The Long and Winding Road

    A woman stands at baggage claim ripping into a new Marlboro carton, waiting for her suitcase. A couple stands kissing on the moving sidewalk, oblivious to the rest of the travelers and, to be perfectly honest, lucky they didn't get an elbowing from me as I scraped by them. I'm back in Paris, if it weren't obvious enough.

     

     I spent just under a month back at home in Minnesota and it was as glorious as I predicted. After arriving home sans luggage (Lost at Schiphol Airport) and sans 40-euro bottle of duty-free wine I specially bought for our Christmas dinner (Confiscated at Schiphol Airport), I spent my days: sleeping till the afternoon, nourishing myself with Nordeast, frosting, root beer, oreos, bagels and peanut butter, driving cars, researching my family ancestry, watching Netflix until 3 AM every night (New Girl, Blackfish, The Shining and a feeble attempt at The Hunger Games before I lost interest), reading non-school material (On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does by Simon Garfield), going to concerts, playing the piano, shopping, gambling, trying out new restaurants, getting a new phone to replace my stolen iPhone, skiing for the first time in ten years with my sister and realizing my lessons served me well from back in the day and spending lots of time with my favorite Minnesotans. But, alas, there are only so many days a person can go without putting on real clothes and not feel like they're at the Overlook Hotel. I walked around the house shouting "REDRUM!" whenever my mom had her back turned.

     

     Goodbyes are hard, especially because I won't be home again until at least September. But it was time to finish up this master's degree and continue living my Paris dreams or whatever, so I left. I have a long road ahead of me.

Part One of my January video

     For someone who loves traveling, I sort of hate it. I mean, the act of traveling...well, it sucks. No matter what, I can guarantee at least several of these will happen: I won't sleep more than twenty minutes on any flight, I'll get stuck next to the baby that cries louder than it normally would just to punish the rest of us for not having kids, I'll have no room overhead for my carry-on, so under my legs it goes, my flight will be delayed, airport security will dig through my meticulously-packed bags despite complying with all the rules (Especially at Shithole Schiphol Airport) or my ears won't pop and I'll start whimpering in agony to myself for the last fifteen minutes. Or if none of the above happen, I'll have a unique situation like on Sunday when I got to my apartment and my landlady locked me out (long story) and I was so jetlagged that I tried sleeping in my hallway against my door until she got home three hours later.

     But I made it. I'm in Paris. Everything is fine and I'm not flying again for over a month. 

     To backtrack quite a bit, December was a blur. My friend Ashley from high school managed to fly out from Boston to visit for a weekend and I had a great time introducing her to Paris and to Europe in-between my classes that I couldn't skip and conference calls she had to make because she technically didn't take any time off from work. I made her walk till her feet were borderline sprained and barked at her to get off my futon, stop being jetlagged and go out, because you don't waste your three days in Paris being tired. (You just don't, Ashley.) Being cold-weather natives at heart, we sat outside with a blanket for dinner in the Place du Tertre and drank wine on the Quai des Grands Augustins, as well as hitting the obvious spots like the Louvre, the top of Notre-Dame, the Champs-Elysées and the Eiffel Tower (though she wouldn't climb it). It's a great thing to have an old friend in this big city.

Ashley & I in the Place des Vosges

     The rest of the month was devoted to school. I had an awful cold for a week or two that had me going through a box of tissues a day and coughing so badly my ribs hurt. Basically I kissed any and every social invitation goodbye and hunkered down in my chambre de bonne until everything that I had procrastinated on got unprocrastinated. In the process of writing close to forty pages in a week, I was missing the simpler days of the low-stress classes of my study abroad semester and the driving passion I had for my French degree that I don't have for translation. If any college students are reading this, you need to realize your finals could be a lot worse. You could be a graduate student.

    Today, the official start of my last semester of school ever (I will not be doing a Ph.D. Do not let me think that's a good idea. It's not.) and I woke up early as I always do at the beginning. I felt daunted by the work ahead of me listed on my syllabi and doubted whether I can do this as I always do at the beginning. The RER B was bursting at the seams during the morning rush hour. I drank copious amounts of coffee and admired the beautifully overcast sky sheathing the Eiffel Tower in fog. I bought a book for class, Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau, from Brian at The Abbey Bookshop, my favorite bookstore in Paris because he always gives me free coffee, sometimes with maple syrup (He's Canadian), and genuinely loves helping me find what I need. I imagine The Abbey is what Shakespeare & Co. once was before the tourists found it. 

