day #258 - done

 

So, if the title and the photo doesn't help you - yeah, I'm done. The last month has been very, very hectic, squeezing in a trip to Montpellier (which is really cool, has lots of student dive bars and lots of excellent weather, and is generally the cooliest) and Paris (which is classic and gave us lots of lovely warm Spring weather to boot) while trying - and failing - to revise for my Finals and pack up all my crap in anticipation of heading home.

I am now procrastinating from packing, which I like even less than I like revising. France has given me one final slap in the face by plonking a bank holiday down on the day before I leave, which means that if I don't have everything I need now, I won't be able to get it until I head back to the UK. Thanks, France.

I should probably write some kind of What I've Learned thing, or, What Really Happens On Your Year Abroad, but I am lazy and one thing I Have Learned is that I'm not even that good at years abroad anyway. Generally, the whole year has made me feel like I'm going crazy - the pendulum is always swinging, and there are constant shifts reminding you that no, you haven't quite got it all sorted, and no, you'll probably not manage to get the hang of it in the short 9-12 months you'll spend in a foreign country. I wish I could say, "But I learned to deal with the stress and come to terms with the fact it was all out of my control," but I have not, and the whole experience has, at times, been incredibly frustrating, scary, and generally made me feel like a huge ball of existentialist melancholy, rather than a human being who was just born in a different place. But I kind of got used to it, started anticipating having the rug pulled from under my feet, and then when it does, the world kind of makes sense, in a weird way.

I have dealt with rude administration staff who simply shrug and say, "Ce n'est pas possible," when you ask for help, weird flatmates, incompetent administration staff who lose your vital paperwork and then blame you, teachers who kick you out of classes for being international, teachers who wish they could kick you out (and spend the whole year ignoring you and shooting you doubtful glances), exams I knew I was going to fail, lectures I didn't understand, French classmates regarding me as some kind of leper because I had a funny accent, loneliness (yes, I said it), trying to deal with home university paperwork from a distance, etc, etc, etc. You can understand why me walking out of the university campus on the day of my final exam in one piece feels like enough of a triumph. I don't care if I passed my exams. I literally don't care. Because this whole year has felt like one massive obstacle, and even if I mess up the landing, I didn't, you know, die, or starve, or wander into oncoming traffic.

And I'm still sad that I'm leaving. There's a sense that there are a million and one things left to do on my list, and they were all plans made with new-found friends who I am leaving behind. It's definitely the things outside of the university which are central to your year abroad, and yeah, your classes fall by the wayside, because they have to, or else you would go utterly insane. I will miss this weird town. It is weird. So weird. But I will miss it. 

I scoffed when people told me, "You'll think all your old friends are so boring when you go back," because that's dumb - but I kind of get it now. Because I've just spent this huge chunk of time stumbling around in this weird French dream-haze, encountering obstacles at every turn, and they got to sit comfortably at home with their friends and their families and watch British TV and drink their tea with milk in and eat proper oven chips. You sort of teach yourself to stop wanting that, because you have to. You switch off, because homesickness isn't really an option. You can't have it, and after a while, you accept that you can't have it, and you don't want it anymore. It's hard to put into words, really, but going back will be odd. It will be odd to be so comfortable again and I think reverse culture shock is probably definitely a thing.

Don't get me wrong, I am so excited about going home. But it will be weird. It will take a few days to adjust. I've been home twice in 9 months, for 2 weeks in total. I found a £1 coin on the floor the other day and it took a while to register what it was. You know how it is.

I will miss the opportunity for visiting friends in far-flung places, and I will miss the opportunity to practice my French with natives without leaving my front door, and I definitely miss the patisseries and the €4 wine. I will miss the weather, which is at least 4° warmer than Edinburgh at any given moment. I will miss trying to pretend that I am from Normandy, and the lovely feeling when someone asks, "Wait, you're French though, aren't you?". I will miss my rouennais friends, who are all very weird, and very lovely, and very generous. I will miss cheap public transport, being so close to Paris, trying out new bars and coffee houses just because, French stereotypes, the excellent cheese, the Sunday markets, and my weird new little city. I will miss 'being an Erasmus'. I will miss the fact that the world kind of feels like my oyster.
I will not miss google.fr. That is something I will not miss. Also, French Netflix. It's not great. And thank God I'm out of that awful university. But hey ho. I didn't do too badly, after all.

