I am human and sometimes I am not entirely grateful for all the wonders around me. Because of this, sometimes when I blog I have to summon up the energy to find beautiful things in my past weeks to blog about. I know they are always there, it is just that some weeks, finding them is harder than others!
The thing about the week I will tell you about today is that I am so in love with the past couple days of my life that letting this blog post spill from my heart and down through my finger tips will be liberating because I have too much joy and I need to calm myself down by sharing it with all of you. Really! So many fun things happened! Also, I took a lot of pictures this week so you should all enjoy that!
This entire week it has been warm but super rainy. Monday morning Chloe and I went to check out Invalides. It is where Napoleon Bonaparte’s tomb is and it was on Chloe’s bucketlist and it is free for students so it was an excellent idea for a rainy Monday morning! It turned out to be a really small little museum and only kiiiinda cool, so after wandering around a bit, we headed to a cafe nearby that Chloe had heard about and spent a couple hours sipping at coffee and getting to know each other better. They had cafe cortados at the cafe and I was stoked because that is what my host mom, Lilian, always loved in Chile so I got one in her honor and it was delicious. The conversations I had with Chloe were entertaining and thought provoking as well! It is always interesting to meet someone abroad who you would have totally chosen as a friend at home. Chloe is from Michigan but she BELONGS in Northern California hahah. She is this open-minded, artsy, up-for-anything-but-down-to-Earth, super smiley person and she makes me laugh. I enjoy her company so much and I cannot wait to go to London with her in two weeks!
On Tuesday and Thursday, all of my friends were busy or sick and the weather was not too pretty so I spent my mornings reading in French in cafes. This is an excellent past-time that I recommend to anyone bored in Paris on a rainy day! Hahaha. :) I read “Le Petit Prince” one of those mornings and it was so pretty I cried a little.
After school on Tuesday, however, Prune and Anastajza and I all had the playground to ourselves so we drew pictures in the sand and went down the slide a million times. I am blogging about this Tuesday afternoon because when I am older and look back and read this, I want to remember how happy I was when I took this picture of Anastazja and Prune with their sand drawing. We had just been running around and laughing and when I took the picture I felt like we were a little family hahah. And I know that sounds silly, but I care so much for both Anastazja and Prune and they clearly care about each other and I am glad to have my little park famille. :D
On Wednesday afternoon after work, I had agreed to babysit at a birthday party Prune had been invited to by her friend Camille with a German au pair named Marie. Cecile had offered to drive the three of us to the birthday party, which we thought started at 3:30. We got a bit lost along the way and ended up arriving at 3:50 or so, and when we finally got up to the apartment, Camille’s mom looked soooo frazzled and grateful that we had arrived! That is when we learned that the birthday party had started at 3:00 and that since all the children wanted to play outside on the balcony and Camille’s mom was the only person there to supervise, she hadn’t been able to leave the children alone out on the balcony for the past hour! We felt terrible, but she didn’t seem mad, just glad we were there then, and we decided to do our best to make the rest of the party go super smoothly. We supervised all the five year olds playign with play dough, painted faces, distributed snacks, and organized games. Some of the children were adorable, others were much much less adorable, but all-in-all it was a fun little party and I made 25 euros off of it! Also, Marie and I got to eat as many cookies as we wanted and they were tasty hahah. It was a bit difficult for me to speak to children in French, because I don’t do that very often as I am always speaking to Prune in English. Marie was soooo good at it though! Goodness gracious, this Marie! Not onlly is she super cute and lovely, but she is also like an up-and-coming muscian who was discovered playing music in a cafe, speaks perfect English and has like Emma Watson’s voice/accent, and her French is even better than her English! Cecile said that Marie only made one tiny little mistake the entire time they spoke and that she had no accent, which is incredible because Marie has only been living in Paris for two years! Craaaazy. She is a pretty cool girl, that one.
Now now now. For Friday! Friday morning, I got up at a reasonable hour to go meet up with KATIE HAGAMEIER at Notre Dame! Recognize that name? If you do, it is because she is in a lot lot lot of my blog posts from my time in Chile! She was one of my closest exchange student friends, and now she is living in Madrid but she decided to come to Paris for the weekend with an Australian friend! Seeing her again made me very happy, and we spent a relaxing morning strolling around one of my favorite sections of Paris. They had planned on going to the Louvre that morning, but all the rain had totally flooded the Seine and that was causing problems at the Louvre so it was closed that day. Because of this, Katie and her friend asked me to show them some nice places, so we wandered along the flooded river, went to my blogging cafe, and around lunch time stopped at Kintaro for the best Japanese food in Paris. They really seemed to enjoy all of this! It was fun for me seeing how impressed they were with my French! :D
I really like speaking French in front of people who don’t speak French because I remember how cool it sounded when I didn’t speak it hahaha. When it was time to go back to work, I hugged Katie and her friend goodbye and we agreed to meet up later that weekend to get hot chocolate or something.
