There & Back Again, Part 1 – Paris to Pennsylvania

There & Back Again, Part 1 – Paris to Pennsylvania

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
It's all quite blurry now, but what I remember of it all is full of various landscapes, faces and suitcases. There was eating, drinking, merriment and... mucous. Fucking holiday travel. It's always a lot of planning and stress, but we had a plan. A simple plan. There was no way it could fail. We had a direct flight from Paris to Pittsburgh, PA. We would rent a car, then drive 3 hours to a tiny, rural town just outside the middle-of-freaking-nowhere. After 1 week, we would board a Greyhound bus to Colorado.  Another week there and we would fly from Denver back to Paris. There were various parties, reunions and get-togethers planned in several different locations with dozens of people. Okay, so it wasn't really such a simple plan. Maybe we'd hit a snag here or there; 1 or 2 little things could go wrong. Or... everything could go wrong. Olivier and I woke up at 4:30am on December 20th. I stared at the wall with...
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You Can Go Home Again… For a Price

You Can Go Home Again… For a Price

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
“There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.” -Bill Bryson "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." -Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again "America is my country and Paris is my hometown." -Gertrude Stein ◊ There is something that happens to someone when they live abroad. It doesn't matter where they live, or for how long; spending an extended period of time living in a country that is not your own will affect anyone who tries it. If you've...
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Leaving for Paris

Leaving for Paris

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
Four years ago, I was in the midst of disassembling my life in Colorado. This is the only way to build a new one. There in my apartment, which was rapidly becoming a large empty space, I stared at the packed boxes. There were more and more of them every day.There were times when the packing and planning was exhausting. It was easier to chain smoke in the dark with several pints of Guinness and a blank page while listening to Rufus Wainwright. Of course, one song that I played over and over again was "Leaving for Paris."httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djpWPhv1tPU&feature=PlayList&p=6FD35315AB3D3572&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1It seemed so appropriate since that is exactly what I was doing. It had occurred to me that I might actually be out of my goddamn mind. Then again, this thought has crossed my mind several times throughout my life and has never really been a point of major concern. But, packing up my life to move to another country to marry a man who I...
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Annoying Americans, Volume 4 – Expat Bloggers

Annoying Americans, Volume 4 – Expat Bloggers

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
American expat bloggers... well, yeah - it's true that with my little blue passport, Wordpress account & carte de séjour, I meet all of the criteria.  But, just wait... hold back your fist-pumping, cries of "hypocrite!" for just a moment.  I might get around to making a point... eventually. Before I moved to France, I spent a great deal of time scouring the internet for information on the place that was to be my new home.  It was a big move, going from Loveland, Colorado to Paris, France.  I was planning to get married to a French man soon after my arrival - I was nervous, excited, stressed-out & elated.  I was doing this alone, with only my faithful feline sidekick.Even though I had already been to France a couple of times already, I wanted to find as much information as I could, so that I could get a clearer picture of what in the hell I was getting myself into. Some...
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Miles of Berlin Before We Sleep

Miles of Berlin Before We Sleep

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
"Gotta go over the Berlin Wall I don't understand it.... I gotta go over the wall I don't understand this bit at all...." -Sex Pistols, Holiday in the Sun * * * The world is full of great cities, each of them considered "great" for reasons all their own. I haven't seen them all and there's a good chance that I never will, but I've seen a few. I've been rained on in London. I've stepped in Parisian doggie doo on my way to the Eiffel Tower. I've drunk sweet, sweet Guinness in Dublin. I've done a shitty Sean Connery imitation in Edinburgh. I have yet to argue with a NYC cab driver, but it's on my list of clichés to act out. Then there's Berlin. Sure, I consumed sausages, beer and sauerkraut in Berlin, so there's one more big city cliché checked off on the list, but there's so much more to it. I went crazy in Berlin. I walked around slack-jawed, laughed, learned, cried and shook my fist at Berlin while...
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Misanthropy at the Movies

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
At the restaurant inside the movie theater, Olivier & I sat down at the table.  He started eating.  I was struggling with the impenetrable plastic package holding my napkin & brittle plastic fork."Man... did you get a load of those fucking people that were in line in front of us?"Olivier responded by nodding his head.  His mouth was full of sandwich.  He swallowed.  "Yeah, they were pissing me off, too," he said.  Sip of soda.  Swallow.  "The wife was smashing her elbow into my ribs while she bitched about napkins to the person working behind the counter."My fork was now free.  I pulled my sandwich apart & began flicking bits of tomato off of it.  "Seriously... you'd think that her husband could have corralled their kids while she did her bitching."  Tomato.  Flick.  "I thought that they were going to start climbing my legs as if I were a mighty oak.  I love how people think that any other adult...
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