space wars

I spend a lot of time in public transportation. For the most part, I love it. It gives me time to read, listen to new music, people watch, think about things I want to do, think about things I don't want to do and just generally sit and do nothing until I reach my destination. It's great.

...but. I have my beef with the Parisian metros sometimes. Let me rephrase that: I have my beef with Parisians. Period. I get my fill of them when I'm making my way through the city by metro. There's kind of a personal space issue - the issue being they don't need it and I do. I need more than the average person maybe. My personal bubble is constantly being permeated by people here on a daily basis on the sidewalks, in stores, waiting in lines, but especially on the metro. Whether the metro is crowded or not, I can never escape people bumping up against me, sitting half on my lap half on their seat, stepping on my toes, and the list goes on. The worst, in my opinion, is when I want to get off of the metro, there's no courtesy space allowing people to exit the metro car - people just crowd around on the platform and charge once the doors open. This annoys me to no end. It's hectic, annoying and sometimes painful to get out when you're facing a sea of pushy Parisians. In my head, it looks like this...me vs. everyone:

That's just trying to exit. Let's talk sitting for a 30-minute commute with strangers all up in your business. A few months ago, I had one of my most awkward metro moments ever because I became personally involved in a scenario dealing with a guy across from me falling asleep. It was cramped, like always, and my metro neighbor was reading a book and simultaneously falling asleep. I didn't have an issue with this until his book started to get lower...lower....lower...and now it's resting in my lap. So I had this inner struggle for a while. 

"Do I wake him up? Do I move the book? If I move the book will I accidentally wake him up? Maybe he needs sleep. I should let him be. But what if my metro stop comes before his and I try not to wake him up and his book falls on the floor? He'll lose his page. Maybe I could memorize the page number so when he does lose the page I can remind him what page he was on. Maybe he'll miss his metro stop. Should I ask him when he wants to wake up?" I mean, really, a ridiculous dialogue in my head but I felt personally involved once his book was sitting in my lap. You might think I'm crazy for even wondering about these things, but I once saw a woman reach across into another woman's purse because her metro neighbor's cell phone was ringing and she couldn't find it fast enough. I guess she thought she was being helpful, although I thought she was walking a fine line between looking helpful and looking like a straight up thief. Strange things happen on public transportation. I get sucked in.

Last week I was sitting across from a guy who was chewing his gum like a horse. Naturally, it fell out of his mouth and tumbled onto my knee. Seriously? Seriously.

So what's a girl to do when she's had enough of people invading her space? Pack up and head to the country, that's what. A short and sweet trip to the Burgundy region of France with more space than I knew what to do with in the company of five of my amazing friends. If I was any more relaxed, I would have slipped into a coma. The house belongs to the parents of my friend, Ben - it's their summer house located about three hours southeast of Paris...with more space than I could ever ask for!

I'm not posting these pictures to make you jealous. Ok, that's a lie. 

Oh, and Martha Stewart, eat your heart out:

Me, Nora, Ben, Adam, Evan and Shauneen at very old church in a nearby town

Entrance to the house

Walking around enjoying the space because we can

Inside the house

We ate every meal outside

I just don't think anything beats French bread

From left: Evan, Shauneen, Ben, Me and Adam.

I'm not gonna lie, we spent a lot of time here

turning into prunes

Ben's preparations for the delicious meal he made for us all

Before devouring it in 5 minutes flat

Dinner by candlelight

The building in the back has a wood-fire oven inside for making bread and pizzas...I'm going to need one of those someday

Ben's family's super old car...that still works!

Fresh lavender

Walking around the small village

Getting our daily dose of fresh berries

The cows migrated over towards the pool at the end of the day...