I was walking near the train station, and I was stopped by a guy who asked for directions in French with a foreign accent. It turns out he was American, and staying in Rouen for a week to decide if he wanted to spend his year abroad here. Kind of a weird full circle.

I have to go pack now. I'm moving out of my house tomorrow and so far all my belongings are strewn across my floor and I have posters to pull down and empty wine bottles-turned-candleholders to throw out and laundry to do. I imagine this may be the last post I do on this blog. How weird !
Hope this wasn't too wanky for a final post.

Josie
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day #217 - hey there, mr blue!

Alternative title: Here Comes The Sun or Help It's Sunny And There's Not Much Longer To Go
 
After a fairly abysmal March (save for the wonderful week I had in my last blog post, where I was bragging about the warm weather - is it possible I got myself bad karma for being too smug?), the sunshine is finally back in my life again, and I couldn't be happier.

jardin des plantes, the first sunny day

It sure has been a long, cold, lonely winter. I feel like the winter in France has felt considerably longer than it ever did in England or Scotland, and I think most of that is due to France's café culture - a lot of little cafés and brasseries in France are not made to be sat in, and rely far more on the warmer weather, when they can get plenty of punters to sit out on the pavement outside with a glass of white wine and a cigarette. It's also really, really difficult to drag yourself out of bed to go to classes which are led in awkward, complicated French, the teachers are becoming increasingly strict as exam season approaches, and it's still dark outside.

Of course, now it's still difficult to drag myself to class, but at least that's because it's much easier to skip class altogether, and, say, go and eat sushi in one of the public gardens in Rouen, or run away to the beach on Cabourg for a day and sunbathe and eat great salmon tagliatelle in the sunshine (which are both things that - if any university personnel are reading - I definitely did not do. Nope. Not at all)

You can't blame me for not wanting to stick around in hot, sweaty classrooms though. The countdown has officially begun - as I am writing this, there are exactly fourty days until the end of the May exam season. That's less than six weeks. For a girl who was bragging about being here for six months just a few weeks ago, I'm actually feeling a little overwhelmed.

my new year's resolution was to learn how to cartwheel... still working on it

My family visited last weekend for the bi-annual Easter trip we make to a town near Amiens, where we have some friends. I headed over there with them and we had a cracking trip; we visited Saint-Quentin (lovingly named Saint-Qu by the locals... have a go at saying it out loud in a French accent, you'll hear something a little more edgy), Meaux (famous for yummy brie) and some other good places. It was nice to see them and they came and took a ton of my stuff away in the hope that it will make the move easier in five and a half weeks' time. (Five and a half weeks. What the dean.)

I'm also now at the stage where I'm trying to squeeze everything in before I get on my ferry home. Because French universities are terrible and hate international students, I have absolutely no idea when my exams are, so I'm not sure how long I actually have left here in Rouen. I am therefore excitedly booking trips willy-nilly - Montpellier, check, another jaunt to Paris, check, go-karting, why not, that weird old charity shop sale that happens every month where it's a kilo for a fiver and you always meant to go...

Fourty days... isn't that just weird? It really rushed up towards me. Obviously, there's plenty left to do - I'm in a play, and there's exams to revise for, and all my trips to get in - but in fourty days, I will be able to turn around and say, "I did it." It was really, really hard, but I made myself a little family here, and I figured the crappy stuff out, and... yeah. It's a lovely feeling.
And hey, even if the weather doesn't keep up - that's good enough for me.

