Girl From the North Country

 

     "I've spent this morning looking up jobs, internships and graduate schools that could lead me back to Paris sooner rather than later, but I know I won't be able to return until this time next year at the earliest. It's exciting to throw around ideas and not know what career I'll have or where I'll live and it's especially exciting to imagine I could be back in France in the future. I know for a fact that I need to go back one day as a resident again, and not just as a tourist. I think four months gets to you deeper than a Paris Visite pass. Even though I already miss France, I know that it will always be there waiting for me, and above all else, I will miss the people I met there who really account for the bulk of what made this experience so special to me. This semester was absolutely the best time of my entire life and I'm grateful I was lucky and privileged enough to make my dreams come true." - I Left My Heart in Paris, France, June 6, 2012


    Well, I'm leaving (again) for Paris. I've been here before, at this point where the excitement of moving away takes a backseat to the shock and sadness of leaving my life in Minnesota. I wish I could have bypassed the whole moment at the airport in which I had to say goodbye and just be asleep in my temporary bed at the FIAP Jean Monnet in Paris. I wish I didn't have to care so much about leaving everyone and everything, but I do. I think it's been just enough time since my last Paris adventure for me to become reattached to my life here. Thinking back to last summer, I would've done anything to be in my shoes at this moment, but now that the moment is here, I'm not really sure how I feel about it. Confused, maybe.

     I know I owe this new adventure to myself because I made a promise last May that I would come back to Paris again as a resident. The thought of never again owning a Navigo card and schlepping through the métro or counting croissants as a key part of my daily diet was too depressing. I've spent too much time on fulfilling this promise to myself to not follow through on it. I studied for and took the GRE, worked with an advisor at Augsburg on writing a really good essay, somehow got all the application materials together, got accepted (miraculously), graduated from college with two degrees, went through the harrowing, soul-crushing experience of CampusFrance for the second time in my life and put myself through the Megabus shitshow to get my visa in Chicago. I spent my time at my summer job--which allowed a lot of time for reading-- putting together my Paris bucket list, which includes restaurants, museums, parks, churches and monuments, complete with their address and nearest métro stop. I was even dorky enough to, honest-to-God, put it all into a Moleskine journal with tabs by arrondissement. I am on another level when it comes to Paris. And those are only the things I can immediately remember that I did to make this whole Paris business happen.

     So off I go, leaving Minnesota once again for a period of time three times longer than I did before. I'm currently sitting at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport and I just said goodbye to my sister and my parents. The goodbye happened almost exactly the same as it did last time (awful) and I think I'm even at the same gate as before. I'm wearing a Twins baseball cap because I know that'll look stupid once I'm in Paris, so I'm getting my Minnesota pride out of my system now. It's hard seeing traces of home that I know will be gone once I land at Charles de Gaulle (But at this rate, after two delays, that might be in quite a while), like all the awful Minnesota t-shirts, a restaurant called 'Hot Dish' on the way to my gate and picking a cat hair or two off of my clothes. It's hard because, unlike last time, I know what's going to happen. This is going to be very hard for a while and and it takes a lot of energy, but somehow I did it last time. I think back on the girl I was last spring and I'm just hoping I can be her again and make this work.

Au revoir et on se verra très bientôt à Paris !

(Here's me in Paris. But not. I just really like this video.)

Rachel

Almost in Paris

I try my hand at video blogging....

Summertime Sadness

   

   

  The long-standing joke in my family is that I'm a cat lady, which is rooted back in my second or third year of life. The farm where my dad grew up was the place where I was first around animals and cats in particular. My sister and I rather creatively named several of the cats Lovey, Maddy and Scared-y, based on their temperaments. At that age, I was scared of dogs, but I ended up loving cats. In preschool, I came home with drawings I'd done of yellow cats with purple collars.

At the farm with Lovey, Emily and Maddy in 1993

     One day when I was five, my mom and I somehow ended up at the Animal Humane Society looking at cats. I was smitten with a tiny kitten, but Mom had her eyes on an almost full-grown cat with a "raccoon tail" who was said to be good with children. We went home that night to discuss getting this cat and by the next day, my infamously good convincing skills worked- we were getting a cat! Finally!

     The four of us brought her home the next night in a cardboard box. In the car, Emily and I dangled our hair in the air holes and giggled as the cat batted it around. Name suggestions ranged from Sassy (My suggestion since the only cat I could think of was Sassy from Homeward Bound.) to Tiger (Emily's suggestion). My dad quietly suggested 'Ribbons' since she had stripes like ribbons. We got our name.

The story of bringing her home "rittin"  in probably 1997

Her first full day at home after a bath.

