wordsmith and mongrel

Tag: travel (Page 1 of 4)

les sirènes de Naoussa

The sirens of Naoussa flew in on
low-cost wings to perch above the Aegean,
rockhopping in sensible shoes and dancing
through flowers shaped like fireworks

They’ve been swiping, not singing, to lure in
young men with boats and sleeve tattoos on
sunwarmed skin and the lifespan
of a single summer

Everyone forgets the myths these days, forgets
that sirens are half bird, not fish,
forgets she might still drown if you hold her under
too long

The sirens of Naoussa washed up on
a park bench in the Buttes Chaumont, drinking
Greek wine from stolen glasses and
mourning the sea

The siren forgets she is half
girl, that the only heart she shatters on the rocks might be
her own, that her only shiny tail is the kind
that starts with
remember when?

the other kind of love

If we were lovers, I could follow you
across the world
pack only sundresses and my
beating heart and say
I went all in for love
and sure
it might be foolish but it might also be
the entire course of my existence

If we were lovers I could fall apart
in public, run crying
from your farewell kiss and
beg you not to leave me, not even
for the adventure of your life

Because you are my friend I must say
go
leave
be happier in a place where I am not
and I must do all this while continuing to
love you
via WhatsApp, if I’m lucky
and I must not tell anyone that my heart is broken because
you are my friend.

things that have been wonderful lately

Sea foam that blows in over the walls of Saint-Malo’s old town and swirls like snow in the icy air. We take refuge in a teashop where the waiters smile and bow, and sit next to a woman who is methodically crunching her way through three bowls of sugar cubes while loudly discussing bank transfers into a flip-phone. The remains of a single espresso, long since finished, dry in front of her. We eat galettes oozing molten cheese. The waiter slips us two slices of raspberry cheesecake “just to taste” and fetches a fourth bowl of sugar cubes for our neighbour.

Sinuous crocodiles of school children, hand in hand in high-vis jackets, meandering along footpaths on their way to and from daycare activities during the Toussaint holidays.

Christmas lights pretending to be icicles strung out along boulevards. Winter comes to Paris in a rush of shedding and adorning, showing off and bunkering down. Terraces grow glass walls and sprout overhead furnaces. Leaves darken and die (a process I still watch with wide-eyed Queensland fascination). Five cold months stretch out bleakly ahead, five months of frozen toes and hunched shoulders and taking 15 minutes longer to leave the house because of all the layers. But five months, too, of bright cold air; of sharp sunshine; of elegant boots and belted overcoats. Of Christmas markets smelling of mulled wine and of cosy train journeys. Of the Paris I first saw at 20, the one that still feels a little more like adventure than any other version.

Hot chocolate so thick it can barely be poured.

Dr Anne the dentist in studded ankle boots and belted jeans, her smoky voice booming through her open-plan surgery while she grinds tartar from my molars. I forget to look up dental vocabulary before I go and spend a lot of my time nodding, hoping not to spot a drill in my peripheral vision. But she says pas de problème and sends me out into the morning unscathed.

Rough-edged cinnamon cookies fresh from an earth oven carved into the walls of the deepest dry moat in Europe. My friend and I are the only ones peering through the low stone doorway into what were once primitive cold rooms and pantries and the woman by the oven says, They’re a test batch. Try one. It’s not until much later, when the last of the crumbs have been licked from our lips and we have crept back through the subterranean fortress to surface level that we see her disappearing into a doorway and realise she still lives in the chateau perched above.

My cheeks when I have remembered to moisturise religiously.

Singing O Come All Ye Faithful at the top of my lungs in a village church at 11:49pm on Christmas Eve.

Singing Auld Lang Syne, arm-in-arm with my friend, at 12:01am on New Year’s Day in a hipster bar somewhere near Wandsworth (the dodgy end).

Staying in, making dense pumpkin soup with extra curry powder, while wearing Quidditch Captain pyjamas and Dobby Is Free socks.

Sitting in a room full of fundraisers, learning about tax exemption regulations and having the confidence to say in accented but perfectly comprehensible French, so just to clarify, this applies to all deductible donations?

