France like you've never seen it, at last.
I dropped my bag in Paris on a Tuesday morning, and I knew from the very first coffee, gulped down standing at the counter, that this trip was going to surprise me. Not because of the monuments, which I expected to find exactly where they were, but because of everything that exists in between. The alleyways that smell of wet stone after the rain, the street corners where the scent of fresh bread appears out of nowhere, or the inner courtyards glimpsed between two Haussmann buildings.
The South threw me a plot twist I hadn't seen coming. Between Bordeaux and Provence, I had planned two days. I took four. The light changes completely once you get past Lyon, more golden, almost thick, and Yuuki settled on the train's window ledge without moving for two hours, mesmerized by the fields rolling by. That's when I understood why so many painters came here to live out their days.
I had saved Normandy for last, wrongly. I expected less from it, and maybe that's why the cliffs of Étretat took my breath away like few things had on this trip! The wind was strong enough to carry off my paper map, Yuuki watched the seagulls with an unsettling focus, and I ate the best mussels of my life in a restaurant with no laminated menu and no photos of the dishes. In France, the best spots don't have a sign.
My wonderful memories
The Night Train
Yuuki claimed the bottom bunk the second we boarded the train, and he didn't move an inch the entire night. I negotiated, I begged, I even tried the stern look that usually works. Nothing at all. When we pulled into Gare de Lyon at six in the morning, he stretched with visible satisfaction while I hauled my luggage down with the back of someone who had spent the night on the top bunk. He had won, and he knew it!
Lost in Sarlat
I took the wrong alley four times in a row under the rain, with my paper map disintegrating in my hands. At one point, a group of tourists started following me, convinced I knew where I was going. I led them straight into a dead end! I owned it, I smiled, I took a photo of the alley in question. Yuuki, meanwhile, had found a dry doorway from the very start and was watching all of us with condescending patience.
Yuuki and the Raclette
Savoyard raclette deserves time, attention and a stretchy waistband. Melted cheese, potatoes, cold cuts, and a very precise order of layers. Yuuki looked at my plate, then at his own, then back at mine, with the expression of someone mentally recalculating all his hopes in life. The chalet owner took pity on him and slipped him a piece of ham under the table. Yuuki accepted it without so much as a glance in my direction, as if I no longer existed!
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