{thought shot}

for those of you wondering where’s the rest of the meme that started here, and which I answered here and here already, just wanted to tell you I haven’t forgotten about the interview!

I’ve been a little busy over the last few days, what with trying to drag F to look for potential new flats -he’s not in a hurry, unlike me, the impatient-don’t-want-to-miss-anything girl he’s quite annoyed with right now- with seeing some people and going for walks in the afternoon…

sorry I’m procrastinating Abby, I’ll post my other answers over the next week!

Interview Meme – Question #2

[If you missed my previous post, this meme started here for me, and question #1 along with instructions is here]

So, here goes question #2 – it was hard to decide, I tell you!

2. Seeing as you may have insider European knowledge which really is better Swiss chocolate or French cheese?

First I’d like to say I like all things chocolate (or almost) and cheese is one of my favourite foods… so you can imagine this was a bit of a conundrum!

As I may have ‘insider knowledge’ but am not a bit of an expert, I’ll just go with my guts and personal tastes here: I’ll say French cheese is better, but I’ll eat more quantities of Swiss chocolate. Please follow me if you want to know why…

Swiss chocolate is indeed pretty good, I am not going to say otherwise – even if Belgian chocolate is also good and seems to have less publicity overseas – but I mostly like black chocolate: milk is too sweet, white is not really chocolate, and although I sometimes eat it, it’s not something I really like.
So, one could say I really *really* like a third of the total chocolate possibilities.

How often can you eat chocolate? hum, my preferred time it’s right after a meal, with some coffee or without. Yes, I love the French ritual of eating a little slab of black chocolate along with your espresso after lunch – I don’t know where it comes from, but I just love it! Anyways, back to the ‘when’: apart from that, I might eat it right after getting up in the morning (very useful when, like me, you’re prone to dizziness due to an empty stomach in the morning), or at any time during the day, really – whenever I get a little craving, I just grab a little bite!

Chocolate has an important role in my everyday life, even if it is always (at least usually) in small quantities: I’ve never been able to eat a whole slab in a sitting, couldn’t imagine doing it… unless maybe it was some very very thin black chocolate filled with mint… *ehem* yes, I guess I could devour a box of ‘After Eight’ chocolates without even noticing… that’s why you’ll rarely find it in my pantry!

(Notice I haven’t been specific about the origin of the chocolate: it’s because the brands I usually eat are Swiss – so perfect for your question, you were right to say I may have insider knowledge after all! – I also eat a Belgian brand, pretty good too!)

Now to French cheese… or ‘cheeses’, as there are SO many different varieties! I am no expert in the different kinds of French cheese, but there are many many I love – some I just know I’ll love, even if I haven’t tasted them – and a few I don’t really like, even wrinkle my nose at.

I dislike stinky gooey cheeses: not only stinky, because there are many stinky I like; not only gooey because most of those are yummy on a fresh piece of bread… Just stinky and gooey – it’s weird I know, but most of the cheeses I dislike are like that! (I am not going to name them, wouldn’t want to discourage anyone -as if I had enough power or influence, but hey- or make anyone feel annoyed because of my own personal taste…) To follow the chocolate comparison, I’d say I like around 3/4 of the total of French cheeses – even if I haven’t tasted all the kinds available…

Cheese on some bread is my favorite breakfast of all: goat cheese with raspberry jam, some cured Spanish one over a drizzle of olive oil on the toasted bread… {yuummm} *that* is just Heaven for my taste buds! I also love the crunchiness of brown melted cheese over… well over whatever dish you want! And freshly grated cheese on my pasta dishes are a must.

Sadly, I am starting to think I’ll have to be strong so as not to fall into temptation and eat them sparingly, really sparingly: not only I have a quite sensitive level of bad cholesterol in my blood, but I am beginning to notice I have trouble digesting any food that contains lactose… It was hard to reduce my cheese intake because of cholesterol levels, but thinking I may need to take it off my diet completely due to lactose-intolerance just makes me shudder! I don’t think I will, I’ll probably eat some from time to time and then bear with the consequences – at least (let’s just hope!) it won’t be a strong allergy!

So there you go, I’d choose cheese over chocolate in terms of ‘quality’, but when it comes to health… Heck, let’s just put it this way: my heart would choose the cheese, my head chooses the chocolate!

Mmh, it’s not so bad after all – I’ll just cross my fingers so I don’t develop some kind of chocolate intolerance!

Interview Meme – Question #1

This is a cool meme that I’ve found over at Abby’s: basically, I answer 5 questions Abby has especially concocted for me, and if you so wish, I get to ask *you* 5 other questions!

Instructions go like this:
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the
questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions. Be sure
you link back to the original post.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone
else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five
questions.