     I took a long way home to avoid the RER B, taking the boulevard Saint-Michel to rue Monsieur le Prince and the Place de l'Odéon and winding through the nearly-empty Jardin du Luxembourg. The green metal chairs were all empty, a rare sight in the warmer months. January is a wonderful time in Paris because you feel like it's yours. It's not even very cold, despite all the complaining Californians and Parisians with very limited cold tolerances.

My last first day of school picture ever.

Foggy day in the Luxembourg Gardens

The pruned trees in winter always remind me of the vines in Sleeping Beauty.

rue Herschel

rue Michelet

     So as I start the new year, what did 2013 mean for me? It was probably my biggest year yet. I worked my ass off applying for graduate school, got in and spent months working on paperwork which included a visit to Chicago, somehow graduated from college with Latin honors, said goodbye to my little companion Ribby, and moved back to the city that makes me so, so happy. Moving here is the hardest thing I've ever done (so much more so than my semester in college) but I've somehow gotten this far. I try to view it like this: if you're going to do something hard, you might as well do it where you want to. I don't want to have regrets of what could have been.

What Grad School in France Has Taught Me

1. You can't get everywhere in thirty minutes or less. In fact, you can't get most places in thirty minutes or less, even though Mary-Kate and Ashley taught me I could travel 9,000 miles to Transylvania in "about twenty minutes."

2. You can't procrastinate like you did back in college. I'm finally learning that starting a research paper two days before it's due is really, really stupid.

3. The Eiffel Tower is really distracting. So is people-watching from my window, Deezer, Pinterest and old Britney Spears videos on YouTube circa 2001.

4. When a professor assigns you five books to read for the semester, you read them ASAP. You shouldn't read other books for fun.

5. You absolutely cannot skip class. Period. I think back on the days when I could Ferris Bueller-it in Montmartre during my study abroad semester and no one cared. That was such sweet freedom.

5. Google Calendar is sometimes the only thing keeping my life intact. I'm holding on for dear life.

6. Sleep can be the most fun part of the day. 

7. Saturdays, and even Fridays, are legitimate study days. For the first time in my life, any weekend day is now fair game to get things done.

8. Chocolate and wine is sometimes a meal. After spending most of my life with a certain nonchalance toward chocolate, I've recently realized that everyone's right. It's pretty good. And it sometimes replaces meals when I don't want to go get real groceries.

9. Doing your master's in France before you're 26 is really smart. In a word, discounts. I can get into any national museum for free and get reduced prices on a lot of things.

10. Doing your master's in France before you're 26 makes you the youngest. Everyone else has time to figure out their lives for a bit longer than me. When people ask what I was doing before this               career-wise, I have nothing to say. I'm the eternal underdog.

11. Wine and croissants will never let you down, but the RER will. My frown has been turned upside down so many times thanks to them.

12. Coffee is everything. 

13. Grad school in one year instead of two means everything is overly intense. Good luck trying to hold down a job on top of it.

14. Grad school in one year instead of two is a relief. I probably wouldn't be doing this at all if it were two.

15. Be really passionate about what you choose to study. It's so much harder if you're not.


     But the main thing I've learned from Paris is that you don't have to do what everyone else is doing. Let everyone else live up to those underlying expectations for what your twenties are supposed to be. I'm having a great time doing what I truly want to do.

Love,
Rachel

Jusqu'ici, tout va bien

 

