the Prune-Prune. 

 

This morning I slept in, had some granola, watched the office, went on a run, cleaned my room, and then watched the office until lunch time. My plan for today was to eat lunch with the family before going to my favorite little cafe to blog and drink a mocha, but that plan fell through when I realized it was 15:00 and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet. I casually meandered on into the kitchen to see if they had eaten without me or if I should make something or just what was going on. We have been putting off going to the grocery store in this household for about a week now, so there wasn’t really any food for me to work with. I decided to just read in the living room until someone brought up the idea of eating lunch. A couple minutes later, Prune came running downstairs, filled with joy, yelling that we were going to McDonald’s for lunch. Yayyyyyyyy. I considered staying home and eating the last carrot and some bread, but then I decided to be an exchange student and go out with the family and practice some French and live my life. It was pretty hilarious, watching eating a family meal at McDonald’s with these two suuuper elegant and classy French people and their daughter hahaha. I am glad I went with them, and I got back not too long ago and now I am on the couch writing this blog post for you! I will go to my favorite cafe another time and it will be okay. 

 

 

I remember that when I was in Chile, Christmas completely snuck up on me. It didn’t feel like the Holiday season, because it was the middle of the Chilean summer and I was so busy all the time. Here, it has been a little different. I don’t feel very homesick, but I get sad sometimes worrying about becoming homesick hahah. I will have a lot of time over the next two weeks to be homesick, you know? Because I will be at the house with Prune and all my friends will be off with their families. My friends in the States are all posting pictures of home and soon all my friends here will be doing the same thing. These are the thoughts that make me sad. But then, I also have my happy thoughts, of course. I think about all the different things I could do with Prune to make her have great Christmas memories, and all the places I could take her. I think of how exciting it will be to meet Cecile’s whole Italian family and all the delicious food I will get to eat. I think of how lucky I am to be here, and how even though I don’t feel like I am “living my dream” 100% of the time, I am surely living someone else’s dream, and they would want me to be grateful to be here this winter. 

Also, to make things even better, I recently booked some cheap plane tickets to visit Nigel in Berlin and my friend Michelle in Copenhagen in January. I have a lot to look forward to and a lot of be grateful for, and I don’t know how I couldn’t have a wonderful Christmas wtih a life like mine. :) 

Next time I post it, Christmas will have passed, soooo MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE! 

Geneva, Switzerland!

I am proud to report that last night I arrived home to Paris, safe and completely exhausted, from my first little weekend/European travel adventure! As you read in a blog I wrote about a month ago, my friend Olivia and I had made plans to go to Belgium, but due to the closing of the French boarders from the attacks on Paris, we were unable to go on our trip. Ever since then I had been itching to get out of France and explore other places in Europe, and this weekend I had the opportunity to do just that! Shortly after the trip to Belgium was cancelled, my friend Jess and booked some really cheap plane and hostel tickets for a weekend get-a-way in Geneva, and that weekend ended up being a total success! 

The adventure began for me at about 8:20am on Saturday morning, when I left my house to meet Jess at the Saint-Lazare train station. I had packed warmly but lightly and brought with me only a backpack with a change of socks and underwear, toiletries, my passport, a journal, some snacks, and some money. I had woken up not feeling sleepy at all, and it felt as though the only thing that wasn’t perfect about the morning was that I was starting to loose my voice a little and my throat hurt. I had been battling a cold the entire week before but nothing was going to stop me from finding my way to Switzerland hahah. Jess and I met up on the train platform and then proceeded to take two trains to arrive at the airport. I was bubbling with excitement and she was nervous that something would go wrong, which was hilarious for me because usually worrying is my job. I explained to her that I wasn’t sure that everything would go well, but I wasn’t going to let the possibility of something going wrong take away my giddiness, and she agreed that that was a good idea, so we ran through the airport like two very happy children, assuming everything would be amazing and beautiful and getting a lot of weird looks hahaha. When we went to print out our tickets, we all of a sudden got very quiet. The trip seemed so perdect that it almost felt too good to be true. The computer, however, quickly located our tickets and printed them out for us! We started jumping up and down because havign tickets made our trip extra official hahah. We were so stoked that we took pictures with them. 

