Adjusting

I now fully remember what it is like to not have enough hours in the day. The phrase "Metro Boulot Dodo" (Metro, work, sleep) seems to have been written for me. Though I am adjusting fairly quickly to my new routine, finding time for anything extra is still a bit too daunting. I want so badly to return to writing - even just the little updates on this blog - but find at the end of the day that my brain is mush. And it feels as though, along with that, my French is getting worse and worse.

But I haven't forgotten you. Not for one second. It's just one more thing that I need to learn how to make time for (after dinner, laundry, phone calls, friends, doctors, boyfriend, cat). But I am certain I will. After all I am not the only person on the face of the planet with a full time job, so stop your bitching already. Sheesh.

Day Two, Sunshine

In a not at all surprising turn of events, I am exhausted beyond belief.

My first two days of work - though excellent - have mainly consisted of cramming in training at the reception desk. It's officially the hardest thing I can recall ever doing. I never before conceived of what it could be like to try to relearn a job you are quite proficient at in a second language (that you are not quite as proficient at). Suffice it to say I feel rather like a stupid bumbling idiot for most of the day. And that just makes me so tired.

Regardless - for some reason - I stayed up until late 12:30 last night finishing the last chapters of a book I started on the plane. I don't know why or even how, for that matter, but I did. Lord I am feeling it now.

My bones ache. My feet hurt (Why? I am not on them all day like in some jobs I've had.). My eyes feel like someone has rubbed vaseline and sand in them - blurry and gritty and impossible to keep open. I get home at night with a brain like a bowl of warm oatmeal. But I am not worried.

Someday in the near future I will have a rhythm. For now I am simply happy that the sun has decided to make a reappearance. It's been too long gone, and lord knows I need all the extra energy I can get. I even have half hopes that one day this week I'll feel good enough to get out there and enjoy it.

But probably not tonight. Tonight I think I'll be lucky if I make it home and feed myself before I pass out. I cannot wait to sleep in this weekend.

C'est Fait

It's Done.

It took seven months from the start of the job search to the receipt of the visa. It felt like an eternity - a period of time where I set my sites on a very specific dream (art gallery assistant) and let it drip away and pool at my feet, where I realized my dream was more about staying than becomong anyone with any kind of certain title, where I dated restlessly and wounded before tripping into love, where my life changed dramatically once more but this time for the best and without a hitch.

My big changes always seem to come in stretches of six or seven months. It is the length of time I was with the Frenchman. It is the length of time it took me to find and move to Paris in the first place. And now it's the length of time it's taken me to be able to say "I have absolutely everything I could possibly want from my life, and I made it happen."

I am proud of myself. After a surprise extended visit with my mom in Houston I have finally made it back to my French home. I was greeted by my cat and my Boy and by the grumpy cold city itself. It's mine, I can feel it distinctly. This is my future, this is my past, this my present. It's my life. It's really truly my life.

I can hardly believe it's true.

Taking Care of Business

This Saturday, in the little blink of my eye, I moved out of the petite maison. With the help of The Boy, Sarah and her husband (and a borrowed car) we did it in about an hour. I didn't have much time to tear up at the leaving and the goodbye to the family was rushed and awkward.

"Boys, come down and say goodbye to Juliet before she leaves!!" Host Dad called upstairs.

They boys came down, both in their "it's Saturday at noon" pajamas and hugged me goodbye. Host Dad walked the very last of my things outside to the car and gave me an uncomfortable embrace, clearly embarrassed by being so close to me. Host Mom was convienently away doing the grocery shopping.

In some ways it was better to rush out like that. No looking back. No tears at this happy moment. Reflect later.

Back at The Boys apartment / our new home together we, through some kind of miracle (and space saving bags), found a way to stow virtually everything I own into corners and closets without too much reorganization. The Boy was only forced to part with one pair of shoes that he never wears.

It was done. For the first time in what felt like months I breathed a sigh of relief, a sigh of real contentment. I finally have everything I want (my cat, my clothes, my boy) under one roof. I start my new job in a week. The first chapter of my Paris adventure (Titled: It turns out I'm too old to be a nanny.) is closed. A new one begins starting today.

In a few hours I am heading back home - where home equals My mom, my other cats, and my various family stateside. I have big plans to go grocery shopping for some junk food, shop at the cheap outlet stores and sit by the pool at my mom's new apartment. Obviously I will also be spending my time at the consulate, waiting to have my papers stamped. Obviously.

It's all the little things I am trying to remember now. Feed the cat, wash the dishes, brush my teeth, change some money (God the Euros sucks right now), double check my bags, shower, pharmacy, this is going to be such a long flight, eat, write down directions and phone numbers, kiss the boy good bye for the next two weeks, try not to be too sad about that, emails emails emails, and BREATH.

This is it kids! It's finally happening. I can't wait to see you on the flip side.

Good Things Come in Packages

So it's official. I have an end date of June 9th here with the Host Family. My visa is processed and I am moving out this weekend.

Host Mom was none too pleased, but is she every, really? So Host Dad and I agreed that it was a good thing I move out sooner than later and shook hands on it. They want to renovate the little house anyway.

Part of me is sad. I realized in the past few weeks that I don't take these kind of transitions well at all. Even staring down the barrel of the very best life can give me - a new job, a handsome sweet French boyfriend and a new little apartment in Paris (and an adorable cat!) - I have been a weepy ball of nerves. I've picked fights with The Boy. I have had anxiety attacks. I have slept for entire days.

