Leaving on a jet plane!

I'm leaving for Barcelona in several hours! I'm so excited to get out of Paris for awhile. After being with my family for a week playing Super Tourist, I can't wait to explore some sites that I haven't seen yet.

I'll be in Spain from today until Tuesday, and then Wednesday morning I'm leaving for Nice. Of my three travel buddies, I've never travelled with two of them, so I'm anxious to see how we wind up working together as a travel team.

Anyway, having my family in Paris was a fun experience. I hope that it's given them the bug to explore some more countries. In the meantime, I can't wait to have new travels in the future. Seeing as the 7-hour direct flight to Paris all but wiped them out, I can't see my family hopping on a 24-hour flight to head to New Zealand or Australia with me. Any takers?


I don't want to sound like I'm too good for Paris. Quite the contrary. Since I've been here, I've consistently been shown that Paris's standards far exceed mine, in terms of fashion, culture, and communication skills. I like to think that I've adjusted pretty well, but I find it pointless to try and pretend that I'm a French person and be serious about it. I have enough French friends, but it's not because I said to myself BON JE VAIS ME TROUVER DES AMIS FRANCAIS. Through working at the soup kitchen and playing frisbee, activities that interest me, I've had conversations with other people. And not just French people, but Tunisian, Algerian, Italian, American, Australian, German, Scottish, Irish, Spanish.. the list goes on. We all speak in French, Spanish, and English as necessary, and it's not a problem if we're not ALWAYS speaking French!

I do like the JYA Paris program enough, but the constant pressure to BE French and to MAKE French friends is stifling! If I thought to myself at the beginning of the year that I was just going to talk to French people all the time and try to work my way into their clique, I would've wound up miserable. PASSION is what really brings people together, no matter the language. Language comes next.


Anyway, that's enough. I'm still happy to be here, and I still have so much to see in Paris! I need to see pretty much every museum and cemetary ever. Thank goodness I still have one last First Sunday of the Month to see the museums for free. AND we're going to Parc Asterix! Log flumes and rollercoasters, here I come!

QUICK UPDATE

Right so today was the day of my presentation. I wound up pulling my first real all-nighter EVER. I wound up preparing a pretty damn good 20 minute presentation for my Art History class. My teacher actually seemed pretty nice about it! He did seem anxious when he accidentally volunteered me to go this week, so all he said after I was done was that I should've focused more on the painting and could've delved further to find out that it was about the 100 year war. And he corrected my grammar. But with all luck, I didn't fail! Yay!

Also, I have the best friends EVER. I walked with Alix out of the class, and I was still super-loopy from not having slept. She said something about cookies, and I said that I really just wanted to sleep. Then, she said something about how Rachel and she had made them last night! They had stayed up till 1 trying to figure out how to make cookies in Rachel's apartment, since her host family was gone. They concocted a mixture of peanut M&M's, walnuts, peanuts, flour, brown sugar, and vanilla sugar. It was crazy. They actually reminded me of my grandma's cookies, since they were flat and chewy.

Before cookies, Alix and I went out for sushi, which was really nice and just what I needed.

AND THEN Rachel comes out with this box of eclairs and a napoleon! AHhhh it was too good.

Anyway, the moral is I'm going to sleep RIGHT NOW and not waking up until 10:15 a.m. Good night, world!!!


Oh, and I have ice cream. Can't get much better, considering the downfall of misery that was Monday and Tuesday! Wahoo, karma!