After sending my mom some beautiful pictures of Paris in the spring and many persuasive emails, I convinced her to come visit me for the second time! Being a great tennis player and fan, she came back in May just before the French Open. We visited Roland Garros, which was completely empty and closed off as they prepared for the arrival of thousands of fans and the best tennis players in the world but still very exciting to see! We stayed at the same lovely apartment, which kind of became my home away from home (host family) away from home (Denver) away from home (Saint Paul)! We visited the same boulangerie and had our favorite ham and cheese sandwiches on baguettes at Luxembourg Gardens, and my mom discovered the amazingness of berthillon, the original French ice cream made on Ile-Saint-Louis in the middle of Paris.
We were lucky because my Aunt Marie and Uncle Don were in Paris at the same time, and we got to have dinner with them at their lovely hotel right by the Opera. It was just one of many examples I had seen during the year of the spacious, extravagant places you would never know are inside the tiny doorways of Paris. We had a wonderful dinner together even though we were not ambitious enough to try the very tall seafood tower we saw at a nearby table! I also got to ride in my one and only taxi in Paris, which I had tried to avoid until then in favor of the less expensive and very entertaining metro and night buses! My only car ride in Paris showed even another beautiful side of the city that one could never see all of in a lifetime!
As springtime came to Paris, the city got even more beautiful. After a long, gray winter of rainy days, I spent a lot more time outside in the spring and discovered even more of Paris by walking around for hours at a time and usually getting lost. One of my favorite things to do was to go down by the Seine River at night, have picnics there, see many of my French and American friends, and meet people from all over the world. Any night of the week, there were people talking, laughing, playing guitar, and dancing all along the river until the sun set or, in my case, until a few minutes before 2 am when we would run to the metro to get on before it closed for the night! If we missed the last metro, we could always stay out until 6 am when the metro started up again!
Before I knew it, my friends at school were leaving to go back to the states and to their home countries all over the world. Depending on their study abroad programs or personal schedules, people were leaving from the beginning of May through June. I left the day after my classes ended, and spent my last hours in Paris doing last-minute packing and staying up the whole night because I had to go to the airport very early the next morning and because I did not want the year to end. I miss all of the friends I have made in Paris, France, Morocco, and beyond, but it helps to know that many of them are still returning home and getting used to life in the states just like I am. It is hard to think that the best year ever is over, but I am excited to go back to classes at DU and continue to experience moments of reverse culture shock and things that I love about America.
For example, the day I got home to Minnesota from Paris, my uncle asked if I could use his office's Twins tickets for that night. I was exhausted from nine hours on a plane, sooo not excited to be in America for the most part, and very far behind on my baseball news after being in a land of soccer, tennis, and rugby fans for nine months. Nevertheless, I went to the game and had a great time! A few days later, I went to the Barbary Fig, a Mediterranean restaurant a few blocks from my house to have couscous like in Morocco. I was anxious to try it because one of my last nights on the Seine, I met the son of the Algerian owner, who couldn't believe I was from Saint Paul and lived a few streets away from the restaurant! So besides having a good dinner, I met the owner and even spoke a little French with him!
I miss speaking French every day, and it's amazing how fast it goes away when you don't practice! That is why I am excited for all of my friends to come back to Denver and for the ones who were in Paris with me to speak French with me! I also had the chance to go back to my favorite French bakery in Denver and speak French with the woman who is still there even though I hadn't been back for almost a year. I am looking forward to my last year at DU and figuring out where I will go from there. If I had one guess, I would say back to France as soon as possible!
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