Josie
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Day #182 - SIX MONTHS/happy holidays

SIX MONTHS!! I'VE BEEN HERE FOR SIX MONTHS!
This is a very grand achievement for the girl who was sure, after the first month, that she would be home on the first plane back to the country where she can use all her bank cards and use £££ and say things in English and have people understand her through her accent.
Six months. That's 262,080 minutes. Which is like, half of that song from Rent.

So what have I done with my 262,080 minutes? I have been an extra in a French film. I have made some excellent friends. I have drunk wine and eaten baguettes from the market out in the sun on a Sunday lunchtime. I found a house, and moved in. I have been to Paris about a kajillion times. I have been to a funfair on the river Seine. I have joined a choir. I have signed up to be in a play. I have been wine tasting, and to Lyon for the lights festival. I have done Erasmus parties and basement parties and many nights spent in with a bottle of wine. There's probably a load of other stuff.

This week was my official spring holiday, and I spent it staying in my friends' flat in the centre of town while they were away. It felt like a proper little holiday, and I got to explore the city while almost everyone was away.

the cathédrale notre-dame de rouen

 

the jardin des plantes on the wrong other side of the river

Oh yes, fair warning, this post will be very picture-heavy.

The weather picked up considerably and by the last day of the holiday, it was 20°C and I had tea in the garden and wore sunglasses and everything. It took me straight back to sweating on buses and having tea in the sunshine when I first arrived in September.

I also took a little day trip with a friend to Honfleur, which is a lovely seaside town in Normandy which is very, very old and very pretty. 10/10 would recommend!

who r u

erik satie museum

 

SIX MONTHS. I can't get over it. I hope that's enough reason to make a blog post like this, which was basically me just showing off about my little holiday. I ate plenty of baguettes, watched plenty of Twin Peaks, Community and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and drank plenty of wine. I actually broached the transition from red wine season (winter) to white wine season (summer) with a couple of glasses of rosé on Saturday whilst watching Don't Tell The Bride. (That's right, kids, just because you've moved abroad, it doesn't mean you will ever stop watching trash TV. In fact, you will watch more trash TV. Especially when you're drinking.)

The fact that I've been here six months also means that I am basically starting the countdown to going home. Lots of my friends have already booked their flights back and have started organising how they're going to ship their things home. I have had to start worrying about finding accommodation for my fourth year of university. And, weirdly, as the weather gets warmer and as I keep discovering new and cool things around the region and around the city, I am already feeling nostalgic. I almost don't want to move back to Scotland where there are no 6am bakeries and the Sunday markets are farmer's markets and there are posh people who dress like homeless people but with really clean trainers.

??????????? I have no point to this post beyond: Rouen, you're lovely, Normandy, I love you, sunshine, bring it my way.

LOTS OF LOVE
Josie

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Day #175 - The art of not updating.

The higher the numbers in the titles go, the less I feel like I have achieved something, and more like I am a sad prisoner scratching tally marks into the wall, which isn't really the sort of vibe I was planning on giving out, if I'm being honest.
So, after on updating once (once! Appalling!) in February, I am back to tell you Where The Flipping Heck I Have Been. Because we belong to the Internet/Buzzfeed generation, I'm going to do this all in handy, easy-to-digest categories.

I TURNED TWENTY-ONE.
I honoured it by misspelling a celebratory tweet, which I can blame on my friend Saf's excellent tequila sunrises. Then I went out and got very, very drunk in some bar off the Vieux Marché (which I believe is called Le Vicomté ???). The next day (my actual birthday), we managed to haul ourselves out of bed in time for the Sunday morning market, and then my other friend Maddi showed up (look at me!! Josie Two-friends!!). Then we went home before realising that had been a horrible mistake and all the shops are closed on Sundays and we had absolutely no food - including no ingredients for a birthday cake.
Being the resourceful girls that they are, Safiya and Maddi constructed this monstrosity delight out of rice krispies, all my Milka chocolate (ahem) and a scented tealight:

Then I got sick and spent the entire night vomiting. But before that, it was all really, really nice, and I got flowers and a sweet silk shirt and some comfy socks, and what more could you possibly want?

