The beginning

Ok all, here's my "year in France" blog, as promised. I'm going to try to recount my week, but it's been like a dream (and sometimes a nightmare), so it might be a little disjointed. Here goes.

I arrived on Sunday at 6 a.m. and was picked up at the airport by a car sent by my French mom. It felt very posh - the driver stood in line with a little sign with my name on it. The mom let me in and helped me bring my things upstairs. I live on the top floor of the building. The whole building is very chic and fancy, and there's a whole separate entrance and living quarters for the staff. So basically, I live in the maid's apartment. It's really tiny, kind of like a dorm, but unlike in a dorm, I can have a hot plate and smoke the hookah inside. It's pretty funny, actually. When I graduated in May, I thought I would never, ever sleep in a twin bed again for the rest of my life. Now I am. Oh well. I like the room, though. The girl who lived there last year left behind framed pictures of Marilyn Monroe and the New York skyline as well as huge bouquets of dried flowers and some candles, so it's already pretty homey in there. And my view is INCREDIBLE. I mean, truly spectacular. I can see la Defense (the commercial downtown area with skyscrapers that the little girl refers to as "New York") and the carousel near the Eiffel Tower from my window. I think if I climbed onto the roof, I could see the Eiffel Tower, too. I can see the top of it from my bus stop. Pretty sweet.

So later that day we went to lunch and then to the carnival in the Bois de Boulogne (we're a ten minute walk from the Bois de Boulogne, no joke). There's a great running route in the park around the lake, actually. I tried to go for a run this week, but it turned out to be a bit of a problem. You see, I got all the way to the lake (Lac Inferieur - this is silly because it's actually quite a bit bigger than Lac Superieur) and it started to pour. Like, immediately drenching, hurricane winds, Florida during late summer kind of rain. Nasty. And also I had to pee. Bad news, so much for my run. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

Basically the extent of my week has been getting lost on the metro and bus (especially when I had to go into the suburbs to pick the kids up from their grandparents'), chasing around the children, and falling into bed completely exhausted by about 10 p.m. Tonight, however, I'm babysitting so the mom and the dad can go out. This means I am hanging out in their apartment watching movies and cooking something absurd, like veal. Speaking of which, I was in the kitchen with their femme de menage (housekeeper / cook / maid / literally everything), Victoria, while she was fixing lunch today. She usually makes some kind of meat and then a vegetable puree for the little boy because he won't eat his veggies any other way. I guess I can't blame him. After all, he is only 3. Usually, when she makes lunch, she fixes something for me too. Today, she put the meat on the plate and told me there were potatoes au gratin and salad in the fridge. I bit into the meat and was like, ok it looks like pork and it tastes like pork, but they don't eat pork, so what could it be? And Victoria tells me it's veal. Veal. Like, no big deal, I'll just fry up some VEAL for this toddler to eat for lunch, nothing special.

I'm realizing that this is really long already, so I'm going to leave it here for now. I hope everyone is doing good, and anyone who is reading this should know that I miss you and love you! Gros bisous!