The full-grown pig that lives on a barge on the Seine in central Paris, and goes for a walk each morning on a leash.

Rue de Nevers

“No smoking in the street,” the bouncer outside the Highlander says. “Smoking area is downstairs.”

He is the size of two rugby players fused together and he delivers this practical information with an air of calm menace.

I feel compelled to swear to him that I do not smoke before ducking past into the gloom of the bar. A guitarist in the corner shifts seamlessly from Bailando to Beds Are Burning. It’s Mexican night in one of Paris’s favourite Scottish pubs. The crowd is student-aged and student-loud, compressed and chattering. I order a pina colada, and then a second.

When I leave the pub just after midnight, the bouncer and I have rue de Nevers to ourselves. The streetlight is disguised as a lamp that pours thick golden light onto the blank walls huddling in close, curving gently away to a dead end. At this time of night, the location of the Highlander Pub makes more sense: there’s an air of Edinburghensian close to this place.

I could take the handful of steps back to Quai de Conti, take the boulevard more travelled, but there’s a cross street hidden from view towards the end of Nevers that serves as a shortcut to the direction I need. I like the quiet of the street, like marching confidently down the middle of it, even like the eyes of the bouncer on my back, wondering, does she know where she’s going?

There is a van parked at the end of the street, just before the wall. A man in black moves from behind it toward one of the buildings. He is tall, abnormally so, and wears a full-length coat and a hat that tips forward towards his nose.

I get the strangest sense that his feet are not touching the ground, and remind myself to stop listening to The Black Tapes after dark. He disappears into a doorway.

I concentrate on keeping my steps even and my eyes clear of the van, eager now to make the turn into rue de Nesle. White-rum confidence, when it evaporates, leaves only a woman on a lonely street. My sneakers make tiny whishing sounds against the pavement.

I reach into my bag for a cigarette. I pause and turn my head to the side to cup the flame.

When I turn back to walk on, the tall man stands over me. Even looking up at him, his face is somehow in shadow. Between the hem of his long coat and the pavement there is empty space.

The street leans in. I glance back, heart in my throat.

The bouncer looks at me sadly, his murmur carrying in the icy air.

“I said no smoking in the street.”

IMG_2986

 

Where:

rue de Nevers, Paris 75006 (click for map)
metro Pont Neuf (line 7) / metro Mabillon (line 10)

Why:

Unless you’re ghost-hunting, there’s not much to see, but open mic night every Wednesday at the Highlander attracts some great artists. 

What’s nearby:

Pont Neuf
The Conciergerie
Pont des Arts
Monnaie de Paris (the Paris Mint)
Passage Saint-Andre-des-Arts
The Louvre
Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore

 

home is where you’re happy

In my sillier moments I like to believe I didn’t choose to live in the Fifth, that instead the Fifth chose me. I have an enduring memory of the first time I visited the arrondissement last year, when I was taking my first dip in the murky waters of the Parisian rental market. Lured in by its proximity to the Jardin du Luxembourg, its central location, and a handful of ads for tiny studios that didn’t cost my entire salary, I climbed out of the métro at Censier – Daubenton on a warm Tuesday evening, looked along rue Monge, and thought, with ringing clarity, I need to live here.

I’m not sure if my instinct speaks often and I do not hear it, or if it saves its voice for times of absolute and immense certainty (put your toothbrush in your handbag and drive home, your father is dying) but either way, on the rare occasions when I listen, it is never wrong.

Of course, “I need to live here” does not constitute an acceptable rental application, and it took a month of nail-biting, the intervention of a dear friend, and a hefty dose of good fortune to make it a reality. My sag-ceilinged little queendom near the Place de la Contrescarpe feels like a rare and unexplained benediction bestowed by the neighbourhood: you, strange oversized Australian, you may stay. I like to think, of course, in my more self-involved moments, that this quartier of Descartes and Voltaire and Hemingway peered into my soul and saw a restless poet who deserved a home.