I FINALLY STOPPED GETTING LOST IN ROUEN.
In my defence, all the old buildings look the same.

I FINALLY CLIMBED THE GROS HORLOGE.
The gros horloge is that sparkly clock that I was so excited about way back in September when I was a fresh-faced young sprite. Anyway, by the time I realised it was even possible to climb up the thing, all my friends had already done it, and had the lovely photographs to prove it. Well! Here is my photograph! Ha ha ha ha let me join your gang now please

not quite the view from the top, but isn't it nice?

I also decided to test out the Panorama XXL - it's this weird blue cylinder that they built on the banks of the Seine, out by the docks, and nobody had any idea what it is. It turns out it's a sort of arty installation where you can see a big picture of Rome all around you. I'm making it sound less cool than it is. What I'm saying is, I'm going full tourist.

I WENT TO PARIS!
Again! Another visitor, another town. Me and Eric hit up all the sights, and I thought I would keep my climbing-things-streak from the sparkly clock going by heading up to the third floor of the Eiffel tower. It's only like, 990ft off the ground. There was no complaining or screaming or crying from either of us. At all. Nope.

 

hiya, paris!

It's actually the first time since I've been here that I've seen the Eiffel tower close up, which is ridiculous, because everyone else who spends their years abroad seems to get off the plane and run straight to the Jardins de Trocadéro. Anyway, it was nice. It was also very, very windy.
Something else that I have wanted to do since moving to France, and hadn't done yet: Disneyland Paris! Do not judge, it was magical, and Eric stopped making me go on rollercoasters after I almost cried on that Aerosmith-themed one.

THE HOLIDAYS STARTED.
As if all my other holidays weren't enough. Rather than being left in Rouen on my own, as I had expected, I'm slowly filling my week up with trips to places around Rouen and Normandy that I haven't ticked off my to-do list yet - climbing up to panorama spots, heading to new spots, visiting the old plague burial ground, as well as Honfleur and other towns.

i hope you're not sick of views yet

I can't believe it's already the half-term holidays! The weather is already picking up - the sunshine has finally come back into my life, although it's not quite warm yet. Before you know it, it'll be Easter. My promise to myself that I wouldn't get on any more planes home until I finish school here - that's the end of May - is looking more and more do-able, and the idea of not having to traipse back through Charles de Gaulle airport warms my heart almost as much as the sunshine.

I'm sure I will update this again soon with news of my holiday adventures, but if I don't, I wrote a little piece for Prancing Through Life to tide you over until then. 
Happy winter break, everyone! And for those of you who have already had your holiday.. ha ha. I'm going shopping now.

Josie
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day #155 - what to expect when you're expecting (a year abroad in France)

There may be a few people reading this who are considering doing a year or a semester abroad in France. Some of you might have a vague idea of what you'd like to do; others have already received the details of their receiving institution. Heck, some of you might have just arrived in French for your second semester placement.
Regardless of your circumstance, I am sure that, as someone who has officially been living here for 155 days, I have some tiny nuggets of advice for you. And I am ready to impart that wisdom.

1. The rumour about the French not bathing is not true for 4/5 of the population. The fifth guy, however, is a very real threat, and he will try to sit next to you on the bus.

2. Pretty much all French kids go home every weekend, because they tend to go to the university nearest their family home, which means that if you're staying in student halls, you will be woken up at 9am every Friday by the sound of trundling suitcases on wheels and you will suddenly find yourself in a ghost town come Saturday. This also means that the likelihood of actually making French friends is kind of slim. Oh, yeah...

3. You've got to work to make French friends. Those guys are really afraid of the foreign kids. They look at you like you've got four extra arms half the time. Most of my fellow Erasmus friends have just stuck with other Erasmus friends, which means we can boast back home about "Ooh my new Brazilian friend [insert name here]!" but we still haven't quite figured out how to order a kebab in French without messing up after a night out. But French friends are cool. They teach you swears!

aggressive advice from a french mug

4. Do not expect to get anything done on Sundays. Seriously! Do! Not! Expect! It! I don't know if I've mentioned this yet, but after 155 days of living here (I KNOW) I have only just found a pub which is open on Sunday afternoon. Some of the shops in the town centre manage to stay open 'til about 3pm, but if you're not a morning bird, this is really not for you. Accept it, move on, and spend the time watching Netflix and painting your nails instead, like a good little Erasmus student.