     I don't really know how, but it's easy to forget how lucky I am to be living in Paris. Maybe it's because life here has become so routine that I forget that it's really the Eiffel Tower that I'm looking at from my desk when I'm typing out my papers and blog posts or that I forget if the conversation I just had was in French or English. When I'm falling asleep at night, the Eiffel Tower's search light lights up my room as it passes. Everything is just so normal, so quotidien, that I forget how far I am from home and that this, however comfortable it is, will never truly be my hometown. I cross the Seine like it's the Mississippi, but it's not. It takes looking at a map to really have it register in my brain that I'm over four thousand miles away from where I grew up. It's really humbling to constantly receive blank stares when you tell someone where you're from and they have no idea what it even is. I usually just agree with people when they think it's Indianapolis or that it's "the city with that car race." Basically my entire existence is lost on people here. Unless I tell them I was born in Texas.
     I haven't really blogged in a while because I'm such a perfectionist; if I can't write something perfectly, I lose interest. I just can't do it. This really applies to school. I feel like my brain is so muddled all the time and that I'm being pulled in so many directions that I can't be as productive as I need to be. My directed study adviser, after I was obviously struggling to stay awake during our one-on-one meeting, told me to eat more fruits and vegetables because "Il faut nourrir le cerveau comme les muscles." She's right. I can't realistically keep eating a baguette, a croissant and a ham-and-cheese sandwich for every meal (Yes, I ate all of those as one meal on Friday).
    This brings me to school. I have four or five weeks left until the semester is over and I have to write a twenty-page research paper, write a 5,000 word travel essay, write a travel feature article, prepare and teach a translation workshop, read two books and finish translating the article "La force des cultures" by Philippe d'Iribarne. Most of the time I feel like I'm treading water and my head keeps bobbing below the surface. And that is a horribly stressful simile because I'm terrible at treading water. I never passed all six levels at swimming lessons and had to retake level four three or four times. So this is how I feel about school, essentially--like I'm drowning.
     No matter how much I love Paris, I constantly think about how easy it would be if I didn't throw myself into this situation. What if I had just graduated from college, gotten a job and found an apartment? That definitely would've been easier than shelling out all the money to live in one of the most expensive arrondissements in one of the world's most expensive cities and less mentally taxing than having to say everything, however minor, in another language. I miss coming downstairs in the morning and people are happy to see me. But I was meant to be a drifter. I mean, the signs that I'd one day live abroad were already there when I was eight and writing travel journals.
     On Monday last week, I received an email that I would be having my OFII (Office Français de l'Immigration et de l'Intégration) medical appointment. This appointment is required for anyone staying in France longer than six months (correct me if I'm wrong) and is necessary for attaining your titre de séjour, which validates your visa. So if the whole CampusFrance and visa appointment process wasn't enough, I still had work to do. AUP's immigration services office continually reassured me that I had done everything correctly and that the OFII was swamped with an abnormal amount of applicants, so we all had to have patience. With one day's notice, I had to track down all the necessary documents (birth certificate, passport, take pictures in a Photomaton booth, buy 58 euros worth of timbres fiscaux, find my housing certification and pick up my convention from the immigration director), take off work and head to their office on the rue de la Roquette near Bastille for my medical appointment, which is just bullshit bureaucracy so the French government knows that I'm healthy and can stay in France and not infect their people. We were warned that if we missed this appointment, we would become "illegal citizens on the French territory" and thus be deported or fined or imprisoned if we were caught. Maybe all of the above. Unfortunately, with racial profiling as prevalent as it is in the U.S., the likelihood of me being asked for an ID by a police officer is relatively low, but nevertheless I didn't want to get my ass banned from France, so I made sure I was on time.

The required Photomaton photos for OFII

     The day was sunny and warm and I got to Bastille early. When I left the sortie, I started smiling--I really missed the place! My internship at French Travel Partners on the rue Amelot and the nightlife back in 2012 made Bastille a hub of memories for me. I don't spend a lot of time in the onzième anymore, so it's probably one of the few places in Paris that remains part of my study abroad experience and hasn't been changed by my current life here. I like that.
     The obvious thing for me to do with the awkward hour I had before my appointment was to head to my beloved Place des Vosges. I can't tell you how weird it is to realize that the last time I smelled the seafood coming from the Bar à Huitres on the boulevard Beaumarchais and turned the corner to see all the pigeons and kids and elderly people filling out the square--Paris's oldest--was more than a year and a half ago. It's some serious déjà vu and still a little sad for me that I'm the only one of my friends that came back. But again, I know I'm ridiculously lucky. The first time I ever came to the Place des Vosges, I was borderline map illiterate and constantly in fear of screwing up at my internship. I'd eat my croissant and ham-and-cheese sandwich, dropping about half my croissant on the ground accidentally for the pigeons and thinking I might not make it until the end of the semester. Sitting there now, on "my" bench (the third one in in the northeast corner) I was remembering how much I loved Paris then (despite my worries) and how I promised myself that I'd come back and do it all over again. I guess I'm pretty good at keeping promises.

