Speculoos Biscuits

July 31, 2011 § Leave a comment

In the middle of July, the air turns frigid and the clouds open up their pearly gates and outside the living room window, the sky darkens and I no longer feel the urge to crawl up onto the roof. The rain followed us through Paris and Ghent, to Amsterdam, and after a brief let-up, came down with us to Prague. So instead of casually wandering the canals of Amsterdam, I sprinted from store to store, doing shopping that I really didn’t need to do. We managed a brief, but rewarding picnic of baguette, goat cheese and rosé (plus Nutella, were you really expecting otherwise?) on the Seine, but otherwise sought shelter in the corner cafés. Being in Paris was disconcerting, my fingers remembered the code to the courtyard outside of my old flat and we ran in one day and peered at my old front door.

Something about seeing Paris made the homesick bug set in a bit. I have one and a half weeks left in Prague (crazy right) and then it’s off to Italy. Despite the quickly closing time period in this city, I am not consumed with the desperate realization that I have seen nothing of it, as I felt as I was about to leave Paris. When people ask me if Prague is like how I imagined it would be before coming here, I really struggle to come up with a reply; no one seems to believe me when I say I arrived here with zero expectations, but I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting anything specific. When people ask how I came to Prague of all places, the honest response is that it was random. I wanted to be abroad and I ended up in the most beautiful city I have ever been to in Europe.

But after a week of traveling and a week of entertaining, the exhaustion has set in. Our sleeping schedule has basically become 6 a.m. to noon, with a tired zone out around 5 p.m. It’s time to sit still, lie in bed, stare out the window, and process, process, process. As this whole year is coming to an end, it’s strange to think about going back to the U.S. for good, going back to school and leaving this part of me behind. But it’s also been good for me to accept that parts of your life come to an end, people come and go and a lack of expectations is actually a good thing to carry with you.