5. The "10pm rule" is just a pipedream for people living in small towns. This is for my Scotland-based friends - people will tell you that France is great because there is no 10pm alcohol law. However, the only people who get to exploit this are people living in larger towns like Paris and Lyon. For those of us in small towns where even the late-opening shops shut at 9pm, the 10pm alcohol law is a distant and fond memory. Remember that 24/7 living? God, those were the days, weren't they?

6. You will spend about 3 days thinking you can get by without iPlayer, and then you will crumble. Just treat yourself to a sweet VPN service (loads of universities offer their own) or gamble with your privacy on a browser-based service like Hola. This also means you get American Netflix and can finally watch all of Gilmore Girls, like I did, instead of doing any reading.

7. Do not assume the French university will have anything covered. As I'm sure I have already whined, when we arrived, we were assigned to the English department, and the professors not only were not expecting us, but asked us if we were there to learn English. None of the departments talk to one another. There is usually one guy who is assigned to take care of all the Erasmus students, and he will be prone to taking three-hour lunches and losing paperwork. It will take 3 weeks for you to find any of the classrooms. No one will know which courses are suitable for Erasmus students. You are likely to have to queue up to meet some course oeganiser, only to be told you're at the wrong office. Staff will not turn up and will not let anyone know. If there is a class mailing list, you as an Erasmus student will not be on it. It is very possible that you will get kicked out of classes halfway through because the teacher simply doesn't want foreign students

english muffin with bacon and a cup of tea

7b. French classes can last anywhere between two and four hours. This is actual, genuine, mumsy advice: Make sure you eat a big breakfast and bring plenty of water, and definitely make sure you have your phone or a laptop for quick access to look up words you don't understand (and check Facebook when you inevitably get bored around the 1h45 mark).

8. You can find English food in France if you just believe. I know you're reading this smugly, thinking, "Ha! What? Cheese and baguettes are so good here, I'll never crave tea and a bacon sandwich again!" You are wrong. One day, probably around 4 weeks in, you will wake up, hungover, and wish you had a gross greasy fry-up. But do not fear, because if you know how to look, you will find your fave treats: Monoprix sells bacon (fumé à l'anglaise), crumpets and English muffins. Intermarché sells baked beans and Newcastle Brown ale. E.Leclerc sells Tetley tea. Don't settle for poitrine fumée. Don't be that guy.

9. You can find world foods in France if you just believe. The French are very big on French cuisine, which means their 'world food' aisles in supermarkets are largely fajita kits and spaghetti - they haven't really caught on to how delicious curries are yet. However, you can get some gr8 curry recipes from LIDL (yes they have those here praise Jesus) and there are plenty of Asian epiceries where you can buy proper hoisin sauce outside of the Chinese New Year.

église st maclou in rouen! culture! history! art! religion!

10. You will never truly understand what the hell is going on. You're gonna miss home. You're gonna forget what the French is for "cupboard" every. Single. Time. You're gonna sit through a three-hour lecture and not understand a single word. And that's OK. Because apparently it's character-building. And you can always Skype someone back home if you get really bored.

And finally, my most important piece of advice for people about to embark on this adventure:

11. You're gonna have fun. How can you not have fun in a country that is home to this song and where actual adults in actual nightclubs do this dance and there are €3,70 bottles of Côte de Rhone? And that's not even mentioning all the cultural and historical stuff and the cheap train travel and the fact that it's so once-in-a-lifetime that my head wants to pop thinking about it. It's gonna be so great!

And at the end of it all, it's something to pop on the CV.

Josie

x

day #130 - war is over (if you want it)

Safe to say, it's been a weird week.

