Gaudi’s Casa Batlló On my second afternoon in Barcelona I sat on the terrace of a restaurant called La Bombeta with my friend Ana, sunshine hot on my skin. Ana was glowing, and not just because of the light but because she was so happy to be sitting in the sun after months of cloudy winter in France. Ana is an au pair too, and as she was leaving to spend a week with me in Barcelona her host kids…
Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and while I did consume alarming amounts of chocolate I didn’t feel particularly festive considering I was also alone in my room while doing so and thousands of miles away from NC. Both my host parents were traveling so it wasn’t worth cooking anything special, and the only Thanksgiving-ish thing in France is a half-hearted Black Friday. But! This weekend I’m making an apple crumble and having my three best friends here over for a Frenchified Friendsgiving….
I will never stay at a hostel again! (Jk I literally stayed in an 8-bunk hostel room days after the chateau, but you know.) Departure One Friday night in mid-October my host dad came home around 8 p.m. and told us to pack our bags: we were headed to the grandparents’ chateau. As one does. We hadn’t planned on leaving until the next day, but it’s a spontaneous household, so we took off in the night after an hour of…
“Marseille is… today the only one of the ancient capitals that does not crush us with the monuments of its past… It is not a city of architecture, of religion, of literature, of academies or fine arts… It is easy-going and jovial. It is dirty and rundown. But it is nonetheless one of the world’s most mysterious cities and one of the most difficult to decipher.” — Blaise Cendrars I read this quote in an exhibit at the MUCEM, and…
In Marseille, it’s claimed, the weather is always beautiful: il fait toujours beau. The rains are brief and chased away by the sun. Unfortunately, I caught Marseille’s sun on a rare weekend when it didn’t shine, much less keep bad weather in check. I arrived in the city on a Saturday morning around 9, and by 11 it started raining, and wouldn’t stop for another ten hours. So my luck was bad, and I didn’t even have someone with…
Instructions for an impromptu 10 euro picnic in France: Buy a baguette, a soft cheese, and a hard cheese. This constitutes your main course. Add a box of Petits Ecolier cookies for dessert. Pick out a bottle of red wine, as you won’t be able to chill a white or rosé. Don’t worry about not having a bottle-opener — it’s France, so most grocery stores have a courtesy bottle opener at the cash register that you can use after buying…
Or, the reasoning that led me to my next step: living in France as an au pair The last blog post I wrote here was about a weekend I spent in Lyon, France a year before — at the time of writing, I had no idea that I would return to this city in just 8 short months! Life can be funny that way. I graduated from college this summer — a phrase which still feels weird to say. For…
Exploring Lyon There’s this ancient astronomical clock in the Lyon cathedral. It’s gorgeous and amazingly ornate but didn’t work when I saw it in December 2017 because people had destroyed its inner mechanisms a couple times throughout history. Isn’t that wild? I wondered what would make someone wreck the clock, and thought maybe they wanted to freeze time. I could sympathize–– I was leaving Europe in a couple weeks so I wanted to freeze time, too, and keep on traveling….
Day 1 I had a mission: to see the Christian Dior Couturier du Rêve exhibit at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. A couple days after finals ended at Sciences Po I took off. Advance tickets for the exhibit were not available, so I expected the line when I arrived that morning. I just didn’t expect the four-hour wait. At first I thought the line would take about 90 minutes. But as the cold and rainy afternoon progressed, I…
One year ago today was my last full day in France. Thinking about it right now makes me smile, but it also makes me nostalgic and sad, because my four months in Europe were so beautiful. When I close my eyes I can still trace the 27-minute walk from my studio to school: The wide shiny boulevard of Place d’Erlon, the narrow side streets with crumbly stone buildings and bright shutters, the hot sugary scent of baking treats unfurling from…