It’s delicious here
Paris likes to pluck things right out of my imagination and make them real, like this cozy cafe in the middle of a used book shop:
(click it, it gets bigger)
Strangers browsed around us as we dined, and halfway through our red wine and vegetable soup Angela glanced to the left and found both the diary of Don Juan and a book about a depressed photographer whose discovery of a baby troll turns his life around (coincidentally, the photographer is called Angel).
After lunch we walked all the way home to make up for having spent the previous night eating and drinking until 2AM. Angela's co-worker Jérémie hosted the dinner party at his apartment -- a sizable place for a single person living in Paris -- and I immediately fell in love with the mix of stone walls, hardwood floors and Pink Floyd posters. We started the evening with happy-tasting white wines, moved onto spicy reds when the lasagna was ready, and coupled fruit salad with something heavy and sweet (as well as a glass of champagne).
Not bad for a 21-year-old, ey?
More friends and friends of friends showed up as the evening wore on, some that spoke perfect English and some that didn't speak much at all, as well as another expat from the US (we bonded over our kinship by impersonating rednecks, naturally). The conversation was nice and easy in spite of language barriers, and at the end of the night when it was time to go, I was reminded of my last evening in Japan.
After 3 months of asking my friend to translate the Japanese world to me, somehow I ended up at a Turkish restaurant with a bunch of strangers from places like Switzerland, Germany and Singapore. Our table looked like a United Nations meeting, but we all found some way to communicate, to share stories from our respective parts of the world. This is going to make me sound like a big hippie, but I remember thinking, life doesn't get better than this.
Similarly, Angela's friends have all been really good about speaking English when I'm around (sir expat even translated the bits and pieces of French that found their way in), and I can't describe just how grateful I am to be included in this way. Japan forced me to realize how it is to be surrounded by a language you don't know... even in Tokyo where the population density is suffocating, it's easy to feel completely alone when 99% of the conversations around you sound like gibberish. I explode with gratitude every second I don't feel that way here in France.