Well, well, well. It is a rainy sunday afternoon and I am home alone and all I really want to do is be calm and drink tea. The wonderful thing is that THAT is exactly what I am doing right now and it is so very peaceful. I made chocolate chip cookies yesterday, so the house smells like deliciousness, and I can hear the ocasional car rolling through the puddles outside — a sound I have decided I enjoy.
This week has been a strange because I have had LOTS of free time and I have actually found ways to make use of that time hahaha. This is a good thing! On Tuesday morning, I decided to skip my run and just do as much resting as possible before work. I had a pretty terrible blister on my ankle from the three former long days of walking in Paris that made shoes and socks and even bandaids quite painful, and that certainly contributed to my unathletic decision. I was excited to have a day to be lazy! It had been over a month and a half since I had had a long quiet morning, so I decided to do lots of quiet acitivities that would make me feel somewhat refreshed. I got up around nine, and ate my breakfast slowly while reading in French (because feeling like I was falling behind in French would certainly not be relaxing). I then did a lot of laundry and cleaned and organized my room. Then I watched the news in French for a little, read in English a little, and then looked up different tickets to plan out the two last little weekend trips of my European adventure. This day was important for me because I needed a day like that hahah. To be alone and get some simple things done and not talk much. The rest of the day was pretty normal! I went and got Prune from school and we played at the park, came home and ate dinner, and then she went to sleep. I felt good after that day. I felt ready to make more plans hahaha.
On Wednesday after work I met at a Starbucks with a German girl named Marie to discuss a birthday party that we will be working at together. One of Prune’s friends is having a birthday party the first of June and her mother asked me if I could attend it with Prune (and another au pair of my choice) to make a little extra money and make three hours of her life a lot easier. All of my close au pair friends are scheduled to work the day of the party, so I posted in an au pair group on Facebook about the party and got lots of replies but ended up choosing Marie, because she seemed super nice! I wanted to meet up with her before the party to make sure she actually is nice in real life, and OH MY GOODNESS she is incredibly sweet and interesting. We had planned to meet up for about a half hour just to get to know each other, but we ended up talking for a little over an hour! She was an au pair two years ago, but now she is living in Paris with her boyfriend and producing an album with a French producer because she sings and plays guitar! So she was pretty cool. I am pretty excited to work the birthday party with her hahah and we might even hang out a bit before I go back to California!
Thursday was a pretty simple day. I woke up, went for a nice long run in the warm rain, and then headed out to Paris to spend late morning reading in French and looking up every word I didn’t completely understand. Now that my French lessons have finished, I am trying very hard to keep learning on my own, and I spent at least three hours doing so on Thursday. When I headed home for lunch that day, I felt proud of myself and decided I had passed a productive morning. :D
On Friday after my little morning run, I headed out to central Paris with Anastazja to take some pictures! She had just got a new camera and wanted me to be her model. I realized I am pretty camera shy, but she did her absolute best to make me as comfortable as possible, and she is a very talented photographer! We spent the morning laughing and catching up. Anastazja is one of the sweetest people I have ever met and I still cannot believe I found her here. She is one of the biggest reasons that I actually learned French, sure, but she is also just so open-minded, supportive, fun, and understanding. Ugh. I love her! Reallyyyyyy. :)
Now. Saturday was a big day. Saturday was the most picnickiest day ever! I got up early and made chocolate chip cookies to bring to the three picnics I had planned on attending. It was 25 degrees Celsius outside (which is pretty warm for Paris in May) so everyone was making plans to meet in parks and enjoy the not-freezing-ness. The first picnic I went to was in the park where I used to run with Cecile on Wednesdays during Prune’s horseback riding classes. The park is situated in Genvilliers (which is right next to Asnieres) so it was a good place for me to meet up with Anastazja and her friends from high school! I had never met Anastazja’s friends before, but she had talked about them, and they were both two very lovely girls. We spent a couple hours sharing the food we had prepared for each other and playing (or trying to play) badminton in the wind hahaha. It was so pretty and sunny outside and the sky was blue with puffy white clouds and I meant to take pictures but I kept forgetting and I am sorryyyy!
After that picnic, I went home to grab the rest of the cookies for the other two picnics, and headed off to picnic number two, at a huge park in Paris! This time I had plans to meet up with my Iranian friend Moein and some of his French, Polish, and Morrocan friends. All of the give-or-take 26 year old Morrocan guys were ingeneers by day and muscians by night, and I couldn’t help but think that just about everyone I know in California would have loved to be at that picnic hahah. I was introduced to some interesting music in Arab and asked lots of questions about my future in French, English, and Spanish. It was certainly and interetaining time. It was also really nice to see Moein again, and I need to hang out with him more often.
Finally, the plan for my third picnic was to meet up with Jess and Maira at the Luxembourg Gardens to eat a bit and then take advantage of the one night of the year where all the museums in Europe are free for everyone! A lot of museums in Paris are free for students, but not all of them, so we picked out two super pricey museums to check out, knowing the lines would be long. Maira was not able to make it, but at the first museum Jess’s friend Camille joined us. It turns out that Camille is from San Francisco and is half Chilean, so we spent a lot of the evening scolding Jess for not having introduced us before hahah. We walked around in the Luxembourg Museum for awhile, checking out different paintings, and you know, doing museum stuff. Camille had to leave early because she had made other plans, and so I gave her some cookies for the road and she was pretty stoked because they “smelled like home.” The plan had been to go to the first museum, then have a picnic, and then go to the second museum, but while we were in the first museum it started to rain, so instead we got some sandwhiches. The second museum we went to was the Museum of Chinese Decoration and it made me feel like I was back at CTTB hahah. There were lots of Buddahs everywhere! We walked around while chatting and saw lots of pretty vases and interesting fabrics and also a really awesome statue of the happiest horse in the world. We were both exhausted because we had done lots that day, so at 11 we decided to head home to get some rest before the trip to Versailles we had planned for Sunday.
Aaaaand, you know, today is Sunday. SO this morning I woke up, ate some breakfast, packed a lunch, and took off to meet Jess on the train to Versailles. The line to get into the actual castle was super long, so we decided to just explore the gardens. For a couple of hours we walked around admiring the symetrical French style gardens under our polkadotted umbrellas. It was raining but it was warm out, so we enjoyed ourselves. We had a picnic by a fountain when the rain stopped for a good half hour. While we walked around, we talked about what if would have been like to be in that garden hace mucho tiempo, and thanks to our big imaginations, it was quite entertaining. Versailles is sort of known for being a huge waste of money (at least that is what we were taught in AP Euro) and I thought a lot about that while we were there. It was SO big. It was so over-the-top and yes, it was beautiful, but it was also dissapointing hahah. There is so much space there! Agh.
I am still super glad I went though, especially with Jess. We were both kinda tired from the day before and from all the garden-walking, so on the train ride back to Paris I read while she listened to music. On that train ride I felt glad to have a friend who was willing to let me read hahah. That is a special little kind of close, you know?
So that is what my week was like, in a nutshell. This probably wasn’t the most interesting blog ever but I hope you enjoyed it anyways. :)
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