But as I haven’t been visited by my inspiration muse lately (also because some of Abby’s questions require much pondering) I will answer the 5 questions in batches – Today it’s time for #1. So…

{rolling of drums}

1. While you are obviously currently located in Europe, what country are you from and what country do you currently live in?  I know that is technically two questions, but I am just curious about your background.

OK, so get ready for a small ride – I haven’t stayed for very long in the same city yet! And I hope your curiosity will be satiated – I think I’ve talked too much but hey… you asked!

I was born almost 28 years ago in Spain, in a town around 200km North from Spain’s capital, Madrid. When I was 8, we (that is my parents, my little brother and I) moved to Madrid, where we stayed 4 years, until my dad got a job in Paris, France, that would take us there for a whole school year: I was 12 y.o. and didn’t know a word of French when we drove there in August. The school we attended was a Spanish one (that is 1h/day of French lessons), but my parents were adamant in that we didn’t listen or watch anything that wasn’t French radio or TV (the only exception was the movie theater: there was one a short walk away from home that only showed movies in their original language with French subtitles… oh the mess! obviously I didn’t speak or understand much English then either… I guess it only helped!) – by June, I was able to understand almost everything someone would say, if they said it slowly enough, in a correct grammar and ‘regular accent’. My, the South of France accent was a nightmare back then – and still is a little bit sometimes… :blush:

In June, it was back to Madrid, for a couple of years only: if the first half of our stay in Paris was spent mostly crying to be taken back to Spain, to my friends and school, the other half was spent enjoying many of the pleasures France and Paris have to offer: museums, gorgeous buildings and walks around the city, short trips to visit some of the most important gothic cathedrals of the North of France, etc. By June, I just didn’t want to go back to ‘boring’ Madrid! My parents had succeeded in planting the seed of traveling and discovering new places and cultures in me – as well as to have me tagged as ‘the French one’ back in my old school in Madrid…

… so 2 years later, my dream of going back to France came true: my dad got another position there, this time in Strasbourg, by the German border, and for 3 whole years! I was ecstatic, all the more so as I had become fluent in French in the meantime – reading, watching movies and spending a whole month with a French girl my age who didn’t speak a word of Spanish – so those years – highschool ones – were some of the best in my life so far.

Again, I didn’t want to come back to Spain afterwards, but my parents couldn’t afford for me to study abroad, so… Back to being ‘the special girl’ at University: I didn’t have the same background (highschool in Strasbourg was an international one so I followed France’s studying program, plus some Spanish literature and history courses) so I usually lacked some concepts… However, I had done many more laboratory hours than anyone in my class! Hey, when you’re following Chemistry studies, those hours help – a lot.

4 years later, I couldn’t stay put in Madrid any longer, and decided to taste some other region of Europe – Sweden it was! Uppsala, 70km North from Stockholm is a student town, a wonderful one at that too! I only spent 6 months there, from August to January, but it was enough to charge my ‘new cultures & people’ batteries for a while: I met so many different and interesting people there, it was amazing… While I don’t keep in touch very often with everyone, there are some that manage to poke me and get some news from me – Martin is even kind enough to open his home for me in no time from now!

After that 6-month-stint, I stayed in Madrid to finish my studies and start my working life. However, I always had the small hope to be able to live in France once again, this time for a long time as I wanted to work there too. And when I suffered a pretty bad heartbreak, I decided it was time to go and find that ticket to France, otherwise I might never take off! (By the way, it had been 3 1/2 years since I got back from Sweden).

It was one of those times. You know the ones: at first, you’re just feeling like crap, just want to get over it, get away from the memories, but don’t hold much hope. Then something comes up, you remember someone who might be able to help you. You brave your shyness and ask for that favour, the one that may or may not get you out of the mess…

The right time, the right moment – this job was waiting for *me*! I landed here in Saint Nazaire, on the West coast of France, around a year and 8 months ago: though at first there were difficult times, things are just turning out great!

So! To get back to your ‘background’ question – yes, bear with me, there’s one more thing I would like you to know (weren’t you curious? ^^): people often ask me where I am from – and it’s a difficult one to answer, as I don’t really feel from anywhere more specific than Spain: you see, something I haven’t said yet is that both my parents and thus my nearest family is from the South of Spain – Seville, to be precise – so all of my holidays have been spent over there, either in Seville, Malaga or Huelva. Moreover, I don’t have friends from my years in my birth town, and I don’t like Madrid enough to say I ‘come from’ there… I just answer with a ‘I lived in Madrid before, but all my family is from Seville’, as I feel sentimentally connected with that city.

