Back across the Atlantic...

In a little over two weeks, I'm flying to Paris, where I'm going to live until the middle of May (essentially I'm staying as long as I can on a short-stay visa, as long-stay visas require, as Rachel as found out while getting hers for Israel, that you jump through a variety of bureaucratic hoops that can take a good deal of time, at least if you want to go to France).

While I was in Paris in October, I'd just had my wallet stolen and so I was moneyless and a bit upset about being moneyless. I ended up spending a lot of time with an old friend of my aunt, Roland, who lives quite near the center of Paris. Roland and I got on really, really well...he was reading a French translation of Mrs. Dalloway when I arrived, and as if Virginia Woolf weren't a quick enough route into my affections, he'd just been to see a French version of Twelfth Night at the theatre. He listens to a lot of classical music and opera, and he knows a lot about art. He knows a lot about a lot of things I want to know a lot about. And for some reason or other, despite my present-tense, limited-to-two-adjectives French, he liked me a lot too.

Before I left the city, he invited me to come and live with him for a few months in the spare room of his Paris apartment, and since currently most of my life choices revolve around where I can live rent-free, and those options are: 1) Middletown, RI 2) Paris, I'm headed to Paris. I am really, really excited and also a bit nervous. My French, as Anika can attest, is pretty poor, and I've never lived in a big city before, so all of this will be a bit new to me. But new has really been what I've gone for with this year off -- and when I return from France, it will have been a full year off, and unless some new possibility opens up to me while I'm there, it will be time to take a few steps back towards longer term plans like GRE, graduate school applications, a job for the meantime, and all that.

While I'm in Paris I'll be studying French pretty intensely (most likely several hours a day, 5 days a week, maybe more) and I'm also teaching myself Latin (or re-teaching, at this point, as I haven't gotten any farther than I got freshman year yet). Ideally, I'll return to the states at least competently bilingual and in possession of some very stylish clothes.

Anyways, that's what's up with me right now. If you happen to cross the pond in the next three months, come see me!! I miss you guys, and hope 2010 has started off spectacularly for all of you.