The French eat French bread, but they also eat burritos.

On June 21, I had lunch with the JWS, hugged all my friends, got on a bus, and left Oxford. I passed Magdalen College, and I remembered my first view of it on October 2. Though the bus had been within Oxford city limits for quite a while, my view of Magdalen was my first real clue that I was really, truly going to one of the oldest universities in the world. On that fall day (seriously, how cliché is this memory going to get?), I was so impressed by the grandeur of the city and by my total displacement from home. In June, my last view of Magdalen brought instead a sense that this grand place had become a sort of home. At this thought, I promptly burst into tears which did not subside until we neared London. It was only my “Get Fuzzy” comic book that finally cheered me up. Darby Conley, you are my hero.


Anyway, off the nostalgia and onto the next story: I wasn’t going into London to fly to Kansas City. I was going into London to fly to Antibes, a city in the south of France.


Let me take this opportunity to plug the Hall Family Foundation. The lovely and kind and undoubtedly beautiful members of the giving-money committee (dear giving-money committee: I am sorry that I don’t know your real name) were lovely and kind (and beautiful?) enough to give me a grant that enabled me to attend a French-language school in Antibes. To the Hall Family Foundation: you rock.


I flew to France and was met by my French host father, Pierre Pravettoni. He drove me to his home (we listened to Jason Mraz, Elvis, and some random French person in the car), where I met his wife, Isabelle, and his twin sons, Alexandre and Anthony (affectionately called Alex and Antho). This is the Pravettoni family:

They were pretty much amazing. Isabelle is a fantastic cook, even when she’s cooking boudin noir (blood sausage, which consists of, you guessed it, congealed blood in a sausage skin. I hope you weren’t eating when you read this). Pierre loves music of all kinds. He kept showing me YouTube videos of American artists that I had to had heard of (I hadn’t), or of awesome songs. Check this one out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM. It’s worth five and a half minutes of your life.

Alexandre and Anthony look enough alike that I initially was afraid I was never going to be able to tell them apart. We became good friends though, and I figured out which one was which. In this picture, Anthony is on the left and Alexandre is on the right:

Alex and Antho and I watched a lot of television, especially this terrible French Real-World-Big-Brother-type show called “Secret Story.” I am ashamed to admit I got pretty into it. I also watched Jaws, which is called Les Dents de la Mer (The Teeth of the Sea) in French, which is hilarious, and Castaway, which is Seule dans le Monde (Alone in the World). Also a lot of “CSI: New York” which they call “The Experts: Manhattan.” The twins and I also played a lot of Wii golf. I can now beat any of you, and probably Tiger Woods, hands down.

The last two of my three weeks, a 16-year-old Spanish girl named Edurne came to live with us. She is super sweet and has spent every summer since she was 11 in either England or France:

I didn’t spend my days just watching TV and playing Wii with French people, though. I also went to school in the mornings. There’s not much to say about school: my teachers were nice, my French really improved, and I advanced a class a week. My classmates came from a bunch of different countries: Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, England, Brazil, Italy, Greece, Turkey. It was awesome because we got to tell each other, in French, about our countries and cultures and traditions. I didn’t just learn about France and the French, I learned about all sorts of peoples and nations! It was phenomenal. I loved it.

In the afternoons, I hung out with my friends. We spent a lot of time on the beach:

Enjoying the view:

Antibes is a very, very beautiful city. It was founded by Romans and perfected by the French, and it’s one of the richest and largest ports on the Mediterranean. The water is this gorgeous blue, the old city are these gorgeous sun tones, and the land is this gorgeous green. Want more proof?

This is in the old city.

This is me with the port and the old city behind me, taken from the top of Fort Carras.

This is Antibes and Juan les Pins, from the top of the hill on the peninsula.

This is one of my favorite pictures.

My friends and I also visited neighboring cities. We visited Cannes, where there were no movie stars but there were yachts that probably cost more than my entire college education, including the Oxford part:

We visited Grasse, which was hilly and wonderful and had a great perfume factory:

And we visited Nice, which was just as great as it was in April. Plus, I got a supercute new dress there, bonus.

On Sundays, I went to the Evangelical Church of Antibes, which played Michael W. Smith and Matt and Beth Redman songs in French. One Sunday, after church, I visited Marineland, where I got to see these guys:

I love aquariums, I love animal shows, I loved Marineland.

I was in Antibes from June 21 to July 11. The goodbyes in Antibes were sweet:

On July 11, I flew back to London. I went to The Globe again (it’s such a magical place), and then I visited Oxford to see some JWS friends for the last time and to pick up some luggage that I hadn’t dragged to France.

Finally, on July 14, I got on the United Airlines flight that would return me to my country. When I landed in Washington, DC, I didn’t start crying from happiness because my mouth hurt too much from smiling. I kept jumping every time I heard an American accent, wanting to run up to them and cry, “We speak the same language!!” I ate a Wendy’s hamburger for the first time in nine months, and I called my mommy. Coming back in the country was a very good experience.

And finally, finally, I got back to KCI. This time, I did cry on the plane as we landed. It was so overwhelmingly wonderful to recognize an airport! I haven’t tried to count how many airports, train stations, and bus stations I’d been in since October, but it was a lot. Most importantly, my family was waiting for me in the airport. I’m tearing up right now, over a month later, thinking about how much I wanted to run from the airplane to the gate, how I couldn’t hold in my tears of joy even before I saw them, how good it was to be hugged and held by my parents and brother, how glad I was to not have to miss them again for a long time. You don’t learn how true the clichés are until you leave home for a long time: home is where the heart is, there’s no place like home, I wish I was homeward bound (okay, that’s a song lyric). Oxford had become a kind of home for me, and I’ll miss it. But my real home, the one I’ll always want to come back to, is 5421 N. Tracy.

And now, friends, you have travelled with me from October to July, from England to France, through fun, boredom, travels, hominess, loves, hates, homesickness and joy. I feel like I should say something pithy or clever to end this blog, but I’m not going to because I’m not done with this blog. I’ve found that I like telling stories, I like sharing YouTube links, and I like filling the blogosphere with parentheses. So, please check back here every so often, and you may find something I thought was funny, a story I thought was interesting, links to YouTube videos or news stories, or just pictures of my senior year.

Thanks for keeping up with me this past year!