Prune looked extra cute that day, and she was paying with her hilarious friend Leonie who reminds me of me when I was little. While they played, I hung out with Leonie’s mom, who I have decided is the least-snobby mom from Prune’s school and who I like very much!
This weekend, Fred, Cecile, Prune, and Eden took off for a little family weekend away in Bruges, Belgium, so I got the house allll to myself! Saturday morning I ate breakfast in my pjs and read for some hours, flopped in strange positions on all of the couches and also spent some time singing at the top of my lungs in the livingroom because I COULD. That afternoon, I went out to Paris to meet up with Chloe, and together we went to the Picasso Museum and wandered around the Marais and checked out whatever boutiques poked our interest. As we wandered, we made each other laugh quite a bit. I realized, even harder than I had realized before, how I really enjoy Chloe’s company and how comfortable I am around her. Like, she is a total goofball, too! On top of all that other stuff I said about her, she knows how to be silly, and that is what I look for in a friend hahaha. While we were wandering, we also ran into a Carnaval/Euro-Cup parade! There were people from all over the world, banging drums and dancing and smiling and just sort of partying their way down the streets, and I couldn’t stop smiling as I watched them. I felt like I was back in California or Chile or I don’t know where, but their contagious happiness felt like home to me and I couldn’t get enough of it!
Later that afternoon, Jess met up with us at the Shakespeare and Co. Cafe and I introduced two of my favorite friends to each other and they seemed to get along super well! Together we did some more walking around along the river before taking the metro to the 19th (like where I used to take French classes) to have drinks on the river before going to a good burger restaurant. As we sat along the canal and told each other stories and LAUGHED, it was cloudy but warm outside and we were surrounded by lots of French 20-somethings doing the same thing and I couldn’t help but thinking over and over again “Yes! THIS is the Paris I love and THIS is the Paris I want to remember.” Having little drinks like that, on the canal on a warm evening is one of the most Parisian things to do ever, and when you do it with great people, it is SUCH A NICE WAYYYY to spend your evening! And as I sat there, listening to entertaining stories and gazing over the water, I realized that I would go home in 26 days and I felt a pang of sadness in my throat because soon that evening would end, and then 25 more evenings would end and never again would I be 19 year old au pair Sally in Paris. And this pang of sadness made me so proud hahahah. Because if I find things to miss about Paris, and if I feel that little pang of sadness like a little pebble stuck in a shoe otherwise FILLED with gratitude for everything this experience was and all I have gained from it, then I will have done this year abroad right.
I am so tired of missing things, but missing things means they meant something to you, and that you were strong enough to face some sadder feelings and let a love for something change you. That is more often than not a good thing, I would say. :)
As we were about to get dinner, my new German friend Marlene showed up to get food with us. Her plans for that evening had fallen apart and all three of us were thrilled to add another kind face to our evening of having fun and french fries! I was shocked at how well these three friends of mine just got along with each other! I liked each of them so much when we were just alone and I couldn’t believe that I was having even more fun when I got all of them to meet each other! I wouldn’t shut up about how wonderful that evening was, and they all teased me for it hahaha. When we had finished dinner, we weren’t tired enough to go home yet so we decided to take the metro to the Arc du Triomthe in the hopes of being able to go to the top of it. Unfortunately, we arrived too late, but we walked around the middle of the round-about and ended up sitting on a bench to enjoy each others’ company for just a little longer and make plans to meet up the next night hahah. Around 10:30, we all said good night and I took the metro home thinking I was the luckiest girl in the world for understanding that the world is full of amazing people and that a good number of them had found their ways into my life.
Now it is Sunday morning and I have written this post while sipping coffee at the dinner table in my pjs! Today I will meet up with Marlene and Katie Hagameier and her friend and later on Marlene and I will get milkshakes with Jess and Chloe! So basically today is going to be fantastic just like yesterday and I cannot wait to see what it surprises me with.
I hope you all have a fantastic day, too!
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