A bientôt, France!

So we just finished finals and we are officially done with school!!! We are pretty excited about this. We had ten final exams and a paper, and although it rather consumed our lives for a while I won’t go into detail about it since I know from personal experience that that many exams is not something anybody wants to think about.

And now we’re done and we’re back in that in-between spot, that sort of suspended point in time where you’re neither coming nor going but you’re waiting to do both. If I thought it seemed surreal and strange when I was leaving the U.S. for France, I need to invent a new word for what I feel like now, because this is probably about as surreal as you can get. I can’t believe we’re leaving. I can’t believe it’s over. It happened so fast and so suddenly. I can’t believe I won’t be speaking French on a regular basis in a few days. I can’t believe I am about to see my parents, here! I can’t believe I’m going home! But more than all of that, maybe, I can’t believe I’m leaving Dijon.

I can't believe this all already happened. I can't believe everything we were anticipating and wondering about has already passed. I can't believe it's already June. I can't believe junior year is over! I can't believe it when I look back on our first week in Europe, Helen and me wandering around London with a great unknown semester stretching out in front of us, and think about where we are now and what we've done since then.

I have kind of been putting off writing this blog, this last, good-bye blog, and I’ve been really busy but I think I actually just didn’t want to write it. I’m so full of different emotions that it’s kind of hard to think about sometimes—I feel like I can’t contain all the thoughts I have. I remember feeling this way at the beginning, when it was all new: I wanted to write down every other thought I had so I could remember everything. I feel that way now, but it’s because it’s all old, and everything takes on significance that way. I went into the FNAC to buy cell phone minutes and a man working there walked up to a customer, shook his hand and said, “Salut, ça va?” and I wanted to write that down because I suddenly realized I would miss hearing that. The littlest things seem significant now that we’re leaving.

The saddest part is leaving everybody. I don’t think it has actually sunk in that I am leaving my host mom yet. Maybe I'm trying to ignore it. Big changes are always weird because your life has to go on as normal in the days preceding. I’ve been going to school and getting lunch and doing everything as usual. It feels like normal life, except then suddenly in three days I’m going to leave and I’m never going to live here again.

Yesterday we had our very last Wednesday dinner at the Condorcet and it was so much fun. It was just us and Nathalie for once, and we just had a great time in each other’s company, singing and joking and talking. Dani had put together a surprise slideshow for us of pictures from throughout the semester, and it was really emotional watching it. Afterwards, we were all hugging and some people were crying and we started singing songs with lyrics that meant a lot to us in light of our departure. After we finally left the Condo, we went to a bar and reminisced about the semester and told stories. It was a perfect last dinner and a really good thing to do. It was filled with laughter and tears, but mostly with a lot of love. That sounds cheesy, but I really feel like our group became a little family this semester. We’re all going to miss each other so much and, again, I am so grateful that this is the group that got chosen and that we were all here together. It was better than I could’ve asked for. I’m so glad we all go to Puget Sound so we don’t have to truly say goodbye right now. And it goes without saying that saying goodbye to Nathalie is going to be really hard, as well; she’s been such a wonderful guide, teacher and mother to us all throughout the semester.

The last few days, I’ve been loving walking around Dijon and just looking at what has been my home this semester, all the places we go and everything I pass by every day. It’s a pretty city. I know I’ll come back here someday, but it is still hard that this is ending. I am ready to go home and I’m definitely ready to see my parents and friends; things like this do come to their natural end. I don’t feel like I am necessarily going to miss France, but I am going to miss the people and the language and the experience. We can come back to France, but we can never get this experience back again. It was something so singular and special and once-in-a-lifetime, and no matter how often we see each other next year or when we return to France, we’ll never be able to have it again. That’s probably the hardest part. I know I’ll see my host mom again, I’ll see the Dijonettes all the time next year, Nathalie is coming to visit us at Puget Sound in October. But the experience, the combination of everything we had here and the way we lived our lives, can never happen again.

There is so much to say and it’s so hard to remember all the things I’ve thought and felt over the last few weeks, but I also feel like it’s all just different incarnations of the same thing. To keep this fairly short, this just feels weird. I honestly can’t believe it and I’m sad to go, but I’m excited for traveling with my parents and for this summer, and I have lots of great memories to look back on.

When I left my host family in Costa Rica the summer before my senior year of high school, I said “adios” as I was saying goodbye to my host parents. We were crying, and our host mom hugged us. “Nunca es adios,” our host dad said. “Siempre es hasta luego.” It’s never good-bye, it’s always see you later. And it’s true. I’ll come back to France and I’ll be able to spend more time with Nathalie and my host mom in the future, whether in France or the U.S., and I know that our Dijonette family will still find time for Wednesday dinners next school year. So, France, I guess this is it. Thank you so much for everything. I won’t say au revior—it’s à bientôt!

our wonderful group on our last excursion

france, nous t'aimons.

Travel Catch-Up: Vélez-Málaga and Flavigny

So thanks to finals, we have all been pretty swamped and busy for the last couple of weeks so this is sort of a catch-up blog to write about my trips to Spain and Flavigny!

