sort of the last day

For the last time, I sit in my apartment and look out the window at the Eiffel Tower doing its Christmas-tree impression. The perishable food is thrown out (I visibly cringed when the Camembert went in the garbage). My clothes are rolled and in the suitcase. My shot glasses—one from each country I visited—are nestled securely in the pockets of my thickest coat.

I’m not done, though. I have more blogs to write.

There’s the one about museums and the people who frequent them: the lingerer, the checklist aficionada, the person who needs to use the toilette (say it in French; it sounds prettier), and the photographer despite the huge sign with the red X over a camera. And I still haven’t decided if shaving one’s legs once in three months is a character flaw or an adaptation to another culture (I can’t even write that with a straight face). What about my on-again-off-again affair with the Metro? Stairs? Cheese? Loire Valley? Visitors? I’ll stop now.

The point is that just because I’m going back to California doesn’t mean I’m done with Paris. My plan—and I wouldn’t be me without a plan—is to write one blog a week until I run out of things to say or my fall semester begins, whichever comes first. This experience has been too big for it to end, at least for now.

So I will cheerfully indulge myself for a bit longer, and if I knew a cool, pithy French phrase, I would insert it here. Yet another topic to blog about.

After ten minutes and mucho stairs, voila (going to miss that).

soccer, scotland and sisters

My apartment is cold again. 

I’m sitting in front of my computer dressed in my trusty REI socks, sweats and worn-in UCSB sweatshirt, stuff I didn’t wear at all when my sisters visited me over a week ago. During their visit, we even frequently opened the windows to let in the cool air. I could attribute my now cold apartment to cooler weather, but the change is only by several degrees. Some would say that, of course, three extra bodies in a smallish living area will produce more heat. It’s not the heat so much that I miss but the warmth. I like to think that I’m living a temperature metaphor with these changes signaling one thing: I desperately miss my sisters. 

It wasn’t just a regular visit with them this time. For me, it was special. We haven’t travelled just the four of us in over ten years, and it took some major schedule shifting for this to happen. We are so busy, everyone going off in a multitude of directions and at different times in their lives, so just my sisters getting here was a challenge. Understandable anxiety on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific ensued—as most of you know I have two sisters living in Hawaii and one in California—but once they were here, it was lovely. 

It began with me crying at the airport. Enough said. They came in late on a Friday evening, and I had waiting at home my version of the expected French dinner: baguettes, croissants and quiche from my favorite boulangerie, great cheese, salad and wine. The funny thing is that my sisters hardly drink at all, but we began the trip right with a toast, and things just got better after that.
  

We went to see Paris St-Germain, the city’s professional soccer team, play. In true Susan fashion, I led my sisters to the wrong metro stop. After bothering three decent Parisians for directions (I will be forever grateful for the Marriot employee who finally gave us a great map) and walking for over an hour (I will be forever grateful for my sisters who didn’t get mad at me for screwing up), we finally saw the Parc des Princes stadium. Funny thing was that we didn’t see any people. The stadium holds up to 50,000 fans, so something was wrong unless the Parisians are so well-mannered that they don’t make much noise even at a football match. The mystery was solved when we found out that the game had been re-scheduled for the NEXT night. Being with anyone else would have resulted in a disastrous evening, but with my sisters, we just laughed, really hard. We then found the nearest café—the first but not last time we went to one—and had a great time. 

The soccer game that we went to the following evening was even better for the wait. While we were getting ready, my sister, Lori, found the PSG team song online, and we sang along with the 45,000 other dedicated fans at the appropriate time. Waving PSG flags, booing bad calls, getting patted down (tight, tight security), imitating some of the cheers (our cheerleading abilities came in handy) and commenting on the many heavily-armored robocops circling the stadium all added up to a memorable night (we tied 1-1). 

Picture the whole stadium waving flags.

That same day, I took my sisters to my favorite place in Paris: Jardin du Luxembourg. It was at the end of a Notre Dame, Left Bank, souvenir-buying excursion, and I kept urging (okay, they said being pushy) to just keep doing one more thing. Eating something kept getting pushed back, so when we finally got to the gardens, there was an ice cream stand in front of the entrance. “We can get something to eat here,” I said brightly. You have to remember that for the last eight weeks I’ve been Rebecca-conditioned, my colleague who once told me, “Are you hungry? If we wait a while, it will pass.” What happened next were jokes about how now we can go for many more hours, pictures taken pointing to the bag of “sustenance” (peanuts), and references to how Paris has influenced Susan (the word starvation kept creeping in here). I still smile when I think of this. 

Is this Paris or what? Jardin du Luxembourg on a sunnay day.

I can’t leave this blog without mentioning Scotland. My sister, Erin, said the people rivaled Hawaii for niceness, and that’s saying a lot. From the time we picked up the car to when we boarded the train back to Paris, it was lovely. We couldn’t have done anything without Lori’s great driving ability on the left side and my sister Terry’s fantastic navigating skills (I still don’t know how she got us un-lost as we hurried to return the car). The Highlands were Braveheart-worthy, and even if we did tourist stuff—Loch Ness, Urquhart and Edinburgh Castles—it was still outdoors, still fresh and beautiful. True to our dog-loving family tradition, we got way too excited over the Highland cows, who looked like really big shaggy dogs with horns. Throw in fantastic hotels (remind me to tell you about the room with four beds), great food and my consistently bad Scottish-accent imitation, and you can see why we all would love to go back (although my sisters would insist I practice my accent more, which usually sounded like a weird combination of Indian, German and Filipino).

Urquhart Castle with Loch Ness in the background sans monster.

Going to the top of la Tour Eiffel, lighting candles for our mom and dad, so many other memories. À bientôt my sisters. It’s never soon enough for me.