like carillon ringing only on Sunday

of COURSE i remember that!! we were so exhausted and we were practically out in traffic trying to get just the right shot. if only we'd known that first day that by day 20 we would not really care anymore about the 'perfect' shot and just do the garden gnome pose in every picture to prove we were there.

here's one for you. remember the day we were finally sick and tired of the cathedral bells? wasnt it our picnic lunch at the farmstay when we realized we were sitting directly under the little church belltower......a bell that chimed every quarter hour? how funny were we refusing to give up our heavenly reading spot, just hurriedly covering our ears every fifteen minutes for nearly two hours.

p.s. this is the Monet painting of the cathedral in Rouen that we visited on my birthday.

love, rach

what i'll remember most...

remember that night, standing under the windmill of the moulin rouge, so tired from our long day of walking all over the city...it was dark and and the neon lights were bright and reflecting everywhere and for some reason we could not stop taking pictures of each other in front of the moulin. i think we were trying to get just one good one of the both of us. one where we did not look like we had been beaten to death by the streets of paris, but to no avail. in every one of those pictures we both look near death --- ah but it was a romantic way to die…

a sign

this weekend when i was in world market i saw a little wooden sign that said 'dreaming of paris'. it was a little creepy since i had just the night before been dreaming of paris. ok, not so strange because i dream about it all the time. i'm homesick for it too! but homesick cant be the right word. it's actually more the opposite of homesick that i miss. i miss every day being a little bit scary.....feeling alive. it goes without saying but you know i'm just like you. it's so easy to become a 'hermit' and imagine how much easier it is when you don't have a car !

ok, i better stop thinking about it. it was good talking to you on the phone tonight by the way. i'm glad you were on your way to have some fun. if you want to have some serious fun though you need to come visit me. we could switch brain halves cause i'm tired of mine.

(random europe memory #187: remember in florence the cool internet/student art gallery place? where the guy gave you the student discount but thought you were a student in the city and thought you could help his friend 'practice his english' and we had to keep pretending we were actually living in florence for the student discount? ya that was funny)

love,
rach

thoughts...

i'm so glad you posted here rach because i havent liked it one bit either that this blog has been left alone for so long. i agree that we should keep it alive. i have been very homesick for paris. is it ok to be homesick for a place you've only spent a small amount of time?

i've been getting settled here in san diego and its all been very exciting up until this weekend. i've got everything unpacked and i've been nesting i guess. well i like to tell myself that anyway. i've been spending a lot of time alone in my new place and i'm watching myself slowly turn into a hermit. i know that i have this tendency, so i'm going to need to make myself get out of the house now and then because i do feel much better when i'm out and around people outside of work.

its funny. i still have everything from our trip, ticket stubs, postcards, receipts, notes etc, all of it stuffed into the same little flowered bag that traveled around europe with us. i haven’t touched any of it. i’ve been meaning to get everything out and go through it, maybe make a scrapbook. but I just cant bring myself to do it for some reason because its all just too sad. i know it will make me restless and i’ll want to be back on the road again. who am i kidding, i am restless to be back on the road again.

never too late

today i wanted to show someone pictures of our trip and thought....i'll just go to our blog! and how sad to see we never updated it. but i know why. we couldn't bring ourselves to do it...to admit that it was really over. every day i have flashbacks. it starts to rain here and i remember the grandma and her granddaughter on the train to the farmstay who called ahead to the station so that when we got off the train, there was an extra umbrella waiting for us with their family. or, i call UPS to schedule a pickup for my job and hear the exact same tone that we heard over and over again on every train station loudspeaker. i put on my worn out jeans that i had on every single day of our trip and think about looking at them every morning and saying 'gosh steph, i dont know about you but i think i'll wear these dirty stretched out jeans today. they look fabulous!'. i hear someone speaking broken english and think about the only friendly guy we met in venice who said (referring to his friend) "his english is not very good looking".

obviously i don't want to think of it as over. i'd like to say we are only in a holding pattern until we can go back. so, until then i dont know about you steph but we might as well still use this blog to keep track of our adventures together or otherwise since we live apart now. i don't want it to just sit here unused anymore!