Two weekends ago, I met up with Amber in Málaga for a little vacation! I took the train to Paris and flew to Málaga, where we met. After a bit of a struggle in the rain with the buses and trying to find each other, we successfully (but with minutes to spare) made our way to the real bus station (not the one I’d been dropped off at, of course) and were on our tired way to Vélez-Málaga, a small town in Andalucía. Luckily, my first twenty minutes in Spain were not indicative of the rest of the trip, weather- and otherwise.

We struggled some more with maps once we actually got to Vélez, because of course the bus did not drop us off where it had said it was going to so our directions weren’t exactly helpful. Also, this was a pit stop for Amber on her way back to the U.S. so she had an extremely huge backpack to deal with. Suffice it to say that we definitely looked like tourists as we wandered around the small town. We did, however, find our hotel, and it was great! My dad had done the planning for us mostly since we’d both been having midterms at the time and he found the most charming hotel that had really cheap apartments. Our apartment turned out to be so cute, and it was amazing to have a kitchen. We cooked all our meals, which was really fun in addition to money-saving! There was also a lovely pool and wifi in the room so it was basically perfect.

perfection

We just hung out the first evening because we were both really tired and we hadn’t seen each other in so long that we had lots of chatting to do (I mean, when do we not have lots of chatting to do, really?). We found the grocery store and got ingredients for a delicious pasta salad and we watched a movie online. The next day, it was forecast to rain and I had oh-so-wisely decided to do this trip the week before our finals started (in my defense, it wasn’t officially finals week and I hadn’t known I would have three finals and a paper for this week when I’d booked the trip) so we decided to hang out in the room so I could get some work done. It did get sunny at one point, so we went down to the pool and read outside for a while, but it wasn’t warm enough to swim.

The next day we wanted to go to the beach but we slept late and we couldn’t figure out the tram system so instead we went exploring in the town. We walked up the hill behind our hotel to a church and went inside it. It had a semana santa (Easter week) museum. We then kept trekking up the hill, past a lot of apartments and Spanish people talking to one another from their doorways, to the fortress. This was really cool. We couldn’t go inside so I don’t know its name or anything about the history of it, although Amber knew from her classes in Spain that it was built by the Moors. It was surrounded by native trees and flowers and it had a great view of the city. I love all the terra cotta and white buildings. There was a small circle of tiled ground at the top with a bench, so we sat up there for a while in the shade and made a bucket list for senior year. The flowers were so pretty!

Sunday we succeeded in finding the beach! It was really hot outside and we took a picnic with us. It was warm enough to go in the ocean and we actually swam around for quite a while!

In all, it was a really relaxing weekend. It was nice to have a vacation that was low-key for once and not jam-packed with sightseeing! From the Málaga airport, Amber took off for home and I flew back to Charles de Gaulle, whence I began a roundabout and long train journey home.

When I got back, Michel had arrived! Then we had three days of school, the last of which, Thursday, included three tests, which wasn’t stressful at all. On Wednesday our class (the five of us in 5A) had lunch with Michel and we all went out to dinner together at Place de la Liberation, one of the prettiest places in Dijon. We ate outside and had a rollicking good time. I even rode a double-decker bike when a guy came around offering free rides to promote his custom bike shop! It was fairly frightening but also hilarious, and it was fun. I would never have agreed to do it before this semester.

I don’t even remember what we did on Friday, but on Saturday we met up bright and early and set off for our last last excursion to Flavigny, with Michel and Valery, Nathalie’s husband, along. We went first to the Château de Bussy-Rabutin, which was beautiful! The castle itself was actually pretty boring. Our tour consisted solely of going in near-identical rooms, the walls of which were all covered with paintings of people and other castles, and our guide explaining the portraits. But the surrounding gardens were great! We went through a non-maze (it was like a maze but there was only one path so we really just went in a spiral until we finally got to the middle. Then we had to walk all the way back out. Don’t worry, though, we entertained ourselves by pretending we were doing the third task of the Triwizard Tournament), the sun came out and we even got Michel to take a jumping picture with us.

why, hello, castle

part of the lovely gardens

us after winning the triwizard tournament. thankfully, we didn't have any run-ins with voldemort, although we did find the portkey...

Lunch was typical but fun and afterward we drove on to Flavigny, the town where Chocolat was filmed! Michel and Valery made a hilarious pair and they were thoroughly entertaining on the way there. We walked around the town, which was small and quiet but pretty, and went to the shop that sells the famous anise candies of Flavigny. They are little candies that come in lots of flavors, from rose to cassis to ginger and more, and inside there is an anise seed. It’s a secret recipe and no one else has ever been able to replicate the candies!

We all passed out in the bus on the way home, and we were sad when we got off the bus and had to say goodbye to Michel and realize that this was truly our last excursion ever. It was so much fun, though, and a perfect thing to do on our last real weekend here. Once again I just had such a great time with the others and Nathalie, and it was special to have Michel around. And that concluded the semester’s travels for me after I think six weekends in a row of travel! Of course, I still have my trip with my parents, but the semester will be officially OVER (thankfully) by then! I can’t believe it.