Tagged: family

Back in Brizzle…

(And I’d promised myself I’d never call the city that…  )

So… I was on holiday/vacation for the last month. And for the first time traveling, ever, I didn’t write so much as a word.

On top of that, I pretty much “forgot” to take any pictures. Woops.

I got to spend time with my family (which, when you only see them once a year and live on a different continent, is a glorious thing indeed!). After running around Nice and Paris and briefly dropping by Cambridge (long enough to find me a place to live next year)…. Continue reading

En France, avec ma famille… et je l’adore!

I’m in Paris, in a charmingly curious little hotel near Notre Dame and l’Ile de St Louis.

We flew in this morning, from Nice, where I met my parents – whom I hadn’t seen since December – and my brother and a lovely family who put us up for five days. (Five days which went entirely too quickly.) They have a beautiful, rambling 17th century farm house – all corridors and white plaster – with an incredible garden, twenty minutes walk from the beach.

They fed us more foie gras and cheese than we could eat, wine more amazing than I know how to appreciate, and ran around in circles with us. We tagged with the family – a gallery opening (a Sosnos exhibition, and met the man himself) to which the… Continue reading

“My” piece of the Berlin Wall

I was there when the Berlin Wall fell. I toured with the Rolling Stones. And I was in a stroller at the time.

I have a piece of the Berlin Wall to prove it.

My parents got it from the source – the wall itself. The wall had been built the year my mother was born; it fell the year I was. By the time we got there, there was still enough of it left that, as my mom tells it, half of Europe was there to party and hack off what they could. Continue reading

Mon frère habitera à Paris. Or, Expatriating with grace.

notredame2010

My brother has a “phobia” of looking like a foreigner. (He told me so himself.)

Now, I can almost understand. I hate looking like a tourist. I get self-conscious with my accent echoing in my own ears and all the wrong currencies falling out of my pockets.  I feel single-handedly responsible for over-turning all the stereotypes about loud Americans. I refuse to patronise international chains and I’ve been known to duck into a doorway to surreptitiously peer at the directions that I’ve discretely scrawled on my hand. I don’t carry a guide-book in public. (Actually, I don’t carry one at all.) I pride myself on not standing out too painfully: I can, and enjoy, eating Continue reading