Last lunch break in 2012 in Place des Vosges

I was such a professional at FTP

     The actual OFII appointment went just fine. It was my first experience with French doctors and overall they're really the same as American doctors; they're just a bit more nonchalant about privacy and tend to sit really close to you. I walked out less than an hour later with the sticker in my passport that basically says "Dude, it's alright. Rachel's with me." for anyone questioning why I'm here. I'm a resident of France now, kids!
     Other than work, school and residency appointments, I'm continuing to meet new people almost everyday, which is a beautiful part about living in a huge city. Thankfully, everyone we meet has been really enthusiastic about speaking both English and French with us and there's no shortage of good times. I miss everyone from home, but I'm doing my best to not let it be a crutch that prevents me from living out my dream of being here and meeting new people and learning about the world. I really wouldn't trade any of this for any other situation and someday I know I'll love helping people do what I've been fortunate enough to have done myself.

I miss you, you who's reading this, and if you're from Minnesota, see you in a month!

Love,
Rachel

Scroll down for my favorite pictures from the last few weeks. All my pictures are up on my Flickr.

Jardin du Luxembourg

Jardin du Luxembourg

Raspail station

Promenade Plantée, one of the spots Céline takes Jesse in Before Sunset

Bois de Vincennes

Café de Flore

Jardin du Luxembourg

Pont Louis Philippe

Christmas decorations on the Ile St-Louis

Fun times with friends

Oops!...I Did It Again

   "I'm not sure what I'll do, but- well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale."

               -F. Scott Fitzgerald

---------------- 

     Well here I am again. Paris is as I remember, and in some ways I am, too. People are walking around in the 70 degree weather in scarves and what I’d consider winter jackets. I’m still the métro pro that I once was- I haven’t had to pull out my trusty Paris Plan even though I always have it on me and I’ve been riding it all over the place in the less than 24 hours that I’ve been here. The only things that have changed are that southbound on line four is now called ‘Montrouge’ instead of ‘Porte d’Orléans’ and Notre-Dame has what I can only describe as giant bleachers in its square (Maybe something to do with its 850^th anniversary?) Oh, and that my friends from Central aren’t here. And I also have no friends to speak of. Yet.

     I got into Paris at around 6 P.M. last night after my flights were delayed about three times, thus screwing me out of the €40 I spent on a pre-arranged shuttle and another €60 for the cab ride I had to take instead. The cab driver immediately started in on wanting to talk about the U.S. involvement in Syria and turned up the radio commentary he was listening to. I had no energy to give any input.

     I got to the FIAP Jean Monnet, where I’ll be staying temporarily until my housing is decided, dropped my things off in my room and went to Bir-Hakeim to see the Eiffel Tower. I don’t know what the hell kind of athlete I used to be, but that is a long walk compared to what I remembered. Alone, I found a patch of grass on the Champ de Mars and watched as it sparkled at dusk, then I bought a sandwich and sat up at Trocadéro. In Paris for mere hours, a woman sat down next to me and asked me when it sparkles because I guess I seem like I know my way around. (My cab driver had even asked me “Vous connaissez bien Paris?” Yes.) It was perfect, but lonely.

Pont de l'Archévêché

Park behind Notre-Dame. Paris is so empty!

Quai de la Tournelle

Bleachers. Am I right or am I right?

Place des Vosges

In Paris for an hour or two, and this is where I head.

Central's Office on rue Henri Barbusse

         I had to be out of my room for the night at the FIAP by 9:30 this morning so I left the building with no plans and métro-ed it from Glacière to Vavin and then spent all morning wandering on foot to familiar places since I don’t have any familiar faces- my internship placement agency’s office, Central College Abroad’s office, St-Michel, my internship office at French Travel Partners, Notre-Dame, the Pompidou, Place des Vosges and all the way to St-Sébastien-Froissart. I don’t know if it’s a morning thing, a Sunday thing, a basically-still-August thing or a hungover-from-Saturday thing, but the city felt empty to me. I also searched for the padlock I put on the Pont de l’Archévêché for Central. No luck. The search will continue.

