Story Time, Kids!

So, it's been a little while. Some may even argue that it's been a long while. Very busy few weeks, you see ... and most of you know why ...

My father and Rozanne came to Paris on April 27th. This day for me actually began the 26th at 9:00 in the morning when I woke up, because that night a friend spent the night and we didn't sleep at all.

That isn't important, though.

Before I go further into this, I would like to say that I don't remember exactly what we did each day, so you may be better off to ask Dad or Rozanne for the whole story. This is just an overview.

On the 27th, I got to the airport waywayway too early. It's way far outside of Paris, see, and I had to take the RER--which is like a métro but it goes far outside of Paris--but it went directly to the airport, when usually it would have made a million and a half stops in between.

So I got there early and took a nap on my luggage.

Eventually, however, I went to search for their arrivals gate and I waited THERE for about an hour ... but they arrived and I was smiling and crying simultaneously and crazily.

Thus it began.

We were staying in Paris for a few days first before embarking on other adventures, so we took a taxi back to the city and located the hotel, checked in, and all that.

All three of us were tired, but we still ventured out to check out the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysées and to search for a place to change my father's dollars into euros (we were unsuccessful). We also had lunch at a Parisian café, which served us lemonade drinks called Pshitt or something, which Dad really got a kick out of.

Dinner was found that evening only after a long search with many changings of the mind ... when we did find a place to eat, though, the food was good, although Rozanne fell asleep when Dad went to pay.

We got a good night's sleep that evening, and Saturday was spent out and about, seeing more of Paris.

Sunday morning, though, we packed up, caught a quick breakfast at the café we dubbed the "Angry Frenchman Café" because of the unpleasant waiter who served us, and headed for the airport.

The café was really called "Le pain quotidien"--the daily bread--but the former name stuck more permanently.

But, yes. Airport.

Yes, my friends, we were going to Ireland!

The plane was freezing, but it didn't even matter! I looked out the window of the plane as we were decending and it was so beautiful I wanted to scream for happiness.

Though most of Sunday was simply spent settling in (we did go to a pub, though, and a very good restaurant where a whole bunch of people who worked there got in a group and gave us a list of placed they suggested for eating in Dublin--cool!), Monday we spent the whole day in Dublin.

First thing in the morning, we headed over to University College of Dublin because that is somewhere that I want to apply to next year, and we picked up some information. My dad tried to get some guy to marry me so that I could become a citizen of Ireland and thus have European Union fees. It was extraordinarily embarrassing.

We took a self-guided walking tour of Dublin. At the end of the day, my feet were none too pleased. We saw, though, Trinity College (beautiful--made UCD look horrible), Dublin Castle, and ... the shop of the Guinness store. My dad wanted to take a tour, but we got there ten minutes too late. I wasn't going to do it anyway. I took a tour of the Miller brewery in Wisconsin a few years ago ... not my cup of tea.

The following day was our last in Ireland (short stay, eh?). We spent the entire day driving. We got in the little rental car and drove south along the coast towards Cork until dinner, then turned around and drove back to Dublin through the hills. Very narrow roads. Very curvy roads. Driving on the passanger side (my Dad, that is) on the left-hand side of the road. I thought I wasn't going to survive.

But it was amazing. I got a little less than 100 pictures that day. You always hear about the French countryside ... but the Irish countryside puts it to shame.

Needless to say, I was very sad to leave the next morning ... the next very early morning.

That was Wednesday. When the plane landed in Paris, I turned on my cell phone and almost immediately got a phone call from my host mother asking if we wanted to meet for dinner.

And that was how my real family and my temporary came to know each other. And it turned out very well. Pierre--host father--speaks very good English (even though he'd tell you that he doesn't), and everyone had a common topic to discuss--me. Oy vey.

I went home with my host family that night because we were at a new hotel and we only had a room for two.

Thursday, Rozanne was sick of the métro, so we stayed in the area of the hotel. She was also not hungry at lunch, so my father and I went to a Thai restaurant nearby. In the middle of the meal, he pulled out something from his fanny pack (which, yes, he brought even though I told him they were illegal in France in a desperate attempt to dissuade him). This thing was wrapped tightlytightly in tissue paper and had a safety pin holding it.