Easter 2013

     Over the years, Ribby and I grew up together and I let her occupy a bigger piece of my heart than anyone else in the family did. She became my little shadow in the house, following me everywhere and waiting outside my bedroom door in the morning. Whenever I was sad, I think she understood because she always came to me, looked me in the eyes and stayed.

    I always felt that people who say they hate cats would have had a hard time hating Ribby. She was an anomaly to the hissing, attacking, reclusive archetype that gives them a bad reputation. She only hissed once in front of me and it was pretty pathetic (When getting her temperature taken at the vet). She was also a lap addict. Her favorite thing to do was to fall asleep on one of us. All she ever wanted to do was eat, purr and snuggle. She was my living, breathing stuffed animal.

     Unfortunately chronic kidney disease in cats isn't really something a cat can just live with forever; it will eventually kill them. She was diagnosed in June 2012 while I was in Italy and the vet told my dad that she had about two years left in her. Life went on and she was fine. On July 24, 2013, I found her with severe dehydration and diarrhea in the basement and we rushed her to the hospital. We opted to not euthanize her and instead get her treated and back home the next day. We weren't ready for goodbye and also, what about that two-year estimate? It had only been about a year. On August 9th, I realized that we'd been in denial about her health. I noticed she was walking funny and she eventually stopped walking altogether. She stopped eating. She stopped purring. She stopped looking at me in the eyes when I was sad. So I made the decision to let her go. On the night of August 13th, I tucked her in and told her the story of when we got her all those years ago. The next day, we wrapped my little girl in a towel and took her out of our house for the last time. I held her paw and her fur looked so soft and we kept saying through tears how cute she still was. "You all are making me cry," said the vet. The end was peaceful and it broke my heart. The last thing I said to her was "I'll love you forever" and I tucked her tail around her.

     Losing a pet is harder than a lot of people give you credit for because they probably haven't been lucky enough to have one of their own. They don't get it and that's fine. Though she wasn't conscious of it, Ribby taught me how to love and how to be responsible. She provided so much comfort from hard days in Kindergarten to the stresses of junior high to preparing this summer for graduate school in Paris. She was patient with me when my five-year-old self tried putting her in a dress. She stayed calm when Emily and I took her for joy rides in the car in high school. She constantly warmed our hearts and made us smile and laugh and forget about our problems.

     It's sad that I know that specific details about her will start to go soft in my mind over time and I can't do Ribby justice in all the ways that she impacted my life for the last seventeen years. I know she was just one out of millions of cats, but she mattered to me.

I'll love you forever.

Things I Will Miss About America

I've done it before. I've lived in Paris and it was great. Beautiful. Fun. The best experience of my life. And because it was great, beautiful, fun and the best experience of my life, I specifically picked it as my base for my graduate studies.

However, life in Paris is not perfect, contrary to how I rave about it.

With my days left in America entering the single digits, I've been taking note of the things in my daily life that I'll likely miss a whole lot, other than simply friends and family.

(I'm perfectly aware that these could all be classified as "first world problems," Mom.)

THINGS I WILL MISS ABOUT AMERICA (In no particular order)

1. Owning or having access to a printer. Last spring I had to print my internship report and three copies cost me a total of twenty euros at a local print shop. That seems excessive.

2. Proper chips and salsa. I'll have to manage with the meager offerings at Franprix.

3. Owning a washer and dryer that not only produce fully-dry and wonderful-smelling clothing, but are free to use, too. I'm already cringing thinking about all the hand-washing I'll end up doing because I won't want to deal with it.

4. Driving. Yes, the métro is easy to use and environmentally efficient, but I'll miss the selfish freedom that cars provide.

5. Peanut butter. Yes, they have tiny Skippy jars at Franprix, but they're expensive and elicit a lot of curious staring from non-Americans.

6. Air-conditioning. Again, it's better for the environment to go without, but climate-controlled buildings are a wonderful thing, my friends. And France just doesn't really do them.

7. Personal space. I'll have to once again readjust to having significantly less personal space in a city whose population is four times that of Minneapolis-St. Paul. No more freely swinging my arms while walking or being able to fit in cramped cafés. Or showers. I think I'm unusually tall in France, which is weird.

8. Being able to buy shoes if I want or need to. Sigh. I wear a women's European 43, which I think is just an urban legend in Paris. Let me know if you ever see a pair.

9. Ice-cold drinking water. Yeah, carafes d'eau (water carafes) don't have ice in them.

10. Dollars. The exchange rate is painfully tipped in Europeans' favor. Ouch. But thankfully it's not the British pound. Double ouch.