     In the Place des Vosges, I sat on a bench, dropping crumbs on accident for the pigeons like old times, and I wondered if this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. This is the part I hate about going abroad. The being alone part and the initial panic. I really don’t feel any culture stress other than feeling very, very alone. I think this is almost harder than last time, because this time, I was aware of how lonely it was going to be and it takes a lot of energy to not succumb to how sad it is.  I know it’s only been day one and orientation hasn’t even started, but I have doubts. Am I smart enough? Do I know French well enough to study translation? Will I have friends? Is this worth my time and money? Should I have just gone on a trip to Paris? I’m not sure. This is the biggest adult decision I’ve ever made and I don’t know if I should trust myself.

Sidenote: I have to remember to drop the habit of smiling as a means of being friendly. A woman came out of a door on the empty rue Chevreuse and I was standing nearby, so naturally, I smiled when we made eye contact. She looked at me as though I’d pulled a knife on her. 

Here's to your first job in Paris!

        "That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me."
-Midnight in Paris, 2011

     I feel like I'm in a dream. It's like I've been here for ages and I still have to think for a minute that I'm here. Last night I had a dream, a nightmare, really, that the semester was over and that I was home in Minnesota. Not to say that I don't love home, but seeing as I've been waiting for Paris for six years, I try to sweep those thoughts of leaving under the rug.
     I'm ridiculously happy all the time here, too. Despite bad days at my internship, getting my laundry stuck in the machines countless times and more choses à faire than I would prefer, I can't help but find myself smiling on the métro, sandwiched in between the man who needs to stop staring and take a much-needed shower and a sea of Longchamp bags. I don't know if it's the 200-calorie-croissants (And I rarely eat just one) or what, but there's no other place in the world that I'd rather be. I think Gil Pender said it pretty well in Midnight in Paris:

You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city? You can't. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights, I mean come on, there's nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.

     This week is my eighth and final week as an intern for French Travel Partners. Though at times it's been really difficult, it has really been the best way for me to use my French skills in speaking. Our classes at the Catholic Institute are made up of almost all Americans and there's not as much of a participation aspect in French classes, so this is the biggest chunk of my week that I have had to communicate entirely in French with my coworkers and clients. I've also made so much improvement in my ability to write formally, since I send out about fifteen demandes de réservation a day to French hotels. It'll be wonderful to have four-day weekends plus Wednesdays off, but I'll miss lunching in the Place des Vosges, my jambon-beurre sandwich from my boulevard Beaumarchais bakery and my coworkers that have been extremely welcoming and kind to me. Saying goodbye will be a little triste, and I'm glad to have had such a rare opportunity to do something like this. I'll probably never be able to say again that I had to visit the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre for my job.

The Catacombs of Paris

Easter mass at Notre-Dame

     This weekend, after three attempts, I finally made it to the Catacombs, which is in my neighborhood. Some two-hundred steps under all the noisy streets and crooked buildings, the Catacombs are lined with an innumerable amount of skulls and bones from as far back as the eighteenth century. It's surreal to think, as you're taking a flashless photo of a yellowing skull, that this used to be a living, breathing human being that's now anonymous. It's a weird experience.
     On Sunday, we went to Easter mass at Notre-Dame. The line to get in stretched out onto the Left Bank, so we had to wait for a long time to get in. The service was in Latin and in French, so I couldn't understand much of it through the swarms of people taking pictures, but now I can say for the rest of my life that I was there for Easter!
     Starting this coming Saturday, I'll be on spring break, traveling to Venice, Rome and Santorini, Greece until April 25. The Trevi Fountain must really be magic, since I'll be back in Rome so soon after studying there last May! I'll also be celebrating my twenty-first birthday in Greece, which I never imagined would ever happen.

