I'm writing you from a subway. The sandwhich shop.

Venice quenches my thirst. I sweat out its rainy thunderstorms in words I can't yet post here, but now I'm in Paris which is perfect and simple and so I shall share. Pictures available here: http://www.facebook.com/#!/album.php?aid=178407&id=736578917&ref=mf. But here is one: or maybe it is up top? I don't understand html and I am going home now.


I requested a triple freshman year. I wanted two best friends, two new sisters, I wanted a challenge and honestly I didn’t have much of a choice anyway so I might as well want what I will get. Now any bed I ever stay in while traveling seems luxurious. If there is more than two feet between the top bunk and the ceiling, you’re living big man. Sink in the room? Oooh la la. Sharing a toilet with less than sixty girls? That’s the life. My hostel room in Paris is the penthouse suite of college dorms. There’s a shower in the room!

I’m often surprised by how cities meet my stereotypes. On my first trip to Paris, I was shocked that everyone said “bonjour” with a bounce just like Madeline. My second stay here has confirmed even more clichés. There is a girl with dreadlocks in my hostel. I heard someone say “Foux da fa fa”. Baguettes are everywhere: in the Metro (beautifully efficient oh it is amazing), on the street corner, and wrapped around my hot dog. I haven’t found le piscine, but did find two bibliotheques. People picnic beneath the Eiffel Tower eating baguettes and drinking bottles of wine, or toasting champagne in tiny plastic flutes.

Some things though, have surprised me. I didn’t actually expect to hear “Oh la la,” but I did. Everyone speaks to me in French, I’ve been asked for directions at least four times, people rambling quite a bit before I say “de solieli, tourist”. The Sacre Cour has an unfathomable mosaic and the worst British boy band messing up the words to “You’re the One that I want” from Grease.

I write postcards at famous places and I’ll post them later but here’s what I wrote yesterday:

“You are gold and shiny of tiny pieces like the mosaics in the Sacred Heart of Paris perched high on a hill stained glass is beautiful but you can’t see through it, do we build questions like windows to look in or look out? ‘De donde vienen ustedes?’ Do they cut mosaics before or after they paint them. If you were a church who would you be? Notre Dame, St.Peter’s Basillica, St.Mark’s, or the façade in Orvieto? Inside le Sacre Cour it feels like I am nothing, if I were to lay down on the floor in the center like I want to I would be swallowed into the hillside beneath the stories beneath my feet. Do the people who design airport benches, and lecture seats and church pews work together? These pews are bearable, but not fall-asleep comfy, I nod anyway. ‘Better take a sweater honey, you might duomo later.’”