Three days left in Paris and once again I'm pondering where time goes and what I get up to all day. It's not like I've been doing very much work, having imagined I would use the six weeks here to finish the introduction to my book - at the very least. Nup. So what have I been getting up to all this time? Here are some highlights...I've had visitors to entertain. Dave caught the train over from London for the weekend and we had a fantastic time eating, drinking, wandering, going to the Musée d'Orsay and Notre Dame. The first night, I took him to a cute little restaurant near Montmartre that Ro and co had taken me to, only to discover it was the very same place he'd been to randomly and loved on a previous trip. Having a visitor to show round made me feel much more connected to being here and reminded me of how much I love it. I've had such wonderful welcomes from a number of my friends here so it was lovely to share the love with my visitors. And there's nothing better than feeling like a local. As soon as Dave got back on the Eurostar, Andrew from Sydney turned up and so he and I launched into a somewhat different three nights of bar-hopping and a little naughtiness, plus some great meals with a couple of my Paris friends.
Just before these visits last week, I caught the train down to Avignon where I joined Tina and Renaud and some of their friends for a few days in the Provence countryside, which was just perfect. Apart from fabulous meals and conversation at the house, we had a couple of outings to some beautiful local places including the amazingly pretty stuck-on-a-hillside villages of Roussillon and Gordes, a Medieval monastery surrounded by lavender fields, and the Roman Pont du Gard outside of Avignon. All of this was well worth the expense of the last-minute train fare and the disaster at the station in Paris where crowds and inefficiency caused me to miss my train and almost storm home in a funk without going.
Otherwise, it's just been a continuous round of early evening apéritifs, late night meals, meeting all kinds of interesting people, going to bars and clubs and stumbling home late, shopping and promenading, some great exhibitions like the amazing Valentino retrospective today with Tina, a little bit of writing, and two positive work meetings which should yield some teaching for me to come back for in September. And so as the five-month odyssey comes close to its end, I may not have achieved quite the career goals that I was hoping for, but I've sure achieved enrichment and have tested out the benefits of letting myself have some of the experiences I spent years denying myself. Who wants a career anyway?
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