France

I made my way from Madrid to Paris by train last Thursday. Elisabeth and her mom picked me up and we went back to her house in a suburb of the city, on the way passing a sparkling Eiffel Tower, which blinks every hour on the hour at night. We stayed up and chatted for a while, me warming up my English. It felt nice to be in someone´s house again, a place with a mom, food accessible at all hours, two cats running around and my own little room. On Friday Elisabeth showed me around her little town which is where Claude Debussy lived, so we visited his house (now a museum, kind of boring) and I touched his conductor´s suit. That night we all (Elisabeth, her mom, her brother and I) went to the Tracy Chapman concert in Paris.

Paris is beautiful and to me looks a lot like Madrid, but a classier, more French version. Elisabeth and I spent probably as much time underneath the city as above. We skipped the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower (although both look lovely from the outside) and instead toured the catacombs and the sewers. Back in the day the cemeteries were apparently causing the spread of disease, so the bones of six million Parisians were transported to an old limestone mine 20 meters below the city and stacked into pretty little walls that seem to go on for miles. The sewers were disgusting, but I probably learned as much about the history of Paris though that tour as I would have in any other. The Pompidou modern art museum was amazing as well.

To Tours on Monday, where I stayed with my cousin Rachel at her host mom´s apartment. Tours was cute and Christmasy, with lights everywhere and a Christmas market set up down one of the streets. Rachel had school every morning, then afterwards we tromped around the city and I was in awe of all the pretty Frenchness. One day we went to a famous chateau a short train ride away, the one that was built right over a river. Thursday to Montpellier, where I met up with Audrey and stayed in her apartment (no host mom and currently no roommate there). We cooked some good French meals, saw the city, and caught up on lots of gossip. And I saw my first American TV in three months: Jerry Springer! It was the only American show not dubbed in French. The U.S. really needs to regulate the shows it exports.

I´m back in Madrid now, which I started to miss when I was in France. I could tell I was back the minute I crossed the border, the pretty white cottages stopped and all of a sudden there were ugly, stacked apartment complexes with clothes hanging on lines and tiny, red-shingled houses a century older pressed right in between them. And all of a sudden purple, orange and lime-green matched. Ahh, Spain. I missed my house too, where apparently everything happened when I was gone.

Six days till I come home.