I started writing this blog post a while ago and never quite got around to finishing it. I guess maybe I should get on that.
Let's see, London. Pretty fantastic trip. I got to see two of my friends from Whitman, crash on their floor, and roam around downtown during the day. Friday was almost perfectly dry and I spent the day wandering all over the place -- hit up a food market, the Tate Modern, the Nat'l Portrait Gallery with a great Annie Liebowitz exhibition, and got last-minute tickets to an Avenue Q matinee. Pretty sweet. Saturday was somewhat less dry, to put it mildly, so I hung out in the Science museum and the Natural History museum and then went back into the city with my friends in the evening to meander through Harrods (massive, ridiculously ritzy department store with an entire food & chocolate floor). Then it was back to Alicante and goodbye to the land of fun accents and half-price theater tickets.
I had a pretty fantastic last week in Alicante. My direct enrollment final turned out to be a short multiple choice test, which was a nice relief, and I spent a solid chunk of time writing a paper for that class (I can tell you all about the changes in foreign residents and the job market in Altea, in case you're interested...), but overall it was a really laid-back week. Dinners with friends, a closing ceremony, and trying to soak up the last bits of Alicante, Spanish, and good friends before we all took off.
And then I went to Paris and man was that a change. My handy dandy little French phrasebook informed me that the way you say someone's butchering the French language translates to "to kill the French language like a Spanish cow." Fitting, no? Although really, I'm not sure I even know enough French to be able to butcher it--most of my communication involved pointing, smiling, and looking confused. A pretty big shock after a semester of living in a foreign country but understanding for the most part what was going on. Suddenly I didn't know how to ask for tap water, get the bill, or understand the directions people gave me after I managed to ask where something was. And for some reason I got blank stares every single time I accidentally started speaking in Spanish. Shocking, I know.
I walked over to the Eiffel tower after dinner one night, spent a day getting incredibly turned around and wandering through the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th arrondissements (Notre Dame, Pantheon, Luxembourg gardens, the oldest part of the city, St Germain, etc.), went out to Montmartre and stumbled on an a capella performance, did the Champs Elysees and Arc du Triumph at night, met up with a friend from high school, walked around the Marais, and ate quite a few delicious pastries. I also accumulated quite a bit of change because, not knowing numbers in French, I generally just handed people a bill that I was sure would cover the price of whatever I had asked for, stuck the change in my pocket, and then did the same thing at the next store I went to.
My 26-hour travel day got shortened a little bit when I showed up in D.C. and was able to switch onto a direct flight to San Francisco, so that was nice, and getting spoiled in business class made the trip much less painful than it could have been. So now I'm back home with my family, suitcase exploded on my floor, trying to see everyone and do everything before I take off again in just over a week. Although I guess that's made easier by the fact that I can't for the life of me sleep past 7am...
I hope you're all enjoying the holidays and are looking forward to your coming adventures, whatever they might be.
Ya te echo mucho de menos, España. Ojalá que nos veamos pronto.
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