well, bonjour there

Long time no post, blog-readers.

It's been over a month since my last post, and life has been crazy. Fantastic, yes, but crazy. And strangely enough, now, during finals, is the calmest I've felt in a while. I know you're going WHAAAT? But it's true. Bizarre how that happened. But let's backtrack, shall we? Let's go back in time...

• April 3rd, Mommy arrived in Paris and spent two weeks with me. It was really fantastic, actually, and kept me very busy, of course. Since my family had spent 3 weeks in Paris during the summer of 04, she didn't really find the need to go to the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomph or Louvre again. She basically wanted to see what I enjoyd doing and wanted to mimic my life. So, that we did. We all celebrated Passover, took a day trip to a French chateau (castle) in the town where French whipped cream (Chantilly) gets it's name (wow, I've been to Champagne, Dijon, and Chantilly. What other French towns can I go to who have food/drink named after them?), sat in parks, hit up museums, just had a lot of busy fun. (I also hit up two other chateaux-- Fontainebleau and Vaux-le-Vicomte-- with SBC).
• Spring break week two (because week one, Mommy was here)-- traveled to Dublin and Stockholm. Honestly, two fascinating cities. Dublin had a lot of charm and character and THE NICEST PEOPLE EVER. Stockholm was beautiful in a very unique way. It's situated on 14 islands, and there is so much to do in Stockholm it's ridiculous. It felt like San Francisco mixed with Amsterdam (which happen to be two of my favorite cities).
• All this while, I was very busy trying to prepare to be a tour guide for this summer, and more importantly, searching for an APARTMENT! Here is what I discovered-- apartment searching in Paris is a pain. A giant pain in the neck. A friend of mine from Wellesley, Stephanie Buhle, and I decided we wanted to split a place together this summer. Not only do I not like living alone, but I also have no idea how to live in an apartment alone. Stephanie, on the contrary, has had an apartment all year in Aix-en-Provence, provided to her by the Wellesley-in-Aix program. So she knows how to cook, clean, do laundry at a laundromat, deal with apartment issues, etc. Plus, I figured it would be easier to find an apartment for two people than for one, because Paris is FULL of students looking to live in "chambres de bonnes," which are tiny student rooms that can be found on the top floor of many apartment buildings, and so I figured, while everyone was looking for small chambres de bonnes, we'll look for something sliiiightly bigger. Well, apparently, it's harder to find something affordable for two people during the summer than we thought. No one wanted to rent for two months, there were less places to choose from, etc. FINALLY, through the help of SBC, we got a two-bedroom place for a ridiculously cheap price. SBC rents this place out during the year to students on our program who prefer independent living. The old couple who have the place are crazy nice, and they wanted to continue to rent it out to students during the summer, and since they trust SBC and they love students, they just handed it to me!! No contract, cheap price (considering it's in the 8th, normally a VERY expensive neighborhood. The Champs Elysees/Arc de Triomph is in the 8th. So you can imagine...), WE'RE SO LUCKY!
  
• went to the Idan Raichel Project concert here on Thursday night!! Marion came up from Aix for the concert, which was great. Always fun to spend time with far-away friends :). The concert was, as always, moving, incredible, beautiful, profound, fantastic. We bought shirts too. They've never had shirts before...God I LOOOOOVE their music. And they played a LOT of songs from their new album, which made me really happy.
• Went to Giverny, where Money lived, with SBC. Had been there before with my parents, but it was beautiful to be there again. SBC gave us the most incredible meal we'd had in a while. Felt spoiled. And full. We did some biking too. All in all, lovely day.
  
• And finally, now, finals... because things felt so crazy before, I feel actually much calmer now, and so finals don't bother me so much. Instead, I'm focusing on having fun with all of my friends before most of them leave. I can't believe they're leaving. But I'll leave that reflection for another post. In the meantime, well, I SHOULD be studying... but that's just an update. If you read all of that, I applaud you...