Discoveries.

Last night I met at a local café/bar with a group of geography and history majors from the university here. At dinner, a fellow exchange student in my house with more gall than I have said he was meeting them just after dinner. I was hesitant to accept because there are plenty of needless stereotypes that we have of French people: that they aren’t helpful, they don’t want to be friends with other people etc. But upon a monologue of insistence by my host mother, Isabelle, I showered and got ready to go out. So off we went into the night: me, my 33 year old Tawainese “brother” and the German student, who despite being a geography major had less than an exact memory of where we intended to go. And again, he had the courage to stop 3 different groups of people on the street to ask where the bar was. (Not something I’ve made a habit of.) Well, luckily the third group of people knew the place we were looking for and allowed us to follow them there. The three of us found a table of about 8 students outside of the Vert Anglais, just talking and enjoying the weather before it officially becomes fall here. I was introduced and began conversing. I talked quite a bit with my “brothers” of course but I spent the whole night only speaking French. As other students came and went according to their plans, I slowly was less shocked every time the southern three kisses of greeting or parting was so readily offered and expected of me. I talked about what I’d like to do. I got the chance to listen to French conversation between friends and I spent the whole night being the only American. For my first time hanging out with French students, I’m still reeling by how much fun it was to spend a night doing what would be considered usual.
I went to a three hour theatre class this morning, which managed to instill the same giddiness for reading I had in a freshman theatre class at Carolina. It’s refreshing to know I still want to learn.
And now. Now I’m sitting at a salon de thé two blocks from my house. Despite having had 4 and half hours of class today I still want to do work. This is odd. Maybe it started with the run I went on yesterday just before dinner and the sunset. I’ve been here a time or two already, only with friends. But today, I came alone. To sit, to type, to write, to watch. And to drink a pot of fantastic chai tea. I’m nearly done with my third cup of tea, which seems to be the universe’s way of creating a natural ending to this fun.
But just a little happiness of today. When I was brought the pot of chai, a woman that works here asked me in French if this was my second time here and if I’d ordered the chai previously too. Now that things are settling, I’m finding routine. I’m finding simplicity. I’m finding cups of tea and discovering that it’s possible to become a “regular”. I’m finding that I could be home.

Tomorrow is laundry day.

After two weeks in France, there are days I still an in awe that I am here. I can't predict if it will dawn on me suddenly one morning that I am currently a resident of Montpellier, a city bathed in the light of the Mediterranean sun in the South of France. I suppose I haven't thought to post anything until now because I'm still attempting to grasp everything I see and hold on as if I were staying another four hours and not another four months.
Tomorrow is laundry day. And when I come back from beaching it on the Mediterranean, there will be damp clothing hanging on the line in the walled off garden behind the house that's adopted me for my stay here. I say this intentionally because it has been standing since 1669 and I can only claim just over twenty years worth of experiences. The cracks between the 8-foot tall doors whistle when it's windy outside and the haunting feeling from that sound is overshadowed by the warmth of lamplight.
I live with a woman in her fifties, a woman who has several lifetimes of stories she keeps saved for dinner time. And I live with three other foreign students in a constant rotation of leaving and returning.
We leave the 10-foot high windows open nearly all the time and the breeze helps summer air diffuse through the house. Occasionally people stop to comment at the neighbor's cat, Napoléon, who has adopted my room and window as his own. Or at night, I hear conversations of people walking by at all hours, in transit to some other place. Sometimes it gets a little noisy when a moped, or worse, a skateboard attempts to navigate the cobbly street. But it's home. And tomorrow, it will be my laundry on the line, and my glasses on the coffee table, and my lemons on the bookshelf.

List of Lists.

So before I venture out and cross the Atlantic, my summer will be spent teaching kids to rock climb at a camp near the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. This means two things.

1. I will be spending as much time outside as possible, walking the line of having to be super-safe and super-responsible at all times and enjoying a summer of peter pan syndrome.
2. I have four days between an eight week stint in the woods and flying from Charlotte to Paris on August 15th.

So inevitably I have lots to do in the three-and-a-half weeks before leaving for camp. And because I tend to make lists, I now have a list of lists. It includes...

1. Trips that must be taken all before June 13th. (including Crowder's Mountain, NC; Chapel Hill, NC; Carderock, MD; Atlanta, GA; Saluda, NC; Etters and White Deer, PN)
2. Things to get rid of.
3. Things to buy. (thankfully much shorter than #2)
4. Things to organize and clean.
5. Things to read. (from suggested books to the selfish time I spend online with the nytimes and Foreign Policy)
6. Foods to try out. (quinoa is checked off the list thanks to Hannah)
7. addresses to obtain.
8. and most importantly communication that needs to happen. (emails, phone calls, visits, movie nights and dinners)

Now, this is probably just a crazy attempt to remind myself that sleeping late and other things associated with summers off don't apply at the current moment. But at least it's recorded. The next step. Checking things off.

The beginning.

During a time which I should be working on the final few assignments I have left, instead I find myself in a room surrounded by a rooftop moss garden planning a train ride. From Paris to Montpellier, France. It's so far ahead of my actual departure date, that the scnf website is telling me that my reservation can't officially be confirmed yet. (For if I can navigate the French page, instead of the one designated for Americans, tickets are half the price. Hmm. Thanks for the ego boost, Frenchies.)

The thing I like about trains, and planes and cars and buses and bikes (my preferred method), for that matter are that they provide the rider with a state of nearly perpetual motion, of restlessness. So at any moment, by the time someone conceives the need to identify where they are, they are somewhere else. It reminds me that very few things stay the same. And slowly that quote that my mother has said to me several times, begins to seem more real. Because 'Wherever you go, there you are."