Tuesday, 12 Jun 2007
And you thought I was done with these. Ha. What you didn't know was that I was Arnold Schwatzenagger in my last update I just forgot to warn you: "I'll be back."
The last week in Paris I spent hopping around museums, visiting friends in town, and saying goodbye, or rather see you soon. I took in the wild world of contemporary art at the Georges Pompidou, saw an exposition on Dalida (an apparently well known pop star from years ago), and went to a fantastic exhibit at the Musee de la Mode on Castalbajac. Castalbajac is a fashion designer who creates outfits out of unexpected items like converse sneaker canvases or gloves or berets. I personally found it quite inspiring. So inspiring that I began tap dancing. No, but the exposition did open groovily with a giant light up rubix cube flashing its... no, not breasts... but rather its less risque, light-up sides in time with techno music in a giant mirrored room. As Austin Powers might describe it, "smashing baby smashing!"
There is a fantastic sentence in French: Le ver vert va vers la verre. It sounds like this phonetically, "La vaihr vaihr vah vaihr la vaihr." The green worm goes towards the glass. They just don't make sentences that stellar in English.
Moving on. Saying 'a bientot's was tough, like 10 year old beef jerky tough, but in an emotional and not physical sense. Though, maybe trying to
eat such ancient beef jerky would be so difficult that it too would be emotionally trying. ANYHOW. My boutique-owner friend Myrna gave me an
incredibly nice gift from her store: one of the hats she sells. The hats, if you go way back to 1492 when Colombus set sail, is why her and I met in the first place. The hats started calling out "Hannah Hannah come look at us" and I did and Myrna and I met and Colombus discovered America. I ate dinner one night with Thomas and his roommate, the next with my friend Floriane. I had a lovely last calm drink with Vincent and Quentin, 'mes garcons francais' and Vincent gave me a ride on his Vespa scooter - the quintessential European experience to round off my year. vroom vroom.
At 12:30 Friday, Thomas showed up at my cousins to help me take myself and my belongings somewhere over the rainbow. We've actually been broken up a while now, but have remained close friends. Surprise! haha! I don't share ALL the juicy gossip with you only all the juicy filet minon! Anyhow, he carried both my sumo-wrestler sized bags, bought my RER ticket and off we went. I could not have managed physically or mentally alone. Standing in line at the airport, any little thing put me to tears from the fact that the man next to me tried to semi-cut in line to the fact that I'd missed the line's security check in and had to double back to do that. Somewhere, deep inside me was the Nile river and it just kept letting itself out, water streaming down from my eyes, hippopotamuses falling out from my tear ducts. (That was painful, let me tell you!) Thomas and I sat out in front of security as long as possible before I boarding time started a'hollerin'.
The flight home seemed never to end. I might as well have drunk 29.769 cups of coffee cause sleep was more difficult to come by than sheep in Antarctica.
Once in NY, I cried again. I saw the American flag at customs. I cried. I had to pay an overweight baggage fee on my flight to Boston. I cried. I'm rather uplifting now aren't I? Coming back is hard. I was scheduled to leave NY for Boston with Jetblue at 10 PM. But as luck would have it, there was some huge problem with the FAA and weather and there was a delay. Then another delay. Then a cancellation and a reschedulation. Noooo, I didn't cry, I made balloon animals with Bozo the clown. Then a delay of the new flight. One twice Chicken soup and rice. Then a near success boarding the plane at 2 AM only to taxi for 45 minutes and have the pilot time out. The flight to Boston is 45 minutes. Frustration was more bitter than horseradish mixed with the banana beer I tried in Prague. After a semi-successful, 2-hour long baggage reclamation from 3-5AM, I finally re-checked in (it was like deja vu doing that again) and made it out on the 7:45 flight to Boston. It was like a bad comedy. The last thing I'd wanted to do in the first place was leave. Then, the leaving endured for hours and wouldn't let itself be finished. I was stuck in the limbo of leaving for near 24 hours when all I wanted was not to win the limbo rock, but to finish the leaving process as quickly as possible.
Next? I bet you think I crashed like a log after the possible slap dash, maybe 2 hours of sleep I had. No. No. I auditioned for American Idol and won! I lie. It was more exciting than that, at least in my world. I showered and went immediately to spend some time with my friend Andrew who just graduated from Harvard. We had a lovely extended lunch of Indian buffet and caught up before he headed off to do some continent hopping of
his own to replace that which I am loosing. We so forth have the unfortunate luck of only being in the same location for short periods of time, but at least we have the luck to have such coincidences at all. The evening was spent dinnering with Alex and Andrea and kids, local relatives, and the night was spent crashing like George Bush's popularity rating at cousin Charlie's. I was so exhausted that I could have slept on a bed of nails. Or bail of neds and I said to my dad in my half-delirious, tired state.
Sunday I moved into housing an MIT independent living group near Central Square. My dad left and I wandered the city bemoaning how ugly everything is. I had sore eyes and the surrounding buildings were daggers of unaestheticness. In search of beauty, I wandered towards the Harvard campus where I ran into a guy whom I'd met during the whole plane delay fiasco! Bizarre. An hour later, I ran into a friend from Harvard. Bizarrer!
Last night I met up with my friend Owen and we dined and wined (my first legal wine-ing in a US bar). Also quite an enjoyable get-together as always.
To close out I'll share some of my reverse-integration realizations:
- Dollar bills: Dollar bills are SO LONG. SO LONG. If they were a snake, they'd be the boa. No, two boas, on biting onto the tail of the other. So long that they pour out over the edges of my wallet and down the hall around the corner and across the seas. Euros and short and fat in comparison like jolly old British men.
- Traffic men, better known as pedestrian traffic signals: The go men are WHITE! What is that!? Since when are they albino? It took a year of seeing green go men to come back and realize that go-men here in the US are pasty and have, evidently, been locked in a closet for eternity without sun or chlorophyll. The European go men eat chlorophyll as part of their daily meal, hence their green color.
- Long distance public transportation: WHERE IS IT? Why can't I go to central PA on a train or direct bus. Blasphemy!
- Food ingredients: A box of cereal in France, reads something like: Wheat flour, sugar, water. A box of cereal in the US, reads something like: wheat flour, sugar, water, high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil, asorbic acid, thymin nicatrate. dioxicholoridice, xymeiib, wifnoe, old gym shoes, pyothiecl, lunar rock, pulverized floppy disk. WHAT AM I EATING and WHY do I need all these chemicals and artificiliality?
- Grocery stores. Even the small ones are HUGE just like elephants. There is so much choice. I sat in the cookie aisle for 25 years and my hair turned white before I settled on ginger snaps. But the cheese sections... where are all my beautiful CHEESES? Why so many cookies and a dearth of cheese?
- Waiters come up to your table and say "Can I help you" instead of "Vous avez choisi?" And then they bring the check right when your done eating. There is no struggle, no tug-of-war with the waiter, to get the check.
- Tax and tip: Caution: meal prices are no longer what they seem.
And so we're back into the swing of things. Internship started on Monday. Looking for a job after work to pay the 'bills' unlike 90% of the French unemployed. etc.
Life now is so much more... more... normal...
And with this, I'm really done here. So you think. So I think. So is true.
Back to life. Back to reality.
Yours truely,
Hannah
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment