Chance?
Last night was the second time since I've been here that I've caught the last métro back home. My stop is always the last stop before the 10 line shuts down for the night, which made me think last night and also the first time that it happened that I have great luck! I think this as I listen to the other people on my métro mumbling dissatisfactions in French under their breath and think how really dissatisfying it would be to be at a métro stop far from my apartment, and climb the steps to exit the stop, cross the cobblestone street, and step under the awning of the flower shop on the corner that has tough winter plants hanging, and walk less than a block on my sidewalk, and drop my keys trying to open the vestibule door because I shared just-barely too much wine straight from the bottle on the steps of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur after weaving/wandering through the narrow streets of Montmartre as we tried to walk off the most amazing meal of Indian food that represents the most recent example of my being very good at picking birthday presents.
In the category of great news: I'm going to Morocco! I went for delicious Moroccan food with my friend Emily the other night and was talking about how I've wanted to go there, but wasn't too keen on doing it alone, and she said she had been thinking the same thing, and THIS is the grand part of it all: her dad worked in the Peace Corps in Morocco and still has tons of connections there, so when Emily's older sister went there to visit, she got star treatment in hotels and restaurants throughout the country as a result of just a few phone calls! She came back with amazing stories, also-- one in which she and several others with a guide got lost in the mountains in the middle of nowhere on donkeys, and a shepherd ran out to them and made them come back to his house and drink his tea even though they didn't speak any of the same languages, so they sat on a mountainside drinking delicious Moroccan tea and watching the sunset and not using words for communication. So, I'm going to Morocco in search of tea, sunsets and stories.
Sometimes I feel quite lucky.
['Sometimes'? 'Feel'? Correction: I always know that I am quite lucky.]
But there are less-good days and nights and frustrations that present themselves in less-poetic ways. There are nights I have trouble sleeping and unstructured days with spare time in large quantities that I'm still trying to figure out what to do with (spare time? what?), there are strange dreams and nightmares, there are bad language interactions that stick in my head for an entire day and deteriorate my confidence. I remind myself that this is a semester, that I am living here, this is not a vacation or a trip. Because in life there are more frustrations and lessons to learn than there are in vacations?
In the category of great news: I'm going to Morocco! I went for delicious Moroccan food with my friend Emily the other night and was talking about how I've wanted to go there, but wasn't too keen on doing it alone, and she said she had been thinking the same thing, and THIS is the grand part of it all: her dad worked in the Peace Corps in Morocco and still has tons of connections there, so when Emily's older sister went there to visit, she got star treatment in hotels and restaurants throughout the country as a result of just a few phone calls! She came back with amazing stories, also-- one in which she and several others with a guide got lost in the mountains in the middle of nowhere on donkeys, and a shepherd ran out to them and made them come back to his house and drink his tea even though they didn't speak any of the same languages, so they sat on a mountainside drinking delicious Moroccan tea and watching the sunset and not using words for communication. So, I'm going to Morocco in search of tea, sunsets and stories.
Sometimes I feel quite lucky.
['Sometimes'? 'Feel'? Correction: I always know that I am quite lucky.]
But there are less-good days and nights and frustrations that present themselves in less-poetic ways. There are nights I have trouble sleeping and unstructured days with spare time in large quantities that I'm still trying to figure out what to do with (spare time? what?), there are strange dreams and nightmares, there are bad language interactions that stick in my head for an entire day and deteriorate my confidence. I remind myself that this is a semester, that I am living here, this is not a vacation or a trip. Because in life there are more frustrations and lessons to learn than there are in vacations?
posted by Sarah Beth Glicksteen at 6:53 AM
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