Also, if you tell people that when 2 seconds ago they thought you were French with some foreign background, you’re in for a little while: I am often told I have no traceable accent when I speak French (so often I get tired of it… really…) and then I am usually asked if I’m ‘a *real* Spanish’… {sigh} Of course, it’s followed by ’so, how come you speak French like this?’
Then, they get the short story of all these -my!- more than a thousand words…. It sure gets you far in a conversation with people you just met!

I hope I didn’t overdo it…
I’m afraid I did, I got carried away! It’s just that all those trips have made me who I am today: someone who doesn’t need a geographical specific spot to feel at home, and someone who actually craves to feel like ‘a stranger’ wherever I go. Because I love discovering things, like all the ‘first times’ moving to a new place entails, am curious about *so many* things…
But I can’t bear having to make new friends from scratch – it’s so hard sometimes! – and tell your life story many times in a short period of time is tiring too. It is balanced by all the perks aforementioned, though.

Exciting times ahead

I’ve had to keep this piece of news for myself for a little while, but now it’s time…

F & I have decided to move in together! I know many of you, if you’ve been following my rants around here, will be surprised to hear it – yes, I was pretty unhappy at times, not very confident on our ability to get this relationship working, as much from my unstable probably too needy at times mood, as from his apparent detachment and frivolous attitude towards us. But the argument and following serious conversation before my holidays’ departure was a turn-point: it allowed me to see I had to take care of myself (not only take care of him and his happiness), thus giving me the strength to *really* talk to F, to tell him clearly I wanted him in my life, but not in that childish ‘no worries, no problems, no drawbacks, only good times and smiles’ kind of relationship he seemed to want. Because there are always bad times, bad moods, times we don’t want to say ‘yes’, days we won’t feel like doing what the other one wants… and we need to manage those bad moments, not turn away and ignore them until they’re gone, the ostrich way.

For him, I now can see it changed something too: little by little, since I’ve come back, he’s been acting differently. It’s not very obvious, it took me a moment to see it, but it’s there: a more serious attitude, more unasked for sacrifices made in little everyday things, much more self-assurance towards me and us, as if he was sure he was doing what he really wanted to do. I no longer feel he’s with me because there’s nothing more interesting to do somewhere else, or that he’s going to leave as soon as he gets a phone call from a friend – I truly feel loved and cherished.

So, a couple of weeks ago, as I realized ‘we’ meant something for him too and that every time we argued, it always started because one of us wouldn’t stay overnight at the other one’s place… The light-bulb shone over my head: ‘hey, wouldn’t it be easier if we just lived in the same place…? as it seems we both want to spend as much time as possible together…’ I asked the tricky question, and was surprised to hear a ‘yes’ after a silence of only 3 seconds!

Believe me, I was scared to hear it was too soon, that he didn’t want to get at that stage yet, wanted to still enjoy his freedom living with friends – I was amazed to listen to him talk about where we should look for a flat, how should it be (we need a balcony for him to smoke so I don’t have to put up with the smoke all the time; we also need a fully equipped kitchen with an oven so I can cook at leisure), what range of rent prices should we look for… I guess he’d already given it a bit of thought – he’s never said so, but the fact that he had all those ideas in his head already makes me think he’d already considered it!

Why did I have to ‘keep it secret’? Because he wanted to tell his friends, and especially the friends he lives with, first – I don’t think any of them read this blog, but lots of them are on Facebook, so F asked me not to risk it… You can also imagine I was over-excited, impatient to get started – lots of things and paperwork to do – while he was much more relaxed, telling me we weren’t in a hurry and that he wanted to find a replacement for him at the house he’s sharing… Luckily we won’t have to wait until then – they’ll look for someone at the same time we’re looking for a new place – so next week I’ll start the ‘moving out’ machine by notifying my landlord, thus starting the 3 months period to find some place else… *our* place… Exciting!!

{thought shot}

Last night, at F’s birthday party, I had a true moment of epiphany, concerning his closest friends – they are my friends too now, and I am HAPPY to say so.

I felt so grateful to know each of them, so happy they have come into my life and  brought their smiles, stories, personalities, tics, in a way that eases so much the feeling of being away from my country.

Most of them are very different from me, have experienced situations completely unfamiliar to me – heck, I’ve even thought I could never ‘click’ with some of them due to some annoying habits of theirs… but little by little, they have earned a place in my heart, they have managed to open my mind, broaden my views, and with their kindness, their disinterested welcome gestures, have helped me shed the ‘a stranger that is only accepted for being F’s girlfriend’ tag I had pinned on myself.

I mean, I almost burst into (joyful) tears last night looking at them, all sitting in a row in front of me, chatting, laughing, unaware I was doing a happy dance inside, thanking God for putting them on my path!

Also… Thank you guys!