And a home it has become, whether it was the spirits of long-dead writers or sheer dumb luck or some mix of the two that brought me here. I confess to my friend that Sundays are “Jane days”, when I spend time alone and prepare for the week ahead, but of course that’s a well-meaning lie: Sundays are the days the Fifth and I spend together, growing into one another. Once a week I choose a new direction and wander (laptop tucked hopefully in my handbag should a Franklin-winning novel suddenly formulate in my head), meandering along new streets and, inevitably, testing the hot chocolate at unknown cafes.

Even putting aside the dead writers, it’s a sickeningly clichéd part of Paris to call home. The Fifth, the Quartier Latin, is Rive-Gauche-lite: if Saint-Germain-des-Pres is old money, the Latin Quarter is the baby sister who blew her trust fund on Arts degrees and backpacking and self-publishing her memoirs at 25. It is a neighbourhood of learning and drinking, packed to bursting with universities and institutes (Paris-Descartes, Paris-Sorbonne, Sorbonne-Panthéon, Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, Collège de France, all cheek by jowl with the Lycée Henri V), with cheap sushi and taquerías, kebab restaurants with plastic chairs and drunk sorority sisters on exchange, raclette and bo bun and most things in between. At 2am on a Thursday, I talk cricket with a Pakistani man toasting chicken in Italian bread. His little store is two blocks from my house and I hope we’ll be lifelong friends.

On Sunday mornings I hook a shopping bag over my elbow and stride to the market in Place Monge. Vendors greet regulars with cheerful familiarity and I long to be one of them, to have been here long enough to earn a bonjour chérie! and an extra clementine slipped into my shopping bag for free. In early March, in the pouring rain and still with the weight of two consecutive nuits blanches in my head, I haul myself out of bed to do my weekly shop and struggle along rue Clovis. My trusty boots are letting in water. Icy fists of wind strike at my umbrella and bat last night’s ponytail into my mouth. In the place, genial political volunteers stretch out wilted fliers for Macron and Fillon and I try to invest my beaming non, merci with an unspoken explanation: I do not have the right to vote but I respect and support your involvement in the political system of your country.

There is a warmth that radiates here that does not come from the steaming vat of gratin or the freshly baked Lebanese flatbreads stuffed with spinach and cheese but rather from the dancing eyes and booming calls of the stallholders: profitez, madame! Happiness is a depth charge in my chest, a slow burn that starts in my vocal cords (trois citrons, s’il vous plaît) and blooms through my ribcage, unremarked until the walk home when I triage my emotions.

These are not the joys we imagine as children. When I grow up, I want to stand in the pouring rain and accidentally buy too many avocados because my accent thickens when I’m tired.

– – – – – – – – – –

Spring comes to Paris overnight, and right on schedule: the first Saturday after the equinox is blindingly sunny. Heavy-headed daffodils (so big and bright that I briefly wonder if they were planted, already flowering, under cover of darkness) suddenly line the rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard, and the trees in the square behind Notre-Dame are so densely covered in flowers that spare petals fall in tiny snowstorms to the paths below.

The bateaux-mouches that for months have been ferrying empty seats up and down the river are packed with sightseers, hoods flung back, scarves dancing in the breeze. Narrow windows along my street that have been closed since I moved in in November reveal themselves to be tiny cafes (four tables inside, four out).

Paris turns itself inside out. Footpaths overflow, intersections bustle, terraces bulge. Every accessible part of the riverbank from Pont Neuf to Pont d’Austerlitz is filled with walkers and cyclers and rollerbladers and people of all ages dangling their feet above the water. I take part in my first ever hash run and go puffing through the crowd, encouraged at regular intervals by picnickers who wave their plastic cups of wine and cheerfully call out Allez! Bravo!

I fling open my windows and Google “types of flowers hard to kill window boxes” and think about painting my toenails. My friend says, make sure you get some sunshine on your hands, and we walk to lunch with our fingers splayed in front of us, divining for vitamin D.

I celebrate the new season by being initiated into my local library by a librarian who derives such evident and pure joy from signing up new members that I wish I could seal the deal with a hug. As we wait for the pen to dry on my new card I tell her that I live just next door but it’s the first time I’ve been inside. She looks at my address, two blocks away, and says, I wouldn’t say that’s next door. Well, I explain, in Australian terms it is. Her laugh dances through the quiet of the reading room. Yes, she says happily, I can see that. I’m her first Australian member and she seems quite concerned that I don’t have any questions for her to answer. Come back to talk to me anytime, she advises.

I walk the two blocks home along Rue Mouffetard with my jacket over my arm and the promise of books in my purse.

what brought you here?

Being an expat in Paris makes a whole lot more sense when you realise that it’s just adolescence all over again: that you spend half your time trying to be accepted into social circles, and the other half trying to understand how life works.

That you feel everything more strongly than you used to, but often can’t communicate your emotions.

That you get frustrated a lot.

That you compare yourself to everyone around you, constantly reassessing your level of integration.

That you’re learning so fast that sometimes your head aches just with the pressure of existing.

That it’s deeply uncool to be too enthusiastic about your life.

That sometimes you want so desperately to wear the wrong things, eat the wrong things, say the wrong things, but that the weight of expectations – your own, those of the people at home, those of the people around you – can be hard to bear.

That most of the expectations are all in your head.

That you crave acceptance.

That you spend a lot of time wondering if you should have a boyfriend yet, and (secretly) what on earth you’d do if you got one.

That you’ll make friends, eventually, and they almost certainly won’t be the friends you imagined making (they’ll be so much better).

That you might, without necessarily realising it, be having the time of your life.

– – – – – – – – – –

People come to Paris for love or money. Almost every expat you meet was drawn here by a job or a lover, and if they’ve been here for more than six months – more than the unwritten but precisely allotted honeymoon period – they have settled into a complicated relationship with the city that ranges from polite hostility to outspoken loathing.

It’s hard to say for sure why this is. People often cite the hardness of Paris, the fact that even after 20 years you’ll still be a foreigner, the perceived rudeness of its inhabitants, the pollution and the horns and the six months of winter.

I wonder if it’s also the discomfort of finding out a mythical city is just, after all, a city; that nowhere is actually as magical as the Paris of books and films. That living here is, unavoidably, much the way I imagine moving in with Tom Hardy would be: a series of shattered illusions in which the perfect object of my affections is revealed to be flawed and complex and very real.

Maybe, too, it’s just a reaction to the string of enthusiastic newcomers who turn up, for a month or three, weak-kneed with love for the city and a return ticket to take them back, admiration undented, to where they came from, leaving the true expats with jobs that frustrate them and lovers who leave the toilet seat up and a city that costs them a fortune and then begs for more.

 

People like to ask, what brought you to Paris? And I invariably say, bread, and wait for them to laugh, or to stare at me in confusion.

I’m yet to meet another expat who shares my origin story, which is perhaps also why I’m yet to meet another expat whose relationship with Paris is quite like mine. I came for love, yes, but not for a person: I came for the language, for the smell of the air in winter, for the colour of buildings and the shapes of leaves.

I came because I fell in love with a country, a long time ago, and absence really did make the heart grow fonder, until at last I had to follow it across the world. I did not come for Paris – if anything, I was deeply suspicious of it – and it is only from being here, living admidst its capricious, challenging, varied reality, that I have fallen in love with it.

People come to Paris for the love of the place all the time. Wide-eyed backpackers and well-heeled retirees and sleep-deprived honeymooners and everyone in between, they come here because it calls to them and they embrace it for two weeks and bid it a lingering farewell, promising to come back.

But they are not expats. Coming is one thing; staying is entirely another. When you’re thirty, if you’re an expat in Paris, odds are you’re here for a person or a paycheque.

I’m more than six months in, now. There are complicated French documents with my name on them and I can complain about the Paris housing market with the poetic rancour of a long-term resident. And as the heady summer of my honeymoon period gives way to the bright winter of reality, I’m learning there are peculiar benefits to being in love with a place.

I am the only person I know to be here entirely on their own terms. If they came for a lover, their relationship with Paris is uneasy; she is the cold, elegant third wheel in their affair. If they came for a job, she is their office.

Perhaps they left things behind they did not wish to. Undoubtedly, they hold Paris responsible for the awkward teenage growing pains of their expatriation. This is why, when asked why I’m here, my response almost always elicits surprise.

I came to France, I say, because I wanted to. And I fell in love with Paris after I arrived.

And when your love is a city, life is easier. Just going outside – being surrounded by her – lifts my spirits. Every meal, every exhibition, every Sunday walk is a date.

I knew her – her moodiness, her flaws, the way she looks first thing in the morning – from the start. I chose to stay.

I do not need to fear that Paris will fall out of love with me, because she has never loved, and will never love me, and for once that is okay. I with my deeply uncool enthusiasm and she with her luminous disinterest in my existence: ours is an unconventional but functional love.

 

Our love will end, of course, as all loves do. Perhaps I’ll read this in a year with bitter eyes and laugh at my naivety as I vow never to return. Perhaps we’ll part with mutual affection a decade from now. Perhaps I’ll be torn from her tomorrow, unwilling and unready.

But she makes me happy, and for now that is enough.

Dubrovnik

Sometimes it seems like it would be the simplest, most logical thing in the world for me to be a travel writer: combining two passions into an honest living.

But the more I travel, and the more I write, the more I realise I would be a terrible travel writer. I’m no good with specifics and logistics; I have no patience recommending hotels and art galleries and restaurants. I tend toward a writing style so snobbishly, aggressively verbose as to turn off (I can only assume) the sensible reader. I prefer the way words sound to what they convey.

And while I so desperately want to write about my favourite places in the world, I don’t want to do so in any kind of way that would help you plan a trip there. I just want to wax lyrical about how those places made me feel. About how they might make you feel, too, if you have the chance to go there. When I tell you Dubrovnik, Croatia, is the most magical place I’ve ever been, I’m not basing it on careful research on affordability, accommodation options, availability of services, weather. I’m basing it purely on the fact that I spent ten days there in early September and if I never get to take another holiday, that one will be enough.

Herewith my entirely impractical, subjective, nonguide to having a wonderful time in Dubrovnik.

 

Go in early autumn, or perhaps spring, before the hordes descend from northwestern Europe and pack the restaurant terraces and narrow bars. Even in September, you’ll get pedestrian bottle necks at Pile Gate and have to weave your way through crowds of American wedding guests and cruising retirees on the Stradun, but you’ll always get a table for lunch.

Take friends, old and new. Mix them in together, it will be okay. Everyone gets along in Dubrovnik. Talk politics. Play cards. Get caught in the rain.

Brave the steep hillside, if your legs will allow it, and book a room or a flat that has some stairs between it and the Old Town. You’ll curse yourself every time you walk home but the view once you arrive, over the town and the Adriatic and the island of Lokrum, will be priceless. It is, in fact, possible to live inside a postcard.

Order the house wine. It’s cheap and it’s good and sometimes it comes in litres and you’ll look at your friends and say, this is foolish. A litre of wine? And then after an hour you’ll order another, just to be sure.

Buy a pair of cheap snorkelling goggles from a souvenir stall slash icecreamery and wade out from Banje Beach to plunge your face into the sea. Without them, you will never realise that disinterested seabream are passing your feet to nibble around the rocks below. Shake out your hair and dive into the middle of a school of tiny silver sand smelt, who will make space for you in their midst with an admirable show of broadmindedness. Become, momentarily, a mermaid. Drift out into the intense blue and gaze back at the city walls.

Go to the only nightclub, even if you don’t like nightclubs or electro music. Go because it’s carved into the ancient city walls themselves. Go because you might be met with shirtless firebreathing bartenders. Go because it contains one of the world’s most dense population of tall, attractive men*. It won’t just be the smoke machines that make you feel faint.

Eat icecream cones. Every day, twice if you can manage it. Eat one as an entrée while you decide on a restaurant.

Say yes to as many things as possible: to parasailing and to kayaking and to guided tours and to 2am swimming and to 3am lemon-picking and to a nightcap with a new friend.

Try not to say winter is coming TOO often.

(Fail.)

Take the cablecar to the top of the cliff, there’s literally a whole other side to Dubrovnik. Pick up your jaw. Order a pina colada.

Go back into the sea, to make sure the fish are still there. Try not to be too sad each time you have to leave them.

Find the fountain with a legend attached (if you drink the water, you’ll come back to Dubrovnik again). Swallow handful after greedy handful.

 

*based on a small-scale study.

people-watching

I spot you on my way to Tuesday drinks at Le Siam, coming off the Pont au Change. You’re sitting outside Le Mistral, a bar that shouldn’t be, but is, my favourite.

It’s tourist central, a little overpriced, nothing special. It sits next to the nondescript Place du Châtelet and traffic jostles by on the Quai de Gesvres.

But when you take one of the wicker chairs facing due west, you look out over the river to the pearly spires of the Conciergerie, and in the distance beyond the Pont Neuf you see the top half of the Eiffel Tower, far enough away as to seem deliciously mundane.

I sat in one of those chairs (the one next to where you are now, in fact) for the first time on a summer evening a few weeks ago and talked about love with an old friend. An American tourist at the next table asked me for a restaurant recommendation and I was able to give one, confidently pulling a business card from my wallet. It’s just around the corner, I said. You’ll love it. Order the duck.

I’d just come back – come home – from London on the train and I gazed out over the hazy view with proud familiarity.

There are two of you sitting there today, with a spare table between you: you didn’t come here together. You’ve just struck up a conversation and your shoulders still face outward. You don’t want to over-invest too early in this interaction so you’re turning your heads to speak, making glancing eye contact, using the view to plug the silences.

You are two strangers wearing the same expression: tired but awestruck. You are both very fair and it’s clear you are both in transit in the City of Love.

I hurry on, wondering if you will recount this story at your wedding, finishing off one another’s sentences, correcting details of how you met on a sidewalk in Paris, thirsty and footsore from your urgent holidaymaking.

Perhaps you won’t remember who initiated the conversation or what you drank or even what you said but you’ll agree forever on the way the sunshine grew thick and golden over the Seine. On how it felt like it was seeping into your veins, a slow warm elixir that was disease and cure in one.

On how you began to fall in love.

finding myself

I think the phrases “I ended up…” and “I found myself…” are the reason I travel.

On the last weekend in July I ended up in an “Australian” bar at one am in the port town of Antibes, drinking Côtes du Rhône and trying to explain relationship fundraising to Italian engineers. We were there because most other places were closing, and because my new friends were now in possession of an authentic Australian, which made it all deeply amusing.

A couple of weeks ago, at a similar time of night, I found myself doing shots with the bar staff of Cafe Oz Denfert-Rochereau in Paris. Antibes’ “The Australian Bar” won points over Cafe Oz for having eschewed fake Indigenous artwork and inflatable kangaroos, but had failed to replace cultural appropriation with anything else; it was a nondescript terrace with a single “No Swimming – Crocodiles” sign affixed crookedly to one window.

When you come from the ends of the earth, you spend a lot of time answering the question what’s it like there? or at least, in my case, disappointing people by not having any kind of neat answer at all.

When people ask about the ends of the earth, they don’t want to hear about high quality of life and high median house prices and cricket and systemic racism and tortured children and terrible public transport, so I invariably add that it’s stupendously beautiful and full of animals that are definitely trying to kill you, which generally mollifies my audience. But, they add. Australians are so friendly. So laid back. Well, I prevaricate, picking at the chewed skin around my nails. Some of us are.

I don’t know if I find it impossible to encapsulate Australian culture because there isn’t a single cohesive one, or because it’s my own culture and I’m too involved in it, or because I am deeply suspicious of generalisations. Maybe it’s because when you’re looking from the outside you’re more likely to see all the wrinkles and loose threads in the fabric. Maybe it’s all of the above.

My friend suggests that my willingness to keep being talked into going to Australian bars is in itself a cultural artefact. I hope it means “openness to experiences” rather than “endemic alcoholism” but it’s hard to say.

 

In early August I catch the slow train to Burgundy, to stay with my friend in the house her parents have owned since she was born. Her brother and his children live just around the corner in the same tiny village. Her surname is etched proudly on the side of the building that contains the family business, and if I can’t find her, she says, I’m to ask anyone where F’s daughter is. In other words: she’s a local.

She takes me through narrow streets lined with stone houses and along winding roads between fields of Grand Cru vines, intensely green as they march off into the distance. We follow her German Shepherds up a rough trail to a lookout point and gaze out over hallowed ground, home to names even I, plebeian drinker that I am, recognise with awe.

On the Saturday afternoon we happen upon a village wine festival, where five euros buys you a wine glass and a stamp on your hand to wander the closed-off streets, filled with stalls of local winemakers, and I find myself tasting wine while patting a baby goat (they’re presumably there to entertain the children while the parents sip, but I line up with the toddlers and giggle as happily as any of them).

On Sunday I end up helping to run a stall in a village flea market. Locals stop to kiss my friend, and her nieces and nephews manage the stand for us while we go to buy ham sandwiches and chips and beer from the food tent, run by chatty volunteers. The kids aren’t sure about this giant Australian their aunt has introduced to the region, and I wish I could reassure them: this place, your little village, it feels like home to me. Culturally, ‘small town’ weighs more heavily than ‘French’ or ‘Australian’.

In the afternoon I find myself floating in a backyard swimming pool, toasting in the surprisingly fierce Burgundy sun. On the train back to Paris, my hair dries stiff and tangled down my back and I fall asleep on my backpack, worn out by wine and sun and late nights.

 

Last month I found myself running ten kilometres through the rain in Manchester, England, wearing an elephant suit. The month before that I ended up singing the Marseillaise with drunk football fans on the Champ de Mars. Next month, hopefully, I’ll find myself turning 30 on a boat off the Croatian coast, accompanied by old friends and new.

I don’t think life is about Finding Yourself. It’s about finding yourself, over and over and over again, in moments of joy and wonder and hilarity and novelty.

Ending up is what keeps me going.

forever and no time at all

One of my favourite people in the world sent me a questionnaire to commemorate three months in France, and I enjoyed answering it so much that I’ve decided to share it. I have edited both the questions and my original answers before publication because I edit stuff, I can’t help it.

  1. Are you happy with what you’ve done so far?

Yes. It would be hard not to be. I always crave more, but I’ve worked, travelled, eaten many baguettes, visited many churches, met wonderful new people, seen old friends, made incredible memories, and run 10 kilometres in an elephant suit*.

  1. Have you consumed the right number of pastries?

My body says too many, my heart says too few.

  1. What’s one thing you wish you had done already but haven’t?

Become flawlessly bilingual and effortlessly elegant. Strewn the cobbled streets of Paris with hearts broken by my exotic but approachable Australian charm. Also, visited Mont Saint-Michel and re-enacted scenes from The Scarlet Pimpernel. I am going to do that last bit in September. The rest is TBC.

  1. Paris. Just Paris.^

Better than I could have hoped. I was worried that living here would ruin the magic, but it’s made it more magical, to be honest. I feel like there’s still more to explore. Everyone needs to stop asking me if I prefer it to Marseille, though. That’s like asking if croissants are better than wine: they each have their distinct and unassailable place in my life and my heart.

  1. What would make the rest of your time a success?

Improving my French. Travelling to about eight more countries. Passing my CFRE exam~. Knowing what I want to do with my life next. Doing more writing. Turning 30 without having an existential crisis. Learning to ride the métro without having to hold on to anything. See also: question 3.

  1. What’s one thing that frightens you about the experience?

Coming to the end of my visa and not feeling done; having to leave before I’m ready. Also, cyclists.

  1. Could there be more pastries?

Bikini season says no, heart says always.

 

*I keep meaning to write about this.

^I submit that this is not a question, but I’ll let it slide under the banner of poetic licence.

~International fundraising executive accreditation that requires passing a scary four-hour exam in November.

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