Sometimes you just gotta live your life

So today is my free day. Every Tuesday I don't have classes, so usually I come up with something to do whether it be making plans with friends, sleeping in, running, reading a book, etc. There's always some little errand or some kind of homework that could use doing so I find things (besides sitting in my room all day) to occupy my day. Today was no exception. Actually, before I get into this I should preface this with an explanation of sorts. Lately we've all been feeling a little down. We're more than half way through the program with less than 2 months left and most of us are starting to feel it. I didn't even realize why I was in such a funk until my friend Miranda asked me the other day "Aren't you just getting tired of being abroad?" Which I answered with an "Yes. Absolutely." I don't mean to be a baby or ungrateful. I am the luckiest little shit alive to be able to study where I've studied, met the people I've met and simply been all of the places I've been in the last 2 semesters. and my adventures aren't even over! but it definitely comes with a price. Studying abroad for a year sounds like such a good idea when you're planning it at your university when in all actuality it is really rough. No income for an entire year, getting funny looks everywhere you go for speaking english and feeling exhausted after an entire day of speaking french/attempting arabic. Not to mention living in someone else's house, no matter how nice they are and how close I may be with my family, at the end of the day it's not my house. We've all hit a wall I think where we miss controlling when and what we eat, doing our own laundry and how long our showers are.

So bearing that in mind, today Liza and I got lunch, when I realized that I had left my wallet with my lunch tickets sitting on my desk at home, which just happens to be about 40minutes away... so liza lent me one which was fine. Then we went to a tabac (a drugstore type deal) and bought her minutes for her phone and proceeded to go to the train station to pick up our tickets. This is round 2 btw because the first time I forgot the confirmation numbers. This time, we waited in line, just to find out that I needed my credit card to get the tickets, which was in my wallet. at home. I think it was a combination of things because we felt so defeated in that moment that Liza first suggested we get a glass of wine. It wasn't even 12:30 in the afternoon. lol. But as we got onto the metro we both agreed that tea felt like such a