Turning pages

The Stanford program has come to a close. I sent in my final paper this morning and my bags are very nearly packed. It's not quite a farewell to Paris yet - Katie and I will spend several more days here - but it is a farewell to life as a Parisian. Even though that did take some getting used to and part of me is anxious to return to the normal, familiar, California routine, I will be sad to see my Parisian life go. Did I take full advantage of the opportunity? It's hard to say. It's easier to look at what I could have done that at what I did, but maybe that's because right now I'm trying to think of what to cram into my last few days with Katie.

I will miss the amazing cheese in France. Sure, there's good cheese in the US, but not to the same extent. Similarly, I will miss how every bottle of wine here is good - even the ones I can afford on my extra-restricted American student budget (Why did the dollar drop just when I went abroad?) I will miss seeing the Eiffel Tower glitter every night. I will miss speaking and hearing French.

But I do look forward to getting back to California efficiency. Everything here takes so much longer than I anticipate. I never leave myself enough time to get anything done. Meals can take four hours. Going to make a purchase generally involves dropping into multiple stores because every store is really more of a boutique with unstandardized merchandise. And even when I go to a mega-store, the item I want is rarely in an intuitive location. Don't get me started on the French propensity to arrive fashionably fashionably fashionably late, either.

The upshot of all this is that today I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to tie up all the loose ends that I haven't had time for before. I still have things left, too, like fixing these train tickets I bought two weeks ago but for the wrong day. Oops!

What have I been up to this week, other than finishing classes and frantically trying to find blank CDs? Well, on Tuesday night I finally went to the opera to see Carmen performed by a touring company based in the Ukraine. The opera was magnificent. The music was gorgeous and the costumes were stunning. Allison (the girl I went with) remarked that you can really only wear dresses like that in a performance of Carmen. No other occasion is quite suitable.

Because Carmen is a French opera, and this is Paris, they opted not to use supertitles. This was a mistake. First, opera singing in any language is pretty much unintelligible. Second, they spoke French with the thickest, most un-French accents imaginable. Luckily, I read the libretto ahead of time so I knew vaguely what was going on, but even so I understood maybe one out of every 20 words. I doubt if the native speakers were any better off.

Last night we had our farewell dinner. I took pictures of all of my food, but on someone else's camera, so you can't see them - yet! We at at Le Train Bleu, which is a very fancy, famous Parisian restaurant that opened in 1900 for the World's Fair, or Expo, or whatever it was called. They haven't changed the interior of the restaurant at all since then, and it is beautiful! The food was amazing too. The meal started with "des amuses bouches" (mouth entertainment, or a fancier way of saying appetizers) with smoked salmon and champagne. Then the entrée (which is not the main dish in France) was crab and shrimp in a delicate pastry with lobster sauce. It was absolutely incredibly. Then we had veal with pasta and the best red wine I've ever had. After this came the cheese course. Dessert was this amazing chocolate brownie-esque pastry filled with chocolate and caramel. Mmmm. I love the Bings.

I take off tomorrow morning at 6 am to get to the airport in time for my 9:30 am flight. Time to become a world-traveler again!