October 19th, 2009
Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m really quite homesick. Being nine hours ahead of my friends and family, and living alone don’t really help.
I dreamt last night that I was back home, but it soon became uncomfortable as I realized I’d not really done much of anything in France. At this point dream-me started panicking and really really hoping this was all a dream. In fact dream-me gave my dream-arm several good pinches–
At which point I woke up, uncomfortably ensconced in my studio but a little relieved I hadn’t sleepwalked my way to the airport.
October 2nd, 2009
So I was all excited about no-bake cookie recipes… then I realized they almost all call for peanut butter, which is basically an import food item here. Oops.
It’s the little things that get you. Why isn’t this milk refrigerated, you wonder: and then you see that it’s sterilized, and that the refrigerated kind has only been microfiltered. You see a pay phone and try to find a slot that accepts coins, but there isn’t one: pay phones only accept cards here. You consult your map and see that your destination is almost due north, but you can’t find it because you keep running into dead ends and you can’t orient yourself.
But at the same time, you don’t want to miss home too much, because you’re a continent and an ocean away from where you were born, and this is supposed to be an adventure. So you stroll and you wander, a little more alert than you’d be at home… but you live in a suburb, and there’s not much to see. You wonder if you’ll ever make it here. You wonder if you’ll ever feel like you belong in this city, just a little bit.