Going through security only took about 10 minutes, and since everything had gone by so smoothly, we ended up with about an hour to kill before getting on the plane. We spent that hour sort of wiggling in our seats and talking about how happy we were to go. When we got on the plane, we realized that we were not seated together, but since it was our luckiest day ever, Jess ended up with nobody beside her so they let me go sit with her in a WINDOW SEAT! The plane took off at 11:15am, and once it was in the sky, Jess and I got out our packed lunches and munched away on baguette sandwiches. The flight attendents brought us coffee and juice and cookies, which went nicely after our lunches, but before we even finished eating the captain announced that we were beginning our decent into Geneva! It worked out so perfectly hahah we just ate lunch in the sky and then landed in Geneva. When we got off the plane, we spotted a machine that was giving out free train rides from the airport to Geneva, so we took one each and then headed off to find the train. We kept second guessing ourselves, so what should have been a 7 minutes walk to the train turned into about 40 minutes of walking in circles. But we weren’t irritated about this, because whenever something began to feel stressful, we remembered that we had no plans and that this weekend was for exploring and there was no way to mess it up. And yeah, maybe we were lost between the airport and train station, but we were lost in SWITZERLAND, and that itself was something to be happy about. 

Eventually we found the train, and we only had to ride it for about 10 minutes before arriving near the center of the city. We got off the train, and with nothing else planned, we began to walk towards where we thought the lake would be. As we walked, we commented on how different it was from Paris. The buildings were more colorful and the streets were a lot bigger and even a little cleaner. Before long, we arrived at the lake, and it was BEAUTIFUL. The city just sort of opened up around it and there was so much room! There was room for lots of sunshine and amazingly fresh air and you could see the snow-topped mountains curving around the city. There were lots of people out and about, walking or biking or boating around. 

We crossed a big bridge and then ended up finding a map. The map showed an area called what in English would be like “Old Town Geneva”, and that sounded cool so we headed over there. When we got closer to the Old Town, the streets became smaller and the buildings really did seem older. The streets were all cobblestone and the curved up hills. We noticed that a lot of other people were heading uphill to the center of Old Town, so we decided to follow them. As we wandered, we noticed that some of them were wearing funny little white bonnets and some kids were dressed up in strange costumes. Up ahead we could see crowds of people watching some sort of demonstration, and when we pushed through to see what was happening we discovered a bunch of men wearing military-looking uniforms doing some sort of march with spears. Around us were all sorts of booths set up where people wearing traditional Swiss clothing were selling vin chaud (hot wine) and chocolate and sausages. After watching for awhile( and having no clue what we were seeing) Jess and I decided to walk down some smaller streets and just explore Old Town some more. The thing was, we couldn’t go five minutes without running into different grouple of people dressed in the Swiss clothing, or children running aorud in strange costumes with pieces of paper, looking alert and excited. We weren’t bothered by this at all, but we began to realize that some sort of important festival was going on and we wanted to know more. Up another hill, we heard musket shots and people cheering, and we ran up the hill to see what was going on up there. Up there, there were more people dressed up, but they also had cannons and muskets and they were announcing something in French that we couldn’t quite pick up with all the other noise. At some point around then, we found a pamphlet that was written in both French and English, and we learned that they were doing an annual festival that celebrates a night, a long long time ago, when Geneva was invaded in the middle of the night and was nearly taken over, but all the townspeople woke up and were able to succesfully take back Geneva! Jess and I felt pretty lucky to be there on such an interesting day and it was fantastic that we got to witness so much of their history on our short trip! We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the festival, drinking vin chaud (which tastes like yummy apple cider but smells kinda gross), and taking lots of pictures! 

When the sun began to set, we walked along the lake and out to a little lighthouse. There were groups of people all around us, sitting on rocks or benches and waiting for the sun to set. There were birds flying all around and the lake was so still and peaceful. We decided to stay there until the sunset because the pictures were gorgeous and we couldn’t think of anywhere prettier to be. When it grew dark, we decided to find our hostel before dinner just in case finding it ended up being difficult. We had some trouble, but after about 45 minutes of wandering around we were able to find it, and it was very nice! Geneva is a LOT colder than Paris, so it was nice to arrive at the warm hostel and sit down for a bit before heading off into the cold to find dinner. In our room, we met a girl named Lael and invited her to get dinner with us. She said she would be delighted to, and had even heard of a cute fondue place we could go to. Lael was pretty cool! She comes from upstate New York and is just finishing a semester abroad in Madrid. She came to Geneva for the same reason we did; because why not hahah. The three of us bundled up and headed out to find the cute fondue place, but when we got there it turned out to be suuuuper expensive, so we found a somewhat cheaper Italian pizza place to eat. I liked it there because it was so warm inside and the pizza was yummy! We sat around and ate pizza and talked for quite awhile, just getting to know each other. I, however, did not do as much talking as usual because my voice had pretty much completely dissapeared by then and talking took so much painful energy that most of the time my comments just weren’t worth the effort hahah. After dinner, we headed back to the hostel and sat on our beds talking and laughing. We met the other girls in our room; a grumpy Canadian skier girl and two super sweet girls from Colorado. I told them about Cherish and they said a lot of their friends go to Boulder like she does. I would have investigated more but I felt creepy because my voice was weird so I just sat on Jess’s bed with her and smiled a lot. Some of the girls wanted to go out to a bar and explore the night life of Geneva, but we decided to stay in because it was freezing, expensive, and well, I personally was still kind of sick and thought I should rest. We were in bed falling asleep by 11:30pm with our alarms set for the next morning so we could wake up early for the complimentary breakfast that ended at 9:00am. 

