Yesterday I sent a metric shitload of stuff back home. It cost over one hundred euros. (You’re welcome, anyone on the receiving end.) Besides the extreme self-satisfaction and smugness I gained from doing this very selfless act, the thing I was most pleased with is that I didn’t even try to use any English. I was there for about 45 minutes too.
The first rule of post-club is that you don’t open the office much during the summer. The second rule is that your opening hours make no apparent sense. But the third rule is that you do post your opening hours online, so unless your clientele is really really stupid, they don’t walk up the giant hill on one or more occasions just to have to walk back with nothing achieved (besides breaking a decent sweat in 35 degree heat).
Last week I managed to find a glimmer of the open post office to purchase several boxes. And then I found time in my hectic schedule of swimming and reading and eating ice cream to pack said boxes. Then I found it within me to fill out some postcards I’ve been harbouring since Mallorca, all of two months ago. And FINALLY I got around to cutting my hair off so someone with cancer may one day receive a wig that’s hopefully not full of split-ends…
Yesterday all of these magnanimous actions culminated in me filling out six customs forms, in triplicate and getting a sweet “you’re doing well” from the post clerk. It’s strange how long it takes to fill out forms when you’re no longer used to using a pen. Damn computers.
It was this outing in particular that made me realise how far I’ve come since arriving. Although I’m still not sure how to use the conditional or the subjunctive, I can manage to explain that I’m sending these things back home, I’m living here for a year, I’m going to Provence soon for a friend’s harvest season, and then I’m going to live in Paris and look for work. I can understand when someone asks me to sign and date a form. I can exchange pleasantries about the weather and the benefits of having a pool at one’s disposal. I can say “seven stamps as well, please”. But most of all, most of all, I can look exasperated and flummoxed when the clerk explains that as of the first of January this year, France decided to stop sending mail on boats. Now, everything through the post, goes priority. And expensively. Very expensively. But what can you do? NOT send your Icelandic woollen jumper home? Not on your nelly. I have about five kilos less to carry for when I move again. And it really is lovely to send little things back to friends and family. Money is just money after all.
Next on the agenda (besides a week more of pool and reading and ice cream), I’m heading over to Provence to participate in my very first (and mostly likely last) vendange (grape harvest). I imagine by the end I’ll be all of my additional ice cream kilos lighter and have wine stained feet, a deep leathery tan, and be fluent if not in french, then in wine terminology.
After that I have booked an apartment in Paris, complete with French room mate, until December. I will look for work in Paris, and if I don’t find any, I will just squander my time on museums and galleries and cinemas and coffee and reading and meandering about the city and no doubt being pickier about what I send back home.
arrest that panda 