After a moment of struggle, my dad extracted the object within the paper. Do you know what it was?

A ring. A diamond engagement ring.

"What do you think?" he asked.

I think I cried. Happy tears.

I left again that evening and when I came back in the morning, Rozanne--my dad's girlfriend--had become Rozanne--my dad's fiancée.

He had asked her to marry him under the Eiffel Tower. How cute!

So now ... I have something really big to look forward to when I get home.

Well, Dad and Rozanne decided that liked the new hotel and didn't want to go back to the old one, which was the original plan after their two-day period of the two-person room. So, we asked the hotel about getting a new room and called the old one to cancel reservations--48 hours in advance. BUT the lady I spoke with at the old hotel said it needed to be 72 hours in advance. So I argued with her until I just decided to give Dad the phone and he said he simply would not pay for it.

Problem solved or something?

Aside from More Touristy Things that day, we went to a wine tasting where I learned how to distinguish a good wine and I also tasted the best champagne I'd ever had in my life. Our "teacher," I suppose, was a sommelier named Olivier, described in his (we assume, self-writted) brochure as being young, smart (I think), and cool. Haha ...

Saturday we went to Normandy. That was my dad's thing. He wanted to see the beaches of Normandy. It didn't particularly interest me, but ... whatever. We took a train to Normandy and had a five-hour tour of a bunch of WWII stuff. Omaha Beach, etc.

It ended at 6 in the evening and our train was at 7:30. We went into town to eat dinner ... but ...

Let me cut to the chase, because it pains me to relive this frustrating evening.

We. Missed. The. Last. Train. To. Paris.

We. Had. To. Stay. The. Night. In. Normandy.

I. Was. Not. Happy.

And I shall go into no further detail ... because it still irks me. I haven't gotten yet to the stage where I can laugh about it. Probably because I haven't thougth about it enough. Whatever.

But, yes. We did catch the morning train to Paris.

Frankly, though ... I was all funned out, as I told my dad. Although I consider it a sin for people to stay in hotel rooms all day while on vacation, I did that (I can, afterall, see Paris any time I want to). I watched BBC. Super-fun relaxing Sunday.

I did go out with Dad and Rozanne in the evening. I don't remember exactly what for ...

I do remember this, though ... it was Sunday. Election night in France. We were on the métro, on the way back to the hotel neighborhood at 8:00 when the polls closed. At about 8:02, the conductor of the métro came over the PA thing and announced that Nicolas Sarkozy had won the elections.

I. Was. Not. Happy.

I swore loudly and glared at the wall. I had to endure happy cars honking and one group of people parading down the street chanting "On a gagné! On a gagné!" ("We won!") during dinner.

I. Was. Not. Happy.

Luckily, dinner was good.

Monday morning, my dad and Rozanne left. I showed them to the airport and said goodbye. It wasn't too sad because I would be seeing them in nine weeks (and a day) anyway (yesterday makes eight weeks).

See? Very brief overview. Ask those two for details. And pictures of Paris. I took pictures, but not of Paris. Versailles, Ireland, and Normandy, yes.

We move on now to this weekend.

This past weekend I spent with my Tennessee friend Krystin and my Canada (Alberta, even though he lives in Ontario, you better not say he's from there or he'll hurt you) friend Taylor.

The weekend even had a title: SSSS

No, no. You don't need to know what that stands for. It's just really stupid and lame and Taylor guessed it in one try.

8:30 Saturday morning I met Krystin at the train station to commence our plan. We were on a mission.

We were going to buy saris.

What? You can buy a sari in France?

Yes, yes. You can.

At first we panicked because all the stores were closed, but we waited for about and hour and came back to this particular street (on which there were about 10 sari shops) and they were open.

With the help of the salesman whom we eloquently named Indian Guy, we became the owners of two lovely, if not slightly cheap, saris.

But ... Taylor didn't know.

We caught the 12:07 train to Compiègne and excitedly discussed many-a-thing as we waited impatiently for the train to reach its destination.

"You two are the coolest people ever to come to Compiègne," Taylor told us as he saw us struggling our way up the stairs at the train station.

Probably very true.