The next morning, we woke up and stumbed sleepily downstairs for our breakfast. The hostel served yogurt and cereal and toast and coffee and juice and it was yummy! After breakfast, we went upstairs and packed up to leave the hostel and see more of the city. Lael decided to stick with us for the day, and she even had some ideas of things we could do! She wanted to go see CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and an Italian market that was just a tram ride away! The hostel gave us cards that made all transportation free, which was awesome, and we set off to find our way to these places. The tram system in Geneva was completely foreign to us, but it didn’t take that long to figure out! We got to the CERN dome thing, but it was completely closed off hahaha. Soooo we took pictures with it and then jumped on another tram to get to the Italian Market. The Italian market was really cool! There were lots of homemade soaps and treats and chocolates and wool things! We walked around taking pictures. Oh, I forgot to mention, that morning my voice didn’t come back AT ALL, so I was doing a lot of listening hahah. After some time, we got hungry, so we headed off to….MCDONALDS. I know, and I am sorry. But Geneva is sooooo expensive! It is ridiculous. Even McDonald’s was pretty pricey, but it was the best we could do. It was actually pretty funny because we sat there, eating our burgers, and saying how much we missed “cheap ol’ Paris!” I always thought Paris was expensive, but being in Geneva made Parisian prices seem very reasonable hahahah. 

After lunch, we decided to head back up to Old Town because we needed to try the Swiss homemade hot chocolate. We accidently walked all the way around where we were trying to get to before realizing that it had been pretty close the entire time, but luckily we got there in time to get some hot chocolate to go. We were trying to move quickly because while Jess and my flight didn’t depart until 8:30pm, Lael’s was scheduled to leave at 5:55pm so she would have to leave the city long before Jess and I. We took our hot chocolate down to the lake so get some pictures of the famous “jet d’eau”, which is this 140 meter high water fountian that just sort of shoots up lake water all day long and is really impressive and nice looking. After wandering by the lake for a bit, we ended up back over near the little lighthouse where we sat down on a dock and talked until it was time for Lael to head back to the train station. She promised to send us all the pictures she had taken on her fancy camera, and like that we said goodbye. After Lael left, Jess and I didn’t feel like moving. We still had a couple hours to kill, so we decided to stay at our cute little dock spot and watch the sun set there again. As we sat and talked, ducks and swans swam by us, and even some crazy humans too! We talked about how lucky we were to have been able to see Geneva and how excited we were to take little weekend trips in the future. As the sun sank lower and lower, we got colder and colder, and as the last bit of sun slipped away we decided to head back to the train station a little early because at least it was warm there hahah. We took our train back to the airport, where security took forever because France is still being very careful with security things, and then we sat down at our gate and ate pretzels and listened to music and closed our eyes. Our flight ended up being delayed by about 45min, so we stayed like that for awhile. My throat was killing me by then and I was pretty sleepy. The night before my throat had kept me awake for a lot of the night, but it was weird because I was so warm and comfortable that I felt like I rested well even if I didn’t sleep much. Still, now that the most exciting parts of our adventure had passed, I was ready to get home and curl up in bed and sleeep for a long time. Jess felt the same way. We got to sit on the plane together again, but we got the weirdest seats because we were on a huge plane and the emergency exits were pretty intense and we ended up sitting right next to one of them which meant we didn’t get little tables or places to put our bags hahah. I woke up a little because I felt like I had to stay alert if I was to be in charge of such an intense looking emergency exit. My mom had told me her flight to Geneva from Paris had been super bumpy and I wanted everyone to be safe so I stayed alert. The flight ended up being a lot longer than the first one because we had to do a bunch of circles in the sky because there was no room for us. After we got of the plane, my night was a blur of rushing through the metro and train stations until I collapsed into my big warm bed and slept for hours. 

 

 

Actually, when I got home, I discovered that a package had arrived for me from my Dad’s family! My birthday presen! I got an Amazon Kindle and a beautiful little card from Stella which is now haging in my room. 

This trip was a fantastic introduction to my traveling possibilites in Europe, and now I just can’t wait to book more trips!! I save all the au pair money I make to be able to do things like this, and I have so many people to visit and I am just so excited about how easy it is! 

I hope you liked my little blogblog. :)