On est toujours "in flux."

A lot has happened since the last time I posted. I managed to keep a regular blog when I studied abroad -- it's a little harder to maintain for a year and not four months. ANYWAY. I had Christmas with my parents. Owen and I went out with my friends to the Latin Quarter on New Years. I finally had a solid day of (maybe) good teaching. I moved! I'm now living in the 14th arrondissement in a technically-one-bedroom-but-we-actually-have-two. My roommate is perhaps the most chill, nice person I have ever met. Our apartment has an oven (in which I have already made enchiladas!) and a shower that will provide you with more than ten minutes of warmth. We even have a washing machine. Our metro stop is flanked by cafes that are open late and two movie theatres, and we're within walking distance of really good shopping and a street where there's always a market. The buildings are elegant, we have a lot of wonderful boulangeries, lovely Parc Montsouris, and even a neighborhood giant -- it's a decoration on a building...pictures to come.

Okay. So now for the bad news. My new commute takes an hour and a half, and I have to time it pretty carefully because I take the metro to one train line to a different train line to a bus. This is okay, although not ideal, but today Paris and its environs had a collective panic attack because it's been snowing lately. Now, Paris is a lot like Seattle in that people do not know how to handle snow. But it's even worse because everyone relies on public transit. During last year's snowstorm in Seattle, the buses hardly ran, and it caused a lot of problems. And not very many people in Seattle even take the bus. In Paris, we've got the metro, RER, and then transit systems in the suburbs, that -- with the exception of the miraculous metro -- are fraught with delays, accidents, and interrupted commutes. Just to give you a better idea of what happens -- today, instead of the metro, two trains, and a bus to get to work, I took the metro, a train, another metro line, another train line, another train line, and finally a bus to get to work, all because of a technical problem at one of the stations in Paris that kept traffic from leaving towards the southeast all day long.

And yesterday the bus I take to work didn't even come, so I walked from the train station to school. An hour.

I just got home from work today after too many transit connections, and a long walk through the neighborhood. It feels good to be home in my cozy but freezing apartment with a cup of tea.

I still feel like I'm in a bizarre state of missing my family who just returned to the States and getting used to being on my own again, except with a roommate, so that's different too, and I'm getting oriented to the new neighborhood as well. I really love it here, and I don't miss the 13th at all, but sometimes I just expect these transitions to be seamless and they never, ever are. I'm honestly quite frazzled at all of the organizing things I have to take care of, so I'm taking it one day at a time. And trying to manage my time better -- which, by the way, is way harder in real life than it was in college, when I felt like I was always being productive just by reading books and doing art projects. It's hard. It really is. Although I know objectively that pretty soon this will just be home. Until then, I'm contenting myself with baguettes tradition from the boulangerie and learning how to cook pork and potatoes and going on long walks in the quartier and sitting down to many a cafe creme. And enjoying the perks of having a roommate. Dinner parties on a cardboard box  with "Franco-Mexican cuisine" have already begun. And by Franco-Mexican, I mean we couldn't find all the right ingredients.

A la prochaine!