I love waking up to the smell of cheap wine

So, I live in Paris now. It certainly is a big change from the sunny, warm and oh-so-easy life down in the French Riviera where the only big concern I had was to wake up in time for class every day. I feel as if my life has actually begun here in la ville d'amour and the responsibilities flooding over me just seem to grow bigger and bigger. The reality really is poles apart from what I had predicted it to be. Or like we tend to say nowadays; La réalité est une salope. I imagined that there would be boulangeries giving off that wonderful scent of freshly baked baguettes and croissants in every street corner but instead Melanie and I managed to rent an apartment in a seedy Turk quarter where our highly anticipated boulangeries were replaced by kebab shops. Don't get me wrong, we love our little area, and we are already to a great extent adored (that's a lie, try: stared at) by all the Turkish/French men, having words like 'Princesses!' shouted after us as we stroll on by the many kebab shops, exploring the surroundings of our new home. Sure, we have our boulangeries, brasseries, boucheries, poissoneries and marchés des fruits within a hundred meter radius from our cozy little pad, and the cafés and bars surrounding us are very close to the number of kebab shops around. Don’t worry, Paris is still very much French.

We do try to go out every night to make French friends, but it's so much easier to end up at home with a cheesy movie and cheap wine when we have the company of each other. Yeah so as you may figure out, as long as we have our boxed wine in the fridge our lack of friends won’t disperse. To be honest, even when the wine does run out, our set of friends really doesn’t seem grow any bigger nonetheless. Everything is easier when you're two. Making total fools out of yourselves by buying way too heavy, way too big, and way too many things at IKEA and trying to transfer it all back to our apartment by using public transportation is fine when you have someone to laugh it off with, and being stalked by creepy French men is okay when you have someone to joke about it with later.

So what do we do with our days when I'm not busy applying for jobs and Mel’s not in school, cutting bangs on each other (correction: having Mel cut bangs on me), watching horrible movies that we wish were our lives or we're just being idiots?

We try to read French poems by Victor Hugo at cafes, we’re being artsy by the Basilique du Sacre Coeur and we dream of spring and summer and sunny days when we can toss the boots and the jackets, even though the weather has been exceptionally warm for January. Give me summer already! Give me short shorts, thin sundresses and iced drinks in the sun on our rooftop!

“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.”

We’ve decided to make the best out of this winter though. It’ll be awesome.

Alors, mes chéris, à bientôt!
Frida