I don't know if you've been watching the news lately, but a lot of really crappy things happened in Paris over the past week. I thought I might address that bit first, because it is a heck of a lot worse than anything that might have happened to me lately.

a je suis charlie sign at the bus stop

Basically, to everyone who wished me to 'stay safe' or 'look after yourself!' - your fears are unfounded; the attacks happened in Paris, which is a safe 84 miles away from where I am right now according to Google Maps (it's probably more, since the kosher supermarket which was held under siege was in the East) (feel free to correct me, any pernickety rouennais who may be reading this).
Rather than reciprocal violence, the attacks in Paris seem to have been followed by an outpouring of grief - the newspapers are calling it the French 9/11, my university announced a minute's silence throughout the campus, and every single bus stop and shop window is showing the now-famous Je suis Charlie sign. There have been a few vigils and marches to show support of Charlie Hebdo, although I haven't been able to make it thanks to a really, really inconveniently-timed bus strike.
Safe to say, rather than feeling threatened, the French have really risen up in support of the victims and their families. Whatever you think you know, whatever you have to say about the events of the past week, this country is still in shock and trying to find whatever way they can to claw back some feeling of control and normalcy - whether it's through holding a pen to the sky in solidarity, or buying the last copy of Charlie Hebdo on the shelf.
(Sidenote: I have to say that I've been incredibly irritated by a lot of the self-righteous Facebook statuses and tweets talking about the magazine being racist, bigoted and islamophobic - my thoughts on the subject are fairly neatly summed up in this Huffington Post article.)

the je suis charlie sign displayed in the corner of the tv screen

In other far, far less important news, I have just finished my exams. These were the end-of-term exams for semester one, and I had five - I took one of my exams in December. The first thing I did, naturally, was head straight to the pub to celebrate. I now get a four-day weekend before I have to start the whole rigmarole again and sign up to all my semester two classes and start learning again.
The bus strike was a real pain in the arse (when isn't it?) and was handily scheduled to be spread across 5 days of the examination period, but I made it through - after having to take a couple of disgustingly early trains to replace cancelled buses.

I'm now officially and academically halfway through my year abroad and I have to say, I'm feeling pretty comfortable and optimistic. Now that the January exams are out of the way, I have a month or so until my Next Big Thing - my 21st birthday. I don't know what will happen until then - probably the trips to the pub, teas in cafés and the parties in tiny town-centre flats that I don't bother to blog about - but I know that I am armed with my student loan and a list of places to go and people to see. May the rest of 2015 be better.

Josie
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day #118 - guess who's back

OOPS I did that thing where I didn't post for a month (ha ha ha, hee hee hee, ho ho ho)
Do not blame me; simply blame the magic of Christmas/exam season/the unnecessarily unorganised nature of the French education system. Here is a photo of me in a festive hat from this festive season so that you are all fully aware that I am not lying:

of course i'm joking, haha. this is me in 2012.

However, as I have not posted since December 4th, I'm sure there's a couple of things I can update you on: (This is a long post, I'm afraid)

1. La Fête des Lumières
My two favourite things in life (after Gilmore Girls, fresh bed sheets and, you know, family and friends) are sparkly lights and alcoholic drinks. Therefore Lyon from the 5th December to the 8th (that's somewhere around day #90ish, if I remember rightly) was a kind of Josie dreamland where there are literally lights everywhere and plenty of makeshift stalls hawking mulled wine and lots of people wearing light-up headbands.

According to Wikipedia, "the Fête des Lumières is a time when France expresses gratitude toward Mary, mother of Jesus on December 8 of each year. This uniquely Lyonnaise tradition dictates that every house place candles along the outsides of all the windows to produce a spectacular effect throughout the streets. With over 4 million tourists coming to Lyon for this event, the festival is probably one of the three biggest festive gatherings in the world in terms of attendance (after the Rio Carnival and Oktoberfest in Munich)."

