live in europe

I fell in love with the movie “l’auberge espagnol”/ “the spanish appartment”. i’m gonna root for a study abroad opportunity, and in the meantime, i am taking spanish courses. Me gusta viajar ^.

Currently set up a few accounts with au pair websites to connect me to host families. I’ve already received two messages requesting more information about myself and experience with kids. The families seem great so far! Will need to continue talking to them and finding other options to get best fit!
Very promising though!

I lived in the town of Stamford, Lincolnshire, a few hours north of London. That was for my gap year, working at a junior school there.

Thinking about, London, Germany, Or Italy.

A bit of the wall still stands in place. You can still get East German entry stamps in your passport for just 3€. You can have Starbucks coffee in what used to be East Berlin while looking at Checkpoint Charlie.

An hour’s drive into France for snowboarding with friends. Evening of live jazz in a castle. Nothing in English, only French and German.

D and I drove up to Rotterdam yesterday to catch an evening of Jazz, Blues and Big Band. It was a 4-hour drive with lots of rain. Well worth the effort. I got to see a bouncy James Taylor sing to hundreds of people, a sea of bodies and discombobulated camera screens. I saw an amazing bass player who did things to his bass I never imagined could be done. More jazz in the form of a small trio. Then on to the Big Band to close the evening. Over 8 hours of nothing but amazing music. We slept in till 9:30 and got up and had a continental breakfast (I now understand why we call our hotel breakfasts ‘continental’). Then a 4-hour drive home with more rain and a border check on the way into Germany. Well worth the time, energy and money.

I was reminded today of a major difference between Europe and America. My new co-worker was shocked by the announcement Germans don’t do air conditioning. The poor girl was, of course, jet lagged so it probably wasn’t very nice of me to dump that on her.

Every day I get home, my bedroom is 2 degrees (fahrenheit) warmer than it was when I left that morning. It only drops 1 degree each night so my bedroom was 78 this evening…

Lightly coated in perspiration all day long. Swinging the windows wide to bring in that hint of a breeze. Hearing the distant thunder rumble without the relief of rain.

I stood at the north end of the Forum and looked out across antiquity. I stood at the heart of the culture that built the Western world. There is no place so old in all of US. No place that has marked the world so profoundly.

One of the buildings on Capitoline Hill is the Basilica Julia. Although it may sound like a church dedicated to a woman, it was really Julius Ceaser’s Courthouse. To understand history is to bring a greater understanding of self.

When I got back to the hotel room, I looked down at my boots. They were covered in dust, very ancient dust.