Je suis....

Americaine. Avocate. Petite. J'aime le voyage, le vin, la montagne et la plage. J'habite a San Francisco, aux Etats-Unis. Je ne parle pas Francais.

Yay, I'm learning French! My head hurt after concentrating so hard on trying to understand the teacher, who spoke only in French. The most eye-opening (and mind-boggling) thing I learned today was that almost all of the time, you ignore the last letter of a word. It suddenly became clear to me why in Paris I could be looking at the name of a stop and not understand at all when the loudspeaker said the name of the stop. The French are so pretentious that they decided to confuse the hell out of the non-French by putting in letters in words that they completely ignore!

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Yesterday was cold, gloomy and rainy. I walked around so much in Spain that the skin on my right heel cracked - really painful, and limits my ability to just spend the day walking around. So yesterday I mostly spent the day inside watching it rain...which made me homesick. Whenever I travel I battle between my homesickness and my love of traveling. As long as I am busy enjoying wherever I am, I can forget the homesickness. But on gloomy days when I am stuck inside doing nothing...the homesickness creeps up on me. Luckily today is clear and sunny and I just stuck a bandage on my foot and decided to explore the town. Antibes is absolutely gorgeous and SOOO picturesque...it's what you imagine the French Riviera to look like (with gorgeous blue water and yachts and sailboats in the horizon) and the old town is what you imagine Provence to look like (Juan les Pins, which neighbors Antibes, is the Miami-esque city). People actually live like this for real!

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The French Riviera is not as expensive as I expected...I'm actually spending a lot less money here than I spent in Spain. Maybe because it's the first time in two months that I've come across a large number of Vietnamese and Thai restaurants and that's basically all I'm eating (French food is good...but you can't eat croissants and foie gras all the time...I never thought I'd say that but after 10 days of utter decadence in Spain, I'm SO over rich European food - I'm so loving eating pho and Vietnamese rice rolls everyday...with the occasional almond croissant, of course).

Antibes is tres jolie - later this week I'm going to do a day trip to Monaco and this weekend I'll be hitting Marseille and Aix-en-Provence.