Adventures & Other Things That Make Me Happy

I was sitting at the piano yesterday, going through an old notebook, looking for song material, when I came across journal entries from Study Abroad.
And they made me happy, and not like they'll necessarily make you happy, but what the heck. Also, I apparently have plans to live ALL the places. Nbd.
We'll just pretend it's like I'm liveblogging the whole experience, instead of failblogging the entire three months. It is without further ado that I present to you: Adventures (ONLY eight months after they happened.)

Saturday - Saturday market in Loche, live there much? It's all so picturesque, but it also feels quite real, and I could happily live here. More than Paris, even. Yeah, I went there. & there's lots of gorgeous woods round here, like in Amboise, where we're staying. Mel & I went for a run last night and it was major fairytale. So in love with this country, but also terribly excited for Belgium, Amsterdam (!!!), & obvs...England, etc.
Paris did teach me I could be a city person if said city is beautiful enough...but being out here in the autumn woodsen reminds me of home & the fact that deep down, I'm just plain country.
& bought a gorgey russet sweater at the market. (& Alicia bought it in grey...twinsies!) (Joking.) (But really.)
Off to Chenonceau!
xxx
Also there was this sweet black lab at the market and everyone immediately goes up and pets him for like a year - like, spot the dog-lovers - but he was the sweetest - Sapphy - but made me miss Hoss & Boo hardcore.
Also yesterday - Leonardo da Vinci's French home & a huge park with tons of his inventions - gorgeous, mad fun, vair cool, and I took mebs a million pictures for KK.
xxx

Saint-Malo Saint-Malo Saint-Malo!
So gorgeous and peaceful and wild. You understand. I think beaches just won in the eternal beach vs. mountains discussion. It is so perfect. The oooooooooocean. Last night we were in our church clothes and straight up got in there. Soaked to my waist? Don't mind if I do. And it was tres warm. BRILL. & today we just like sat and watched the ocean for over an hour.
SO HAPPY.
Here I want to live.
Also Chenonceau yesterday (Saturday?) - so lovely & fairytale-y. The wooooods. Mmm. Oh, and happy October!
xxx

At Port...en...Bennis. I think? (UPDATE: Nah, it was Port-en-Bessin, my little fools.) It's a fishing town, not v romantic but almost...realistically romantic? Like modern drama? Think the town in Ondine when there's the accident. Although obvs less chaotic. But, like, Mel & I popped outta our hotel room at tenish, wandered the tiny town center, with two roads facing each other across a canal, with all the boats blinking blue and guys hauling fish out of their boats. Also cool moving asphalt bridge, v. Hogwarts. Anyways, it smelled of fish & salt & grease & it was raining lightly, the kind you barely feel but can see coming down hard in the goldy streetlights, and it was fantastic. Normandy D-Day beaches manana.
xxx
Oh & Mont St. Michel today! Really really lovely, & made me think of our Christmas Village train, all steep little road winding up through the cottages.
"The cure for anything is salt water: tears, sweat, the sea."

Omaha Beach - assess, adapt, and overcome.
At Omaha Beach: how incredibly brutal. War is horrible & brutal & sick & dehumanizing, but warriors - they're noble & believe in something & are braver than I think most of us can realistically imagine. The greatest horrors of mankind seem to create the greatest men.

Oct 3
The Bayeux Tapestry this morning - seriously excellent.
Giverny this afternoon, except it was pouring.
And now we've been on the bus for ages, & it is so grey and green and it's sleepy and sad and lovely. & Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head just came on. Excellent. I love France, uh, a lot.
xxx
One of those days where I dream - more than normal - that I can fly. Comprende?
& all the countryside & towns we're passing...the houses all look either like mental institutions in horror movies or crazy, stupidly picturesque & lovely & cosy, all windowboxes and smoke curling out of chimmneys and painted shutters and all that, or some bizarre combination of the two.
Very If You're Feeling Sinister.
Yet all highly magical, too - that wooded glen with smoke rising out of it? An elf feast. These brick houses? Holding a mad magician, C.S. Lewis style, every last one of them. That sort of feeling.
Count me in and consider me sold. If I could get thrown into a story right now, Inkheart style...well, I'm not so sure I couldn't, today.

Just watched The Sound of Music on the bus (love). (HELLO Christopher Plummer. Who knew that was him? Not me. I love Captain Von Trapp.) (LOVE.)
In ma homeland...The Nederlands! What's more, last day with Pieter, our adorbs bus driver/ ma Dutch brotha. He's the jovial big-belly-ed kind of man whose tip of the nose gets red when he laughs at his jokes. That kind. Adorbs.
Nederlands Nederlands Nederlands.
It's about 4 here, the sun's low in the sky & mad bright, & it's v green and chill & Just a Boy is playing. Done & done. One of those Mindy moments: "Or rather, who I have been is not who I will be."
It's naice. xxx

Sent mom a pic of the I Love You sign drawn in the sand for her birthday, and today's Demarie's birthday, so we all wrote on Post-Its & covered her hotel room door in em this morning. Besides which, on the bus, her countoff number is 3, so when she called it out we all launched into Happy Birthday. I love other people's birthdays!
xxx

I love how Holland is literally claimed from the sea. Like there's an area, like a whole county/providence (?) that didn't exist in 1930...because it was THE OCEAN. That's solid.

In France the clouds moved so fast it was bizarre, & in the Netherlands, they don't move at all. Oh, I'm sorry, did I say at all? I meant at all. The most green and blue still kind of peace, though...I like Holland MUCHO.
Still tripping out about the clouds, though. In 5 minutes they have made no progress. It's majer surreal.

Holllllllland. We were in Amsterdam yesterday and it was fab, I lurved it. So this morning we went to Leiden, and I was like, I love this. Leiden > Amsterdam. And we climbed up inside a windmill. Shveet. Then we stopped in Delft, and I was like, I DIE. Delft > Leiden. The Netherlands just keep getting better and better. All we've done in Delft is walk around & now we're drinking cinammon steamers in Coffee Company, where there are lots of scruffy, sensitive, well-dressed Dutchmen having deep discussions in English. It's just really sun-lit & cosy & there's a very nice, very broad-shouldered, very ginger baristo. Happiness is a Dutch coffee shop in the sunshine in the autumn.
xxx
(& the biiikes!) (& Vermeer's hometown!)




That's the end of that run-on trip down Memory Lane, babes.
xxx and all that jazz,
Tabby

Make That Three

Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery today.

This is like, er, straight from ma heart and all, so if you like it, yeah, words to that effect would be awesome, and if you don't, that's cool, it's okay, there are no claims to being great here, but...er, gentle, constructive criticism? Thanks mate.

Visiting the D-Day beaches and the American & German cemeteries though...seriously a transcendent experience.




I only know one person
- two - who have died.
I cried more
over Moe
who was 17
and my cat
than I did for my grandma
and great-granny
combined.
Make that three
but he lives -
lived - in the desert
and I rarely saw him
and so it's not real
is my understanding.
So 3000 graves is a bit much, yeah?
for an 18-year-old
who only knows
- make that 3 -
people who've
"passed on".

My great-granny
looked strange
when she was dead
I remember the room felt pink
like cloying, really warm
and she looked ridiculous.
And she was crabby
so I'm sure she agreed
and she'd have scolded
that mortician
roundly
Scolded him roundly.

I don't much like
to think about death
when I do it gets into my tea,
the taste of
the thought of
the inevitable-it-will-happen-without-exception-to-all-every-single-you-love-ness
of death.
So these white stones
and red lawn-mowers
make me tired and a little angry
- which I'm not used to -
but really sad
(and?)
I've gone from
- make that three -
I hardly grieved
or don't believe
to a father and son I didn't know
but am sitting on this freezing bench
kind of crying over.

At the end of the day, Paris is a mass of really pretty lights.

I don't imagine I'll get a lot of time to write after tonight - it's just that tonight everyone is major jet-lagged, so add that to our "not going out alone" rule and you have me chilling here with David Sedaris, Gorillaz, and a baguette. Er, yummm. The sun's falling behind a hill clustered with white buildings and trees and France's bitty Statue of Liberty is just outside, holding up her torch to a Paris I can't quite see for massive apartment buildings. Add the dark ribbon of the Seine rolling past my window, a boat loaded up with tourists, and the lights slowly coming on across the city and you have something remarkably like bliss.

Our hotel/apartment (little suites with baby kitchens that are perfectly equipped to make mint herbal tea) is ten minutes walk from the Eiffel Tower. From the other side of the hotel you actually get an aewsome view of it - so a bit depressing that our room happens to be on the wrong side, but then again, the Eiffel Tower, so obviously glorious, is only just a fair competitor for the completely endearing Little Lady Liberty.

 

(Classy crazy zoomed in picture of classy Miss Libertay.)

 



And catching a glimpse of Le Sacre Coeur, set up on the hill, gorgeous and exotic and Parisian as anything, as we shuttled/bussed/metroed/walked into the city was totally one of those perfectly framed, breathless movie moments found in such enduring classics as Passport to Paris or that other well-acclaimed Olsen film noir, Winning London.

And the energy of this city is gorgeous, said with only a bit of throaty enthusiastic sarcasm. We've got a Monoprix on the corner, mais oui, and it was only after buying an armful of groceries that I realized that they don't just give you shopping bags. And the cashier I asked for one really was pissed, especially when, after begging her for one in half broken French, half desparate English, I produced what I thought was a five cent Euro coin, but what was instead a pound coin that had been floating around in my bag. And it was stressful as anything, because, I dunno whether you've noticed, but I feel like French stores move fast. I feel like I had better know exactly what I'm getting and exactly how much to hand over and God HELP me if I hesitate. The point of that? I love that there's this whole city moving around me that doesn't give a crap that I made a fool of myself for a second at the Monoprix. Not like most cities, or towns, or even villages would give a crap, but for some reason it's like, yeah, that kind of stressed me out. Being embarassed does that to you. But who cares? Because the Seine is chillin outside my window, and I get to have croissants fourrés (although I just googled that so I could use the accent on the e, and found a recipe for it using curry. Que??) for breakfast every morning because, hello, chocolate and croissants? Heaven. And I get to make new friends in one of, if not the, most gorgeous cities (y) in the world and I get to live ten minutes from the Eiffel Tower for a week and a half and I get to watch the sun set over Paris and leave the sky the same warm, drowsy hue as the rest of the city lights. Paris, je t'aime.

 

 (Paris is bloody hard to shoot zoomed in, out a window, at night. So we make it intentionally blurry and call it style.)

There! That's better. I dig the different shades in each strip of the picture. Way to go, Paris. Well done.

 

xxx

Tabby