Until next time,
Rachel

La vie en rose

     Now that the novelty of riding the métro has long-since worn off, we have a love-hate relationship. I’ve started taking round-about ways of getting around instead of taking the seemingly logical, American straight-shot across town, just to avoid frequents stops at the nightmares known as Montparnasse-Bienvenüe and Châtelet, because most of the time I’d honestly rather waste a half hour on a detour than fight my way through swarms of people who just stand there on the moving sidewalks. I’m also not the biggest admirer of that one person who smells like rotten eggs who always makes an appearance when the train is full and there’s no way out. But despite my gripes with other passengers’ hygiene, I don’t know what I’d do without the métro, because it really is the most convenient way of going anywhere in Paris. What will I do when I go back to Minneapolis and there’s only the Hiawatha line?

     I was asked a few times before coming here if I could imagine living in Paris after my semester and the answer just came to me: Yes. In a heartbeat. I think Americans are always in search of Audrey Hepburn’s Paris; the Paris without lines, pollution, or bad weather. But it really doesn’t exist. Paris is imperfect, it is always raining and no one is singing “Bonjour Paris” throughout town. Tourists are able to avoid being hazed by Paris- they live in hotels, speak their own language and leave before things turn sour. Now that I actually live in Paris, it’s completely different than the memories of Paris I had of my last visit and my ideas of what this would be like. Life is harder than at home, yes, but it's so much more normal here than I expected, too. My frustrations have already peaked and I think I could honestly live with crunchy, line dried towels, room temperature water, and without proper chips and salsa, because I love most everything else and the availability of outrageously good croissants and wine more than makes up for it. Eating breakfast under the Eiffel Tower while on an assignment from my boss, sitting in the sun in the Place des Vosges today at lunch and walking home from the Montparnasse cemetery (10 minute walk) are just a few of the little moments of bliss that I’ve had in the last week that make it hard for me to think about how my days here are numbered. I spent a half hour at my internship looking at jobs in Paris, desperate for a way to stay. I hardly think a semester is long enough to improve my French as much as I want to- I’m still not able to be funny yet. My coworkers must think I’m the most serious person ever.

     But for the time I have left, I’ll just have to profiter au maximum, as they say. 

Rachel

Croissants under the Eiffel Tower. 

Montmartre at dusk

We'll always have Paris

     Coming back to Paris from the south of France felt like coming home. It was nice to come back and know the city and see the familiar sights and sounds again. My internship is starting to pick up and I'm feeling like I'm actually helping for the most part. On Friday, I had to call every three-star hotel in the 10th arrondissement- a whole page- in French and see if they had available rooms. When my boss told me to do it, I thought she was kidding. She wasn't, and I had to make my way down the list. Bonjour, je cherche des chambres pour vingt-cinq personnes...Speaking on the phone isn't as hard as I thought it'd be, even though one person asked me to send a written message instead because he couldn't understand me. I'm busy all day now and I have my croissant-based lunch every day in the Place des Vosges, where I get harassed by fat little pigeons that eat the flakes of croissant that I drop. I also got a chance to draw a little bit, which made me really happy.

View from my bench in the Place des Vosges (I made a sketch of this woman)

My desk!

    It was Elise's birthday on Tuesday, so we went to the top of the Arc de Triomphe at night to take in the view, followed by sitting by the Seine with some wine for the birthday girl. It was so much fun to hang out, be really silly and to take my mind off being sad about missing my grandma's funeral, not being able to see my extended family that I never get to see and not being able to be there for my mom. My mom told me she read my last blog post at the funeral and "there wasn't a dry eye" in the audience and that it was like I was there. Hanging out was also a welcome respite from all the seriousness of having to act professional full-time during the week at work and at school and pretending to be French. And honestly, what's more beautiful than sitting by the river with wine, croissants and good conversation in Paris? I don't think it gets much better than that. Sometimes I forget this is my life.

Happy birthday, Elise!

     This weekend, my boss gave me free tickets to see Avenue Q in French, because she realized that she couldn't take her kids to see it since it's essentially a dirty version of Sesame Street. I'd already seen it a few years ago in Chicago, but I happily took the 40 euro tickets to see it in French. I guess there are a few perks to being a stagiaire!  

     And, just for kicks, here's a funny story: I was in the métro stop Châtelet today and the inevitable happened. I missed a step and landed straight on my knee, which started to bleed and swell. I spent the rest of the day hobbling around the Louvre and the Marais and I'd really prefer not to think about how the bacteria that's growing on every surface in the métro is probably now in my knee. I really need to carry a first aid kit around with me. 

Rachel