I headed down on a TGV (the French high-speed train service. Well, it was suppose to be high-speed. It ended up being 4 hours later than intended) to Lyon, and got given a complementary lunch by SNCF, the train operator, because the train was late and they clearly felt guilty. When I finally arrived, I got to spend the entire weekend with my pals Nel and Kate, who are both studying French with me up in Edinburgh and who are both now scattered across France too! The whole weekend was cracking and involved plenty of alcohol and complaining about the bitter cold and wandering around Lyon at night.
Lyon is lovely, by the way, you should visit.

still not clear whether this animatronic dragon featuring two men in white jumpsuits on its back playing guitar and synth was part of the festival or not

2. The terrible French assessment season.
Imagine that you are a student who has, through no fault of their own, been forced into taking 6 subjects. Imagine that each of these subjects takes up a minimum of 2 hours a week, but most of them take up 3 hours. Then imagine that all of these subjects require you to do three pieces of assessment in the months of November and December. Mm, doesn't that make you feel cosy?
Then imagine that they also have January exams to put the cherry on top of a wonderful academic semester. Then imagine that they don't release the exam dates until after everyone has left to go back to their own home countries, and that there are 4 exams scheduled for the same time.
These are all things which have happened to me over the past few months. I'm *this* close to banging my head solidly against my lovely French wooden flooring.

3. I bought a space heater.
€14 off amazon.fr. I would just continue to use the space heater from the bathroom, but I think my housemates have noticed and if I don't put it back soon, I'll never be able to put it back.

4. My housemate's cat stopped loving me over the Christmas break.
Pretty self-explanatory. She's called Desperado (yes, after the beer) and we call her Desper or Despet or something - it's one of those French words that I'm not 100% sure on so I tend to mumble the last bit on purpose.

5. I went on a little jaunt to Paris.
I almost forgot this one! Just before the Christmas break, it was my good friend Fede's birthday, so I headed out into Paris a day earlier than I would have done for my flight home and we spent a day stomping around the capital city, seeking out tourist attractions. Unfortunately, l'Orangerie was closed, but we found Galeries Lafayette in all its Christmassy glory, saw the Eiffel Tower from a distance and spotted that bridge with all the padlocks that has had to be boarded up because it's so heavy the council think it's going to fall into the Seine.

the christmas ceiling at galeries lafayette, a huge shopping centre in paris

 

 

the padlocks have spread down the sides of the river now

It's the first chance I've had to see the kind of tourist version of Paris that most people have seen; whenever I've visited in the past, we have seen maybe one or two monuments and then driven (yes! Driven!) away. This time, I had to buy a carnet of tickets for the Metro and use my actual legs to get places.

jardin des tuileries shot, feat. fede's head

The day was rounded off nicely because I stayed overnight with my friend from Edinburgh, Meg, where we stayed up late nattering as we are wont to do (however, note to self: staying up drinking until 3am is not a good idea when you have to get up at 8.30am for your flight). Not only that, but my old flatmate from Edinburgh was also in town! We had grand plans to get a nice meal, ended up missing all the restaurant hours, and ordered slightly drunk kebabs in Frenglish instead. What can I say? You can take the girls out of the UK...

This has been quite an Edinburgh-centric post, really, but it is so wonderful meeting up with old friends in new places. One of my new year's resolutions is to visit as many people as I can in as many wonderful places as I can; me and Eleri sat down yesterday and wrote a list of Things To Do Before We Go.

can you spot the eiffel tower?

There's plenty of things left to cram in to the next 4-and-a-bit months: Strasbourg, Montpellier, Omaha beach, Le Havre, more Paris, my 21st birthday, Toulouse, Grenoble, Giverny, Versailles, possibly trips abroad to Belgium, Italy, Germany and Scandinavia, maybe Bordeaux and Champagne too! Thank you to the ERSAMUS gods for your generous grants. We salute you!

Anyway, before all of that, I have to pass my January exams, which isn't looking likely, so, wish me luck and tell me to stop procrastinating!

Gros bis,
Josie
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