You know you're in the United States when...

Top Three Holy-Crap-I'm-Home Moments:

1. When I was in the Chicago airport and I saw a sign that said "toilets" and legit thought it was a typo for a few seconds. Toilets? What? Toilettes. It's not that hard to spell check a neon s... Oh. Chicago. Right.

2. When I got a soda from McDonald's and immediately got a chip of ice through the straw and freaked out because I thought it was a human finger or something. And then I remembered that there is ice in America.

3. That moment when I stepped into the shower and was like, the shower head is mounted on the wall! There's hot water! It's not absurdly small!

France friends, did you have any "aha moments"?

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. The times they are a-changing. CHILDREN GET OLDER.

A lot of things have changed since August 22nd.

Where vacationing couples used to stroll along the hot sunny quais of the Seine, now only the most water-resistant Parisians walk, the cobblestones covered in puddles and strewn with rotting leaves. Where once there was scaffolding on the building across from me, now there is fresh-washed limestone. The sky has turned from deep summer blue to a variety of steel-grey and aluminum-grey and pewter-grey clouds.

There are neither leaves nor cobblestones in this picture. But I swear to god it's a thing.

When I first got to Paris, I walked past an abandoned office space every day on my way to class. After a week or two, the windows were boarded up and the abandoned office space became a construction site. It was a bit of a nuisance on my route, a gaping hole to sidestep, a pile of concrete dust that stuck to my shoes. And, like all construction sites, it seemed like it would never end. For three months, I walked past the men with jackhammers and sheetrock. The construction progressed, of course. One day they were bringing out the remnants of old walls, another day they were building new ones. But it never occurred to me that the construction would eventually be finished. I paid no attention to the progress, because construction is something that stretches on for all eternity. I never expected it to end.

But then, one day, they un-boarded the windows. And the new glass was shiny and clean, and the formica countertops inside beckoned like toys in a Christmas display, and the lighting setup was absolutely heavenly. Men in suits with clipboards replaced men in hardhats with power tools, and within a week there was a big red sign outside, and there were loaves of bread and macarons on the formica countertops, and there were fresh-faced young women with tidy hair behind the counter.

You can alllllmost see the baguettes.

I have been in Paris long enough to see the birth of a bakery.

Weird.

On Wandering

I'm leaving Paris on Friday, and I have a lot of feelings about that. But for now, I want to talk about wandering.

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, "Not all those who wander are lost." Well, J.R.R., I think your books need a really overzealous editor, because no one wants to read a description of a forest for 15 pages, and I think you get too much credit for that quote.

No all those who wander are lost? No shit, Sherlock. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that if you're wandering, you're not lost. Just awesome. You know what people do when they're lost? They cry. The pull out maps. They frantically ask for directions.

Wandering isn't like that. Wandering is poignant and stress-free.

About a week ago, I went to London with my two best France buds, Faith and Erin. We didn't have a whole lot of plans, because we're too cool for that. And we ended up just doing a lot of...well, wandering. It's funny, because if you ask us what we did that weekend, we just kind of shrug. What did we do that weekend? We walked past Buckingham Palace. We climbed some lions. We saw Wicked. We ate Indian food. But there are so many hours in the day, so much time that more driven tourists could have filled with museums and guided tours and whatnot.

Did I mention we climbed a lion?

But we just wandered. We wandered past some restaurants. We wandered around a department store. And we wandered down a long long long street, where we were expecting to find a tube station.

There was no tube station on that street.

Nope.

So I guess you could say we were lost. We didn't look at our maps, so I'm not sure if it counts as lost, just guessing that there will be a tube stop and not finding one. But we were looking for something and it wasn't there. But you know what we did find on that street? We found some piles of leaves to frolic merrily in. We found a statue with confusing dates on it. We found a free museum with the most fascinating exhibit on craftsmanship. And we didn't mind one jot that we were "lost."

Merrily frolicking!

So I guess what I'm saying, is that "wandering" is just a state of mind. And so is "lost." But I would say that the best way to explore a new place is not by making a great big schedule with all the things you want to do and see, and then getting "lost" trying to find them, but by setting out to wander, maybe in the general direction of something cool, maybe not.

All things considered, London was the best.

The. Best.