for the last two weeks i have been in france, as evidenced by my endless barrage of content. this is just an obnoxious little summary of my trip.
i spent a week in the cote d’azur and i loved everything about my stupid little fantasy life there. i would go for a stupid little morning swim in the stupid atlantic ocean, and then go to my stupid bakery to buy baguettes and stupid little pastries.
this was followed by my daily journey to the farmer’s market, which emma chamberlain recently featured in a vlog. i mourn my routine there. i would get tomatoes from my stoic tomato guy, who rebuffed all attempts at banter but had tomatoes that were so sweet you could, and should, eat them by the handful. i would slice them over some bakery focaccia with some fleur du sel. then i’d go to the olive vendor, who was so cheery and more susceptible to banter. on sundays there was the socca stand, a mediterranean chickpea pancake specialty, and the socca vendor told me about how she left korea to move here for the love of her life and now they made socca together. she gave it all up for love! but above all there was my lettuce girlie, who was so effortlessly beautiful with a smattering of freckles and perfect winged eyeliner. we would giggle in nonverbal communication and when i said goodbye, she said she appreciated how i smiled at her every morning. isn’t that the sweetest and most heartbreaking detail to notice? i met her boyfriend, who helped run the stand, before i left. i have only one photo of me at the lettuce stand. i was too shy to ask for photos with my farmer’s market girlies.
i am of the camp that paris is definitively mid (imo there is nothing there that new york does not already offer — or shanghai does better), but the south of france was a cathartic space. it was wholly ridiculous and completely magical. there were so many villages that i wandered around that i’ll never remember the name of, and places like the gorges of verdon that i just know i’ll never find my way back to. how irritating! why did everything smell like flowers in those villages? why was the air literally perfumed with jasmine and lavender? how did the butterflies feel so comfortable that they would lazily float through the air, taking time to land in your hair and on your shirt like you were a character in a fucking disney movie? the water was so blue, the sunlight so warm, when you ran into the ocean in the morning it felt almost abhorrent to know that this was real. because it also wasn’t!
wanderlust is a grating word to me, largely because of those 2014 tumblr posts, but i admittedly have it now. sightseeing was great, of course, but i miss just making my way through five coffees and aperol spritzes a day, oftentimes simultaneously. i had never been to france before, and found both rest and relaxation there (nobody tell ottessa moshfegh that). i listened to a criminal amount of jason derulo. i washed my hair a lot. i still feel too awkward to unabashedly reminisce in it all — there’s too many snobby travel aesthetic posts for my taste — but i had to let you know about what i saw. i had a wonderful holiday, the kind of trip that white women write novels about. i am sick of bread. i don’t regularly eat it and have consumed several years’ worth of it. i am excited to be around other people of color again. but that was my france trip. it was highly, highly annoying. and i miss it very much.