Eighty-five percent of my dreams are about to come true because I am set to hop on an airplane to my favorite country in the world tomorrow. The city of Paris awaits me, with its historic greenery and looming architecture and endless inspiration and beguiling language and everything I ever need. I've been practicing my French for the past three nights, starting at 10 pm and staying up until 2 am conjugating verbs, reviewing grammatical structures, working on speaking quickly by singing along to French pop songs from the '60s (I have played that song maybe 80 times since this morning), and just trying to prep my brain for the culture I'm about to be submerged in for a few weeks.
My passion for everything French is no secret, but for some reason I feel like this trip is going to be especially important. I feel like I'll be able to communicate more, and more easily, and that it will be amazing to get away from America for a while and experience something new. I used to relish my time at home and spent a great deal of it sitting in my room doing whatever the hell it was that I did. But now my apartment entrenches me in a sort of stale apathy that I can't seem to do much with. It makes me anxious and tired and restless simultaneously. I need a change of scenery. France is exactly the place to go for that.
I'm also going to be turning 16 while I'm there. After a consecutive sequence of abject birthdays, I can just tell that this one's going to be good. I want to go to Shakespeare & Co. in the Quartier Latin and buy French books, and eat delicious food, and wander around Paris. It all seems so unreal, but at the same time I can't wait. The feeling is inexplicable, which is why I'm doing such a bad job of explaining it.
We also might be traveling to the south a little bit, which of course I am hella pumped for. I want to buy some orange lipstick somewhere, and get a refill of my perfume in Les Baux, and eat fresh fruit from the market in Aix-en-Provence, and see the Palais des Papes in Avignon, and glide along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. And maybe stop in Italy for lunch. Who knows.
Here's some photos I gathered off the internet of places I might be going.
[Photos via Google.com.]
This is where we go running. We run that whole frickin' thing. It's like, 7 kilos. Sometimes we bike it.
The Promenade des Anglais, right on the coast of the Mediterranean
The market in Aix-en-Provence
The Pont d'Avignon
Montmartre, home to the Sacre Coeur and an ungodly amount of Parisian beauty
One of my favorite bridges on the Seine, the Pont des Arts. I'm bringing a lock to put on it this time.
Shakespeare & Co., the store in which I plan to work when I move to France.
The village of Les Baux
I'm not bringing my digital camera with me this time because it's so heavy and I'm worried I'll break it and/or my back, but I just came bought some disposable cameras to use instead because they're very light. Basically what I'm saying here is that there won't be much live-action reporting from France, but who knows if that even matters? I'll probably write about the trip sporadically on here.
Have a blast back in the States. I can't decide if I'll miss them.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Tell Me What's On Your Mind, Dear Readers!