We ate lunch at the Taj Mahal, some Indian retaurant with very yummy food. We sat there for about two hours and spent most of the time laughing.

We took the 80 million-mile walk back to Taylor's house and spent most of the time in between then and dinner (a) practicing songs for the following day, which you will read about shortly (this does not apply to Krystin), (b) practicing the accordion (this does not apply to me) and (c) trying to squeeze all three of us onto the couch because we were tired.

We had pizza for dinner, separate from the family (probably because they like to eat in silence and Taylor, Krystin and I had been laughing loudly for most of the day). Then we went back to the basement and watched "The Island", which was fairly good and with lots of symbology and philosophy in it. THEN we watched "Top Gun" which was horrible and had nothing worth mentioning in it. And then we squeezed all three of us onto the couch and actually fell asleep. We were really tired, see.

We woke up in the middle of the night and went to our proper beds.

The next day we had to catch a train at 12:30-ish to go to a place called Etrées St. Denis, where there was a cute little event called "Dimance à la ferme"--Sunday on the farm.

Wouldn't you know it, we left late and had to run as fast as possible to the train station--Taylor with his accordion, poor guy--and we just made the train.

It wasn't a long ride ... but as we pulled into the train station, Taylor said, "Oh my God ... I forgot their phone number."

We had no way to call them for them to come and get us.

We were exhausted from running. We were hungry ("I just want a kebab!" said Taylor when we managed to find the only kebab place in town ... closed--I have video footage of this).

We found a payphone.

Actually, first we went through a very confusing series of attempts to try to call someone to give us someone's phone number so we could call them for this other person's phone number, etc ... but we found a payphone.

Do you know what was on this mocking, mocking payphone? A flyer.

Do you know what for?

Dimanche à la ferme.

After a little bit more bad luck, we FINALLY got ahold of someone and soon we were on the way to the Ouashée family's farm out in the styx.

Where did we head? Over to the barn where a bunch of little kids' crafts were set up. What did we do?

Taylor whipped out his accordion (as best as one can whip out an accordion), and played a bunch of weird traditional western songs as I sang the weird traditional western lyrics.

In between singing/playing the accordion/watching Taylor and I perform, we ate crêpes and took a look around the farm. This was Taylor in his element. Not the crêpes ... the farm. He wouldn't stop rambling about one thing or another ... the sheering of the sheep, the canola crop, etcetcetc. He seemed at home.

This was, oddly enough, me and Krystin out of our element. But I liked it anyway. I'm being converted.

A bit after five, we headed back to Compiègne. Krystin and I weren't going to leave until 8:47, so we had dinner--kebabs--and hung out at Taylor's house (all squished onto the couch again--go figure).

We headed back to the train station just in time to get onto our train ... or so we thought.

We verified our tickets and all that and got on the train, all in a rush because we'd thought we were going to be late.

But the train ... did not ... move.

What happened?

The train was broken.

The last train to Paris ... was broken.

SSSS was not over, afterall.

After playing phone tag with our host parents, we sheepishly headed back to Taylor's house with no other choice but to stay another night. My host father had a particularly good humour about it--he sent me a text message reading "Those who have not known love can not understand what it can do. I as well have missed trains and classes so that I can live more." Ha ha ha. Oh, Pierre.

I missed school the next day, but I did get back to Paris. Besides Sunday night--we had all been rather frustrated, not to mention tired--it had been a weekend well spent. Taylor and I decided it better than St. Patrick's Day and equal to Fasting Week (although with the benefit of us not having fasted).

And this coming weekend, more adventures to come. Krystin and I are returning to Compiègne to make crêpes with Taylor during the Joan of Arc festival.

Small conclusion.

Yesterday marked that in eight weeks I will be back home. It's funny, because I always thought I'd be crying my eyes out over such a short time! But ... I'm about ready to come home, actually. I'm not homesick, nor am I tired of France. I suppose it's sort of a resignation. It is what it is what it is and I accept that. I'll miss France, yes ... but I won't pine for it nor cry on the plane ride home.

I'll be back home on July 10th at 5:00 pm. I'll be sad to have left France. But I'll be happy to be home.

I guess you lucked out! I won't cause an international incident after all.

Leah!!