Smorgasbord of topics

This Past Wednesday:

While I always have the best of intentions for my day off right smack in the middle of the week, I usually end up spending Wednesdays sleeping in until noon and then spending the afternoon sitting around the apartment. Eventually I make my way to the supermarket before it closes at night. This Wednesday (and the last one), however, was much more fulfilling.

I woke up at the horrendously early hour of nine o'clock to prepare myself for my GRE Math tutor at 10:00. I have made so much progress in math since I started with my tutor, and on Wednesday morning I even defied my book by finding a mistake in their answer section. Rock on! After my tutoring session I stuck around the cafe to work on my internship. On top of my grueling 12 hour/week work schedule I am now writing articles for a website 10 hours/week. So far it has been a great excuse to hang out in cafes and people watch.

Of course, shortly after diving into my work I received an invite to go ice skating at the Hotel de Ville outdoor ice rink. I accepted. Skating for the first time in two years on crappy rental skates was... a challenge, but I also had a ton of fun and I hope to return again for another round.

On Wednesday afternoon I met up with Kelsy at the Pere Lachaise cemetary so that she could snap a picture with Jim Morrison. Mission accomplished. Oddly enough, there was a group of Frenchies standing next to his grave looking quite somber. I found this strange. Were they seriously in mourning? C'mon now... We had a fun time gossiping while walking through the cemetary (weird, I know), and the weather was pretty great. Thank you again, Paris, for your lack of snow and your moderate temperatures.

Wednesday evening Kelsy and I trekked to a Chandaleur party with some buds from our Tuesday evening conversation group and stuffed our faces full of crepes and cider. Yum yummy yum!

Travel Plans:

Julie, Alexis, and I have been busy finalizing our plans for our February vacation, and I am getting ready to go visit my dear friend Sarah DW in Munich next weekend. Call us crazy, but for our February vacation we are renting a car for a week to drive through the south-west of France, then coming back to Paris, hopping on a plane to Sicily and spending the second week of our vacation in the "warmer" Sicilian temperatures. I am also hoping to make some progress on this whole Italian citizenship thing. Did I mention that I'm eligible for Italian citizenship?

Mumbo Jumbo About Myself:

All in all, this sejour in France has passed far too quickly. I have already been here for almost five months! I still have very mixed feelings about the end of my stay (even though it's a good four months in the future) and while part of me wants to stay here forever, the other part of me knows that a) setting up camp in France is practically impossible, and b) I actually miss some things about the United States. I can't believe I just admitted that. On the contrary, on two occasions this past week I woke up in the middle of the night bawling my eyes out. Why? I had dreams about returning to the U.S. and I was so upset that I actually started crying in my sleep. Seriously... what could possibly be so scary about the U.S. that the mere thought of returning there has me in tears? That's just embarrassing.

I've got 4 months to figure it out, but I'm hardly going to dwell on it. I have plenty of distractions...

Love,

Court