Thinking Man, you never looked so handsome.

On a blogging and email hiatus for a bit while I show my ma around the best cities in the whole world.  And YES, I am allowed to make such definitive statements despite having seen only about O.O1% of the world's cities.  Why?  Because this is a blogtatorship!  

And also, how could these cities NOT be some of the best?  Consider the evidence:

Cats in Paris!  And some nice buildings and sights and food.  And cats!!!  Handsome French ones with a vague resemblance to a certain phenomenal cat I know in Canada.

Climbed up Sacré Coeur in Montmartre with mom, which I've done a few times before with various combinations of important people, though never with someone quite so important as my mom, nor quite so willing to climb that brutal winding staircase for a thousand breathless minutes to get up there (after jumping the turnstile at the bottom - God will smote us!).  The view is fantastic, and the graffiti is almost as rewarding.  Thousands of declarations of love painted on with white-out, and several hundred prayers scrawled over the stone, mostly begging the Lord to spare innocent souls from the brutality of the French finishing exams at the end of high school.  

Another point of evidence: endless liquid dinners in Lille with two of my most favouritest men in the world.  Okay, maybe Lille wouldn't make an objective list of the World's Best Cities, but to me, personally?  It's a tie for Montreal.  

Baby ducklings in Bruges!  (Yes, it's Belgium, but my love for France is so huge that it dribbled a little over the borders...)

The photo below is taken from inside the Close at Bruges, where we were shushed several times by earnest-looking nuns.  Just as we were leaving, we noticed a joyful and well-hydrated wedding party push their way in.  The things nuns have to deal with these days!

 

All of this is just a TINY taste.  So far we've done Paris, Bruges, Bologne-sur-Mer (northern beaches, with England like a hazy rope of licorice on the horizon), and Lille.  Tomorrow I'm taking her to ground zero of this whole love affair: ROUEN.  Tingly fingers just thinking of it.

Not easy!

Tearjerker alert: Lara left yesterday morning to go back to the U.S.

After Annabelle and I dropped her off at the train station, I allowed myself the whole morning for moping and taking everything far too seriously.  And then I got out of bed, went "running", took care of basic personal grooming needs, and got down to the business of planning for my last few classes.  If I sound self-congratulatory it's because initiating all of that activity took super-human strength, given the weight of knowing that Lille is now without its Lara. 

What we'd look like as a pair of Dutch farmers:

Over the weekend Lara, Annabelle and I drove to the Netherlands to see some tulips, which were so numerous and colourful that I doubt my overwhelmed retinas will ever recover.  I'm having trouble uploading photos so I will have to post all about that in a few days.  For now, here is one shot taken from inside Keukenhof, the fantastically enormous flower gardens in South Holland:

You know how sometimes when you spend a LOT of time with the same couple of people, even the best among us can't help feeling a little tense?  Well, with L & A, I never felt like that.  The more time we spent together, the goofier we got, and the more roving and unintelligible became our jokes.  It was heaven to meet these two goof-balls and go roaming across the continent with them, and it's annoying how we all have to split up now.  Thank goodness for Skype and for the fifty thousand emails we've already sent each other, even though it's only been two days!  

See you in September, BG!    

It's been evening all day long

I slept like a bear through much of the day, and then got up and went to a comedy show tonight so hilarious & insane that the actors themselves could hardly keep straight faces, and in the midst off all that tearful laughter I looked at my friends and realized that I have to say goodbye to France exactly two months from today.

An impossible (and somewhat inconvenient) truth.