Friday full of friends :)

Last friday was such a fun day :) While it was one of the coldest days I have ever spent in Paris, I spent a lot of the day walking around the city!  I met a friend at our moms' old cafe haunt in the 17th, Cafe Vigny, right by EAB Monceau, and got a hot chocolate and pain au chocolat :).  We actually saw british and american mom's of kids at the school, so we had a little nostalgic chat about the old days in Paris, and how bizarre it is that so many of us seem drawn back to the city all at the same time.  I just finished the book The Paris Wife, about Hemingway and his wife, and the time they spent in Paris.  I love imagining what happened in authors real lives, that you only see hints of in their writing.  It was really interesting because I love Hemingway's quotation about Paris being a moveable feast, that once you live there, you carry the city with you forever.  I identify so much with that sentiment.  My friend and I were having moment after moment of feeling simultaneously like an eternity had passed since we left Paris, and also like it was just the other day that we we trooping into Parc Monceau in our blue and grey and white.  We compared 9/11 stories, mine being spent in Paris right at the very start of my time there.  We felt old and young at the same time. 
I got lunch in the 1st arrondissement with a BC friend, and then headed back to the 17th for an "English Tea" with a really old Paris friend (and her pug!).  I love friends who you can not see for days, months, years, and find you can fall into the same friendship each time you see each other again.  
Later in the weekend I headed to the Musée D'Orsay to escape the cold, and what a beautiful building it is!  I took in some Degas(my favorite), Seurat, Monet, etc...and then had a leisurely chevre chaud salad and frites in a nearby cafe, while I read Camus' La Peste for my french literature class (how and when the rest of the class has already read it I'll never know!)
With the cousins, I got down to some planning for our end of the semester traveling/backpacking/eurorailing/hostel-hopping, you get the picture!  We booked our initial flight from Paris to Bilbao at the end of May! It is really happening-and I can't wait!
Upcoming trips: In two weeks, I am off to Berlin for the weekend, and then the following weekend to Dublin, AND the following weekend (the first in March) to Lyon to see extended family! I can't wait! Hopefully the weather will have gotten at LEAST a few degrees warmer by then, but I'm not keeping my hopes too high for that!
A bientot :) bisous
xoxo Gi