...and they got pretty close to us

Kicking and screaming, we returned to Paris to face another week. Nobody was ready to leave. But as of yesterday, finals are over and my summer break officially started today. I'm looking forward to traveling a little bit, relaxing a lot and getting ready for my last semester of grad school this fall. Where has the time gone?!

it turns out, i'm not a tourist

What a week, what a month, what I life I've got going on here. Last week was one of the first weeks I realized that I have a life here in Paris and that I'm not just a glorified tourist getting my master's degree (yes, it took a year to come to this conclusion - don't judge me). When I leave here eventually, I'll have friends to say goodbye to, routines to abandon, and physical things to pack up that have been acquired from my time here in Paris and from my various travels to other countries. When you move somewhere new, there's an art to getting into the groove and finding the sweet spot where you belong. I've got my apartment, my Starbucks, my hairdresser, my metro stop, my park, my grocery store, my shortcuts, my secrets to the city that you can't get from a week-long vacation through the eyes of a visitor.

This realization came after a great friend of mine left France this week...my Marie. I've been anticipating her departure for a few months now, but didn't know how sad I would be until I went to say goodbye last week. Marie is approaching 80 years old and within the past year her memory has been deteriorating slowly but surely. Lately when I've been going to visit her for lunch, we would spend hours looking for things she's misplaced, I would listen to her tell me things she's told me about hundreds of times, I would ask why the table was set for 6 people instead of 2 and I would leave fearing that she would accidentally leave the stove on and burn the whole apartment complex down. I brought Marie to the airport a year ago so that she could visit her daughter who lives in a tiny island off of the coast of Africa called Reunion Island (known as La Réunion, it's a French territory). I talked to Marie's daughter to let her know I got her to the airport and on the plane just fine.  It was then that her daughter expressed that she was concerned about her mom's ability to live alone for much longer and I agreed because Marie's usual absent mindedness seems to be headed towards something more serious. Marie knows her memory loss is problematic and it's sad for me to see her get so frustrated about it. So this year, instead of going for a visit, it was decided that Marie would move to Reunion Island to live with her daughter where she's got someone watching out for her if/when things get worse. To get an idea of how far away this island is, here's a map of Africa - the island is just off the coast of Madagascar:

I've never known France without Marie, she was my first friend here when I studied abroad in 2006 and has been a fixture in my life ever since. We had the perfect last day together, though - we "oohed" and "ahhed" over her fancy new passport, she read me the rules from the new passport in its entirety (for the second time), we went to her favorite park, went out to lunch, ran into her favorite neighbors who had thrown my going away party in 2006, and she asked me to help her perfect the only English phrase she knows..."As you like it" - which always sounds funny and comes out with a thick French accent no matter how much I emphasize my American accent in order to get her to say it right...it's always more like "Hazz yeww lieg eet".  As our perfect day came to an end, my heart sank as she walked me outside because I knew it would probably be the last time I would see her.  Although the invite to visit Marie is open, as she has assured me multiple times, I'm not sure that a trip to the island is in my near future. Here are a few pictures from the last couple of times I went to Marie's:

Waiting for lunch

Marie ran out to this statue during lunch so she could report back to me exactly how the man and woman carved into it were standing

I love this picture because it shows Marie's shall we say...eclectic way of decorating and a picture of when she had me and my family over for dinner in 2006.

Reading me the rules to her new passport over Easter lunch

I don't know why it took Marie leaving for me to come to the realization that I've built a life here, however temporary it may be. Maybe it's because I'm usually the one leaving France, not the one being left behind. It seems fitting and also a strange coincidence that the same week I found my sweet spot here was the same week I officially got my residence permit to live in France, something that has been several months in the making. So here I am, a real resident - legally and mentally.

an unpaid advertisement for malta:

Ah, Malta. There's so many things to say about this strange little country. Jaime and I were completely surprised by everything Malta has to offer and we would both go back in a heartbeat. Sometimes you visit a place and leave thinking to yourself Alright, not bad, glad I went but I don't need to see it again.  This was not one of those places...gotta go back. 

