The one where I leave France.

You guys, I am leaving France in like 16 hours or something.

After this I am going to Greece for 5 days AND THEN I WILL BE HOME.

This whole experience has gone both quickly and entirely slowly. When you're feeling lonely, it feels like an eternity until you are with your friends and family again. But at the same time, I feel like I just moved in. It is amazing how time is so subjective.

I realize I haven't written in awhile.

 2 weeks ago I went to Paris again for a day. I couldn't stand the idea of leaving France without seeing the Louvre and Versailles, so I went with some new American students and took the slow train to Paris. It left at 5:30 AM, which is before even the busses are running, so I had to walk the 45 minutes to the train station at 4:15 AM. Fun times.

After our 3 hour train ride into Paris, we arrived and had some breakfast before tackling the Louvre. It was so amazing to see some of the pieces of art I have only read and seen pictures of. It almost didn't seem real as I stood and looked at the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. It was insane.

We had lunch in the museum cafeteria and then our group separated. I wanted to go to Versailles, but as it was everyone else's first time in Paris, they wanted to go see some of the monuments. So I ventured off to Versailles on my own. (Mom, Dad, if you're reading this: I know this is the kind of thing you tell me specifically not to do, but... hey I'm alive still! That's good!) So I had to do a record breakingly fast tour of Versailles. I was there for about an hour when I had to get back on the train-subway system and go back to the train station. I thought I was doomed when I was just getting of the subway about 5 minutes before my train was supposed to leave, but luckily I made it and my friends and I had a lovely 3 hours ride home whilst being hit on by our neighboring compartments' annoying male passenger. Luckily, we had an older gentlemen who decided to sit in our compartment. We think he was doing so in order to protect us, because honestly we are annoyingly loud, so I can't imagine he enjoyed sitting there. So thank God for nice people.

These last two weeks, I have basically been hanging around Dijon and going to some places one last time. It is sad to leave a city not knowing if you will ever return. Right now, I am waiting for the dorm people to come inspect my room so I can get my deposit back. Tonight I am sleeping at a friend's house and tomorrow morning we have to leave to go catch the 5:30 AM train to Paris to get to the airport to travel to Greece.

It sure has been an experience.

What I did over winter break (spoilers: nothing.)

So winter break was not super exciting for me, neither were Christmas or New Years, but they could have been worse.

For Christmas eve, my friend's parents took us out to dinner and they treated us (against our will, we wanted to pay.) We had some cookies that night, too. Her parents were entirely too nice to us. They brought us SO MUCH FOOD. That made me feel loved. :)

On Christmas day, I slept in probably the latest I have ever slept in on Christmas. At around 11 am those of us still around got together with the parents again and we made a gingerbread house that they had brought with them! (I tell you, way too nice!!!) It turned out halfway decent and we had a lot of fun! Later in the day we all cooked Christmas dinner together. It was way better than I expected (since we only have hot plates to use). We had pan friend chicken, vegetable medley, potatoes, stuffing, a baguette, and some illicit wine that we somehow got away with drinking in the downstairs common area (alcohol in any form, for any reason is prohibited in the dorm.) Afterwards, we had, you guessed it, MORE COOKIES! Cookies cookies cookies cookies.

It was very, very nice of he parents to include us in their holiday festivities. It felt nice to have someone's family there, even if I couldn't have my own.

I had a very chill week after that. Lots of wandering around the city and getting food and the like.

For New Year's eve many of my friends went to Paris, but as I did not have the money at the time of planning, I stuck around Dijon. I had dinner with some American girls at a Taiwanese restaurant and it was very good! They even gave us a free apéritif (a drink for before meals) because of the holiday. After dinner, my friend and I saw Le Chat Potté (Puss in Boots) in the theater in 3D. I would have preferred it to not have been in 3D, but other than that it was a fun movie.

When the movie was over we literally just walked around the downtown area and waited for it to be midnight. Lots of places were open, but we weren't really feeling the bars, so we just wandered. We had lots of Frenchies yell Bonne année to us and some even yelled Happy New Year even though they had no idea in passing that we were American. It was a fun evening, considering I had not had high hopes for my New Years.

So yeah, that's basically my winter break story.

My friend and I are planning a trip to GREECE for after our semester is over!!! I am so very excited about that. I will be spending 4 nights in Greece at the end of the month. After that, I will be flying home on February 2nd, which seems too close yet also too far.

I don't know how to feel about leaving France yet.