But it's all almost over; the waiting, the nail biting, the cleaning of the Host Families toilets is all almost over. The old apartment is nearly packed away in bags and rolling carts and the new apartment is waiting for me and Boo to come in and move everything around.

Tuesday I cleaned up the pad (do people still call it a 'pad'?) and waited FOREVER for the delivery of our brand new Furminator and shampoo. It didn't come until nearly four o'clock. But wasn't I so surprised when we got a second delivery the same day of our fancy new Modkat litterbox!

I'll be damned if it doesn't look good in our apartment.


And of course the first thing I did when I got home was Furminate the Boo-ster.

(the Furminator PLUS "Cat Look" shampoo for Boo's new do.)

He LOVED it. Honestly. He rolled around on the concrete, got up and stretched and then came back purring for more. And he has never been so cuddly soft. I highly recommend this product to anyone who hates cat hair but loves a cuddly kitten.

So it's just the details that remain. There will be some major re-organization this weekend (which has the boy quite scared, I might add), but little things are getting organized too. It's no small chore to figure out how one person's apartment full of things will fit into another person's SMALLER apartment already full of things. But I enjoy organizing, it makes me feel good. It's like a clean slate.

Even little things can be tidied.

Apart from the small sadness of leaving behind a family and home I've kept for nearly two years, the only other downside of this Big Awesome Change is that I have to forgo my trip to Barcelona with my best-friend-since-diapers that we've been planning for months. I knew it was a possibility that it might happen, but oh I was looking forward to laughing with her over a pitcher of sangria on the beach! (I do get to go home to see my mommy, though, and that makes my heart infinitely happy.)

With luck all these big changes will only lead to bigger and more exciting things, and someday I'll be able to bring her back here and make up for those days we're going to miss. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I am off to pack some more things into much smaller things and Furminate the cat again, just for good measure.

A Post For My Aunty M

I finally went to Versailles.

I've lived fifteen minutes from it for nearly two years now and the only other time I went happened to be in the dead of winter when it was snowing. Trust me, this is not the best time to see Versailles.

No, with 800 hectares of garden (that's nearly 2000 acres for you non-metrics like me) the best time to see Versailles is on a sunny day in the spring time. And so, with my best-friend-since-diapers I headed to the grand palace in the pouring down rain.


Alright, it didn't rain the whole time, but rest assured I will have to go back in order to get the full scale of all of the gardens in their majesty. Not that I mind at all, because it was truly spectacular.

What began modest hunting lodge built by Louis XIII became, over the course two hundred some odd years, an immense sprawling palace where the French monarch would stage it's absurd displays of wealth and it's subsequent downfall. It was the proper home of Louis XIV through XVI as well as Napoléon I's empress Marie-Louise and served as an annex of Hôtel des Invalides for a good fifty years. From approximately 1814 to 1830 Versailles sat virtually uninhabited.

It wasn't until Louis Philippe (the great great grandson of Louis XIV) that the process begun by Napoléon I would finally be seen through to a finish: Versailles was officially named a museum and became what Balzac would later call “hospital of the glories of France”.

Me, I have always been fascinated by this style of lavish design. In middle school I was obsessed with a A&E's America's Castles where most of the estates stole their designs (and sometimes entire rooms taken apart, moved and rebuilt) from this period in history. The heavy brocade floor-to-ceiling drapes, the polished, carefully hand carved wood furniture, the enormous enclosed beds and the vibrant fabricked walls all made me salivate. Countless hours were spent imagining what it would be like to live in such luxury.


Now, of course, my tastes have changed significantly and I cannot fathom having that kind of furniture in my own home, but the appreciation is not lost. While at Versailles I found it easy to revel in the fantasy of waking to servants, eating off of delicate china and wandering in those amazing gardens all day. It is no wonder at all that the French peasants, in the end, beheaded Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette for living like this while the rest of the country literally starved.


To be perfectly honest, we breezed through the Château. There was a lot to see but we opted not to have an audio guide and I wanted be able to see the rooms again with more information behind them. As they stood they were stunningly beautiful, but without the history they are just that to me. Both of us agreed, too, that the we wanted to save enough time to really see the gardens. Which were positively breathtaking.


While there, without the information behind us, we both speculated on how many times the garden had been replanted, how original the trees were and what an undertaking it must have been to reconstruct the wild land after it had been abandoned for so long. In reality the gardens were always cared for - save fifty years here and there where war left them the least of France's problems. For me, that makes the whole even more spectacular. For nearly four hundred years that amazing parcel of land has been trimmed and hedged and brushed clean to rest in it's pristine state.

By the time the gardens closed (early for some fancy military event) we had been witness to three weddings being photographed (but I couldn't find how ridiculously expensive that must be), made it to the Grand and Petite Trianon (which were already closed to visitors) and watched a well dressed crazy lady shake a broken umbrella at the castles perfectly white clydesdale horses.

We didn't have nearly enough time to explore the gardens in full, and though I tried to get us there we didn't even come close to seeing the Queen's Hamlet - a mini Normand village built by Marie Antoinette 1787 where apparently the Queen and her servants used to dress as peasants for fun. This retreat, however, is on the far outskirts of the property - a pretty good hike by foot or a ride by Château visitor trolly. We simply didn't have the time.

I think, though, that it's safe to say I have caught a little obsession for Versailles (and especially for the sassy Marie Antoinette) and that I'll be back to visit soon. But, you know, on a sunny day this time.

*See all the photos and descriptions on my Flickr page.