This trailer has a hold on me.

Just when I thought Lille couldn't handle any more awesomeness...

... my aunt & uncle & three tiny cousins came to visit!  Which made me remember what I always forget: BABIES DON'T STAY BABIES.  In the same way that slim orange kittens become fat, glorious orange cats, tiny dudes become BIGGER tiny dudes! 

Milan & Rishi a few years ago, capable only of sitting around looking fatally adorable:

Milan & Rishi now, capable of creating mass chaos while STILL looking fatally adorable:

Not to mention their baby sister, conveniently known as Baby, exhausted after hours of holding her own in the midst of her big brothers' Tasmanian Devil-like energy:

Oh man.  Doesn't it kind of HURT a little bit to look at them?

Speaking of hurting a little:

I hope that they will always be able to laugh that hard.

There we were, a chaotic little flock of Ontarian ex-farmers (and my Aunt Padma, who is from India, but is also Ontarian and ex-farmer by association), parading through the streets of this big France town, among demon babies and boulangeries and beer parlors.

Demon babies, you say?!

For very mysterious reasons they just sort of appeared one night, and haven't left.  Lille people act like this is completely normal so I'm trying to do the same... but they give me the creeps nonetheless.  

So.  Other news.

I reached the point last week where I could no longer ignore the fact that I really needed a haircut.  And I got one, and it's a good cut, but it's SHORT.  Shorter than I'm used to.  I think it still classifies as "long hair" because it's not like you can see my ears or anything, but it's definitely something new.  I'm hoping that it's short & sexy, short & sophisticated, even short & cute, but it might be just short & short.  Too short to tie up when I go jogging, so it just kind of flies around everywhere, Medusa-like, which at least clears the sidewalk of people as I approach.

(that was my coy way of bragging that I am a jogger now!  No longer the black sheep of my marathoning family!  Except that I can barely wheeze through five consecutive songs on my playlist... but you have to start somewhere.  Also they are long songs.)

The jogging, while somewhat motivated by the memory of all that chocolate and wine that fuelled my first, let's say, five or so months of living in France, is mostly a clever avoidance technique.  As long as I'm concentrating on not hyperventilating or throwing up, my brain doesn't have time to dwell on the various uncomfortable questions it has recently been volleying around, like what it will feel like to leave France and come home, and what I should do when I get there, and where I should do it.  

Answering the first question is easy: it will feel fantastic, because I will finally see people I've gone far too long without seeing, and because I'm flying straight to Montreal where an extremely fun itinerary with the girls and guys I've missed so much has already been suggested.  

And it will also feel wrenching, because I will have to say goodbye to a life I've lived for the last eight months, and the people I've come to love, and all of that delicious, inexpensive wine & chocolate.  And I will have to answer the next two questions.

And I KNOW that this is irrational and silly, but since this is my blog I can air out whatever irrational and silly worries occur to me: what if I am peaking right now?  What if going to France to teach is the coolest thing I'll ever do, and after this I will get an acceptable job and start saving acceptable amounts of money and eating acceptable amounts of acceptable food, and accepting an adventureless life?  

I can't imagine that ever happening, because I can't seem to keep drama and adventure out of my life for longer than five seconds even when I try, but that's still a bleak question that creeps into my mind now and then.  

The answer, I think, will come to some extent from writing.  While I write I usually have this flickering movie reel in my head showing all of my friends in suits and cocktail dresses, helping me celebrate my first book launch.  Someday soon.  Someday in my twenties.  I am confident enough in this that I even know which dress I will wear (it is pink and if you've ever gone anywhere formal with me then chances are you know the one I mean!).  

This dress, which Pauline leant me for a party in Stockholm, might not make it to the future book-launch party... but that apple crisp definitely will, in some kind of delicious reincarnation

In the meantime, there's the mangled mess of everything else in my brain to be sorted through, and it looks something like this:

Two nights ago I had a dream where I found a job in a cavernous warehouse containing millions of Oprah-like self-help books, which would be a bleak prospect except that THIS warehouse offered free back rubs to its employees before and after every shift.  There was a whole room full of massage tables, with tabletop stone waterfalls artfully arranged around the perimeter and an Enya CD on endless repeat, and professional masseurs who would gently press you back onto the table if you tried to get up too early to start working.  MOST RELAXING WORKPLACE EVER. I'm afraid the whole experience of that dream has set a new & impossible standard in my job search, as if the whole thing wasn't impossible enough already.

