And it's nice to be home.
The last week in Lacoste was dense with work, but excellent because it was work I was excited to do. My Writing About Place class went on our last field trips around the Luberon valley, to vineyards and abbeys.
At the end of our last day of class on Thursday, the nine of us students went with our professor to Le Garage, a restaurant in the neighboring village Lumière. We had a real French dinner with local red wine.
I had some extra café to help me stay up all night to finish my brooches for Vernissage. Almost all of them were made with antique French ribbon.
On Friday and Saturday, we had Vernissage, the student art exhibition where we showed work we'd produced during the quarter in Lacoste. This was my gallery space (I got da prime spot) where I sold prints of my échantillon-pairing photographs and brooches. It was a successful exhibition, and now some of my photographs are hanging in French homes and my brooches are pinned to French sweaters.
My Writing About Place class put together an art installation for Vernissage in one of the caves. The concept was a walk-in travel journal, so we put up mementos and writing excerpts and pictures.
In this class installation, I included a summary I originally wrote about The Abbey Bookshop, but which I've found serves as an apt summary of my time in France: It's overwhelming, but in the way the view from the top of a mountain at sunrise is overwhelming. And like at sunrise, there's coffee to drink.
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| Provençal Aubrey |
Sunday and Monday were devoted to packing and spending some last moments with friends in Provence. I traveled all day Tuesday. Miraculously, we made our flights out of Marseille and Paris even after some authentic French bureaucracy at check-in, which took a little over an hour. I saw Sacré-Coeur and the Eiffel Tower from the airplane window, though, so I said goodbye to France with love and gratitude. We did miss our flight out of Atlanta because Homeland Security's Agriculture beagle sniffed out an apple and an orange in my mom's bag, but it was adorable, so no hard feelings. Plus, we were in America and could actually talk to the airport staff past the level of three-year-olds. I got home and was reunited with my dog and the comfiest bed in the world early Wednesday morning, and later enjoyed my first meal back in the States covered in Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce.
And now for some stats n' facts about the transition from France to America:
Best souvenir from France: Antique passements (ribbon, basically)
Most worthwhile activities in France: Making friends, being outside, drinking coffee and eating croissants
Approximate number of chocolate croissants eaten: 100
First thought upon returning to America: I can understand what they're saying!
Second thought upon returning to America: This coffee is watery.