The island is super tiny - it's got a population of around 400,000 and you can get from north to south in about an hour.  Jaime and I relied heavily on public transportation to get everywhere because they a) drive on the other side of the road and b) drive manual cars. Not happening. It took us maybe three full days to even learn how to look out for oncoming cars when we were crossing the streets...and even then we sometimes were looking at the wrong lane and doing the whole street dance where you run out to cross and then realize you shouldn't have and then contemplate finishing what you started or just making a run for it. I usually ran for it, Jaime usually went back. When we could find crosswalks, they were our best friends and usually the only time we made it across the road together. So, we took a liking to the buses. And who wouldn't? Look at these gems...they are all unique, most were pretty old (and consequently, not the most comfortable rides I've ever had) and the best part...one ticket was .47 cents!

The people in general were so nice, super helpful and most of them spoke English. The bus drivers, however, were another breed. Jaime and I had noticed that the buses didn't really come to a full stop when picking people up or dropping people off, they were a little impatient with traffic and loved to take corners really fast. We thought that maybe it was our Minnesota Nice mentality shining through but our observations were confirmed by a local shop owner the day before we left saying that yes, the bus drivers and crazy, rude and impatient. And here is further evidence that they just don't care...this picture was taken in the middle of a bus route.  Our bus driver pulled over, took the keys to the bus and walked over to a convenience store where he chatted it up for several minutes with a worker. He then came back with a sandwich that I thought maybe he would eat while driving. Well, here he is...outside of the bus just leaning up against the wall enjoying his sandwich while we all stared at him from inside. 15 - 20 minutes later we were back on the road. It was bizarre.  

Jaime has a knack for finding awesome places to stay while vacationing and the place she scored in Malta gets first prize, hands down. We had an entire Maltese "house" to ourselves...there's not much space in the capital city of Valletta so our house was stacked and had four stories: the first floor was a kitchen/sitting area, the second and third floors were bedrooms and the fourth floor was a rooftop terrace. I don't know what was better, the prime location or the unique decor...part of me thinks the decorating wins - it kind of felt like we were living in the pages of a magazine or something.

The House

First floor sitting area

This creepy monkey pillow slowly won me over and I liked him by the end of the week

Second floor bedroom

Lots of stairs all to ourselves

The only thing Jaime and I decided was missing from the house was a basket. The first morning I was getting ready and I saw a basket across the street being let down from someone's window...naturally we had to go check it out and creep on the neighbor. Little did we know this would be an every day occurrence, but we were both completely fascinated by the basket situation. Basically, there are little convenience stores/grocery stores on the streets - and I really mean little. The one next to us was maybe the size of a full bathroom in an American home...it could either be me, Jaime and the owner inside or one of us, a stranger and the owner - three is the limit for being able to move around in there.  So people living around these shops drop their baskets out of the window while the shop owner runs over and puts their items inside and voilà - shopping is done! Even after creeping around every day watching this happen, we still aren't sure about the logistics like how does the shop owner know what to put in the basket?, how do they get paid?, etc. It's probably better that I live in a place where the whole basket thing wouldn't work - in the winter I'm not sure if I would ever leave my apartment. Here's the exchange in action:

We spent a lot of time just walking around the tiny streets because they all had so much character. By the end of our visit we both had a ton of pictures of door knockers and handles. Every door had something unique...since they don't have space really, I felt like this was their version of a suburban competition between neighbors of my lawn is greener than yours but they've got competing doorknockers instead.

Since the island is so small, we were able to travel around to different areas pretty easily.  It wouldn't have been a complete trip without me getting roped into a conversation with an elderly local gentleman...this happens on every vacation I take for some reason. Jaime was a victim of this interaction because we were coerced into taking a boat ride with this man around the harbor at sunset.  It turned out to be a good time, despite the fact that it was a little chilly, a little long and the apple of my eye was missing some digits on his left hand. 

Our new friend on his boat

He insisted on taking a picture of us on our boat ride. Between the wind, the waves, his shaky hands and the absense of some important fingers, I was terrified for the entire time he was holding my camera. It all turned out ok in the end...my camera did not go overboard, which is all I could have asked for.

On the way back to dry land

Before we got on the boat

After the boat ride we grabbed dinner along this harbor

We also made it to Malta's former capital city called Mdina. It's a completely walled in medieval town that's fairly small (I would say you could walk across the whole thing front to back in several minutes) and has a population of around 300 people. It was pretty quiet when we were there but I could see the potential for it to become a tourist trap during the right part of the day.  We walked around the city, shopped around in stores that boasted an impressive collection of it's famous glass in various forms (I miraculously escaped without breaking anything) and had a little break for tea + cake at a café that had been recommended to us. So to sum up Mdina - tea, cake, glass:

tea

cake

glass

One morning we ventured out to Marsaxlokk, a fishing village in the southeastern part of the island. Not surprisingly, it smelled overwhelmingly of fish and there were avid fishermen fixing things on their boats all up and down the boardwalk.  The water was unbelievably blue and the boats were so colorful...it looked like something out of a travel book. Ok, so actually it was the picture on the front of our Malta travel book that we had with us...but usually those are photo-shopped and look better than reality so when you get somewhere you're a little disappointed you aren't seeing things through a photo-shopped lens. BUT, this place was maybe better than the travel guide pictures.

And lastly we journeyed in our favorite buses way north for beaches and sun - the only sandy beaches are in the north, the rest of the island basically consists of giant flat rocks leading out to the ocean. We took the bus to the edge of the island and then hopped on a ferry that took us out to an even smaller island called Comino. It was on this ferry where I gained a new-found respect for the sea...the boat was small, the waves were big and there were a few times were I was pretty sure I would find out what it meant to capsize. It looked and felt like we were on some crazy amusement park ride except we had the joy of not being able to get off even if we wanted to. And we wanted to. But the good news is we made it there and it was beautiful. We spent some time at the blue lagoon - to clarify this is not THE blue lagoon but just a lagoon that happens to be blue. And it was so very blue.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and so we left Malta the next morning. It was probably for the best, though, because Jaime and I both miscalculated our proximity to the equator and on this day suffered severe sunburns. It didn't look cool when it was bright red, it didn't look cool a couple of days later when it turned purple and it doesn't look cool now, peeling off in all its glory. I hope we both have learned that our ivory Minnesota skin can't handle sun like that for when we visit again...which will definitely happen.

seeing green

Last week I saw the smallest sign that we've made it through another winter...trees that are almost green and blossoms that are ready to open! The first signs of spring never used to excite me, I always thought that was for old people who had nothing better to be excited about. So maybe it's my old age, but but seeing green totally made my week. 

For the past month I've been completely consumed with writing my thesis proposal. It's what keeps me shut in for six hours at a time at Starbucks when it's 70 degrees and sunny outside. But apparently it's not going to write itself, something I discovered at the beginning of last month. It's due April 15th so it will be nice to have it turned in and off of my plate. The latest version I emailed to my advisor for him to review just said "Here it is...I can't look at it anymore!" I'm sure he's sick of looking at it, too. We're both anxiously awaiting the 15th I think.

I did get a break a couple of weekends ago when my friend Peter came to visit.  He is currently living in Spain, but he hit me up on his way back from a trip to Amsterdam and it was just what I needed. A weekend with no schoolwork and lots of hanging out.  One night we went to an uppity bar that our friend, Kate, works at...we spent one drink being fancy and then headed out to do something a little more low key...street food and wandering around the city. We also got some quality café time in, as well as a sushi lunch, some more wandering around and some making fun of American tourists when we grabbed wine by the Eiffel Tower.

The visit was short and sweet, but a nice break in the middle of a very busy month. Next up - Jaime and I are heading to Malta on Saturday! Don't know where Malta is? I didn't either until about 2 months ago. Word on the street is that it's a verrrrrry tiny island just south of Italy. It's so small that it's not even deserving of a dot on this map apparently. But you get the idea...sun and ocean. Updates on that trip coming soon - gotta get there first.