For reasons big and small, it looks like I may live in Waterloo, at least for the summer and start of fall.  For a long time, right up until two weeks ago actually, I thought vaguely that I would go back to Montreal, find a French-speaking job to keep myself polished, and live among that famously loveable crowd, but the advantages of living in Waterloo, at least at first, are growing & growing.  A big one is the prospect of living close to family again, after three years of being at least eight hours away from them, first by train and then by plane.

And, of course, there's always the ten-dollar Coach Canada bus between Toronto & Montreal!

 

But... wow.  Sometimes I wish I could pay someone to quickly and expertly figure this all out for me.  Barring that possibility, I just keep telling myself that it doesn't have to be all figured out TODAY.  

Soon.

I am still here.  Or rather... I am here, for the first time in a while.  I'm back from Stockholm, Paris, and Amsterdam, and also from successfully herding 25 teenagers around London for two days, and it's been exhausting.  And I don't just mean the traveling and the extreme-UV-ray exposure to unchecked adolescence.  The last few weeks have been a scrambled mess of tough choices, baffling conversations, and an extreme, knock-you-down-and-steal-your-lunch-money kind of exhilaration, and not for the reasons that might first leap to mind.   That kind of frantic living takes the stuffing out of a girl, after a while.

But please don't give up!  I'm here and I have pictures and stories to share!  I just need to catch up on three weeks worth of skipping sleep and them I'm all yours.  And I promise to stop being so cryptic for no apparent reason.

An ice experience impossible to forget!

I don't know what I was thinking when I packed for Sweden, but it was somewhere along the lines of, "hmmm, this is Scandinavia we're talking about, and it is February after all.... oh whatever, I'll just take this light jacket and hope for the best." Of the many Stockholm/Canada similarities, snow is the coldest, and the easiest to underestimate. But it has its good sides! Living in a French city perpetually overhung by Eyeore-like rainclouds made me forget the pleasures of walking through a snowy city, full of tiny snowmen and kids on toboggans....


After the first few enchanting hours, though, the reality of snow begain to creep in the seams of my Pumas: SNOW IS COLD. And despite popular belief, being Canadian doesn't make me impervious to freezing temperatures! Result = several dozen hot chocolates, creative scarf arrangements, and all of us huddling in the bathroom when we got home, thawing out on the only heated floor in the apartment.

Rough translation: BEWARE! OUTRAGEOUSLY CUTE PUPPIES AT LARGE!!

Unexpected food fact about Swedes: they like their nutrients packaged in toothpaste tubes, be it bacon, cheese, or.... fish eggs.


I tried to be brave. I did! I ate stuff I have never eaten before! But despite the sexy Tilda Swinton scene in Benjamin Button, I couldn't bring myself to indulge in the fish-eggs-from-a-tube (unlike Mattias, my enthuasiastic host and friend, who generously offered to eat my share).


I did, though, eat raw herring, which is served everywhere in Sweden (along with potatoes - oh my goodness, the Swedes LOVE their potatoes). And not only did I eat the raw herring, but I actually kinda sorta didn't mind it, which is a big step for me, a girl who has resisted the sushi trend and every other seafood movement her whole life.

Very typical Swedish lunch, with herring, potatoes, a creamy fish sauce, and green onion:


I hadn't seen anything, though, until I went to Sweden's national culture museum, and saw examples of Swedish meals from past centuries. Amidst the million variations of herring, there was a roasted swan! With head and wings still in tact!!! And a diamond danginling from its beak, as though in some kind of grotesque gesture of forgiveness for all the butchery and roasting...


I guess I don't have to tell you that this isn't MY plate:

Traveling to another country can be as much of a gastronomical adventure as a sightseeing one, and sometimes, after several such "adventures," there's nothing better in the entire world than to eat something familiar and comforting and full of delicious calories that have nothing to do with seafood. Which is why the blueberry pancakes I had on Sunday morning were the best pancakes I have ever had in my life!


Let's just pause here for a minute in memory of the perfectness of those pancakes.....




Sigh.





Back to the sightseeing part of this adventure: since Stockholm is a city built on several islands, there is water everywhere, and wherever there is water there are boats, waiting for tourists to come and take their pictures.

In the distance of this picture is Nordiska, the Swedish cultural museum, mentioned above:

Another view of Stockholm:

Two things that I need to handle better when preparing for winter conditions: (1) find out some way of taming my hair, which buckles and frizzes like an old wool mitten the second snow is near and makes me all self-conscious, and (2) stop wearing jeans that are so long they drag in the snow and soak water up to knee height and freeze my legs, which is, you know, mildly unpleasant.

But I hope none of that sounds like complaining, because I LOVE being in this city and indulging in my very favourite part of travel: getting entirely lost in an unfamiliar city (but always only a phone call away from being found again). This is Stockholm's City Hall, where the annual banquet for Nobel Prize winners is held every year (mysteriously named "the Blue Room") (Also where my friend Mattias formally received his MA degree):

A view of City Hall from the other side of the river:

Of the bazilion other touristy/museumy things worth seeing in Stockholm, my second favourite was the Vasa Museum. That place is a dream come true for those who, like me, once went through a very intense obsession with Lego pirate ships and their tiny canons.

The story, as far as I could gather, is that halfway through the 17th century the King of Sweden ordered that the biggest possible ship be built to intimidate Poland. It turned into one of those "bigger, faster, stronger" stories, where what mattered most was a country's ego, at the expense of everything else.

In the end the ship was so enormous and wobbly that it immediately sank five seconds after it was launched, before it had even cleared the harbour. Imagine how embarrassing that would be!! The kicker is that the shipbuilders suspected that their ship wasn't seaworthy, so once they got it floating they had several dozen sailors sprint from one side of the deck to the other to test it out. They had to cancel the test after only a few sprints, because the ship was keeling so steeply that it might have turned right over. But of course the king ignored the results of this experiment and told them to hurry the heck up and launch the thing.

(Listen to me! "Keeling"! Like I know anything about ships!!!)

333 years later, in 1961, the ship was finally hauled up from the bottom of the Stockholm harbour, and evenutally the Swedes built a musuem around it.

Isn't that cool?? A 300-year old ship! And you can go and see it!! And touch it! And they even fished up the skeletons of all the people who didn't make it off the ship before it sank, and you can visit those too, which inspires a delicious mixture of creepiness and insatiable curiosity.

It was impossible for me to take a decent picture of the ship, which was truly massive, so instead I just stole this one from Wikipedia:

On the right you can see part of the ship, and on the left, a little model of it with its original colours, which I did manage to snap:

I wish I could be ten years old again, with this model to play with. I could feel that part of myself, the ten-years-old part, leaping with excitement.

ABRUPT CHANGE OF SUJECT:

On an entirely different outing, I joined some friends for the most unusual cocktail I've ever had. Actually, the cocktail itself was pretty standard Megan fare (raspberry vodka), but the location was entirely unusual!!

Actually, that could be the slogan for my entire holiday in Stockholm, not just the part where I got tipsy in a giant igloo...

Cocktail glasses made out of ice! Bar made out of ice! Walls made out of ice!

I sort of wanted to leave with one of those furry coats, but the staff had obviously anticipated that possibility and were super-diligent about making sure you de-robed before checking out. Regardless, the twenty minutes spent there represent the most fun I've ever had while sitting on an ice cube.

My totally favourite place to visit in Stockholm, though, turned out to be one of the last things I did, with our entire gang: we went to Skansen, which is a big "outdoor musuem" on one of the islands, meant to recreate old Scandinavian farms and stores and lifestyle. It had kind of a pioneer village-y feel, with guides dressed in period clothing, old toys and sports equipment to try out, and dozens of tiny, beautiful roads to wander....

And it also had animals! Like this very fat, very self-satisfied hog.

A pack of wolves and their noon meal:


Tycho's distant cousin:

Santa's reindeer in the off-season:

(side note: Swedish people have no idea who Rudolph is! And Sweden in the reindeer capital of the world!! Shocking.)

Mooses:

Pauline tries an old pair of skiis:

Hippie sheep:

The entire week was pretty amazing, and to give it a movie finish we left Skansen and walked bravely out onto the frozen Baltic Sea and wrote our names in the snow (and some of us did strange turtle dances):





That's it from Stockholm. In the morning I'm flying to Paris for a second, and entirely different, chapter of this holiday adventure, which will involve a VIP visitor from Canada, some shenanigans in Amsterdam, and probably a lot of champagne. I will splash it all across this blog (the pictures, not the champagne) once I get back to Lille and life goes back to some kind of normal rhythm, somewhere in the very distant future (ie. in two weeks).

Au revoir for now!