Top 7 Favorite Moments since coming to France:

7. Hitch-hiking through Alsace with the coolest roommate ever.

6. Discovering Le Paros, the best Greek restaurant this side of Athens, on a chilly autumn night with my best friend from the US, and having the restaurant’s cat climb onto my lap during the dessert course.

5. Going to the Killers concert with a dozen of the coolest Europeans ever, and suddenly realizing that I had a group of friends in France.

4. The thousands of café cremes I drank at Le Montparnasse, the café Laura and I visited at least twice a week since the second half of first semester, sitting watching people walk by in the dark and the wind, cozy inside with Rasmus on the stereo and the waiters never quite understanding WHY we stayed for hours at a time.

3. Preparing for the Christmas party to end all Christmas parties in the smallest kitchen ever in the history of the world at Lydia’s apartment.

2. Climbing the Eiffel Tower at the stroke of midnight, under a full moon, on the coldest night of the year with Cliff, bundled to the absolute MAX, and being able to spot my apartment from the top.

1. Waking up at 630am on a Thursday, getting ready and leaving my apartment at 7 to wander around in a brand new outfit in an effort to forget all my "troubles:" I had no bags, I was out of cash (traveller’s cheques in baggage), had a raging fever so high I could hardly walk that had woken me up at 6am, and I couldn’t figure out how to use European phones and thus couldn’t call anyone. I went storming through my neighborhood, walking faster because I thought that perhaps thus I would outrun everything freaking me out. I turned a corner at full speed, looked up, and caught sight of the Eiffel Tower, shrouded in fog from the first deck upward, at a distant of less than 1/4 mile, but I had no idea it was there. Funny, if you had asked me then, I would have marvelled at it because it was beautiful and amazing, but since I was so miserable then, I would not have said it would make it to my top ten list... even then I knew that those would be the worst days of my life and adventure in Paris– I knew immediately that I had knocked out ALL of the potential troubles in the first week and a half, that after that, it would be a breeze, but I also knew that SURVIVING that first week and a half was going to be nearly impossible. I remember thinking that morning as I stormed through our quartier without a thought to where I was going that there was nowhere in the world I would rather be– even then I didn’t want to go back to the US– but that there was really nothing that could realistically have made the situation worse. But I stopped when I saw the Eiffel Tower then and looked at it for close to fifteen minutes– I just stood there, thinking about where I was and how excited I was, and how I knew somehow that the next nine months would be full of unexpected surprises like that.

And that song keeps playing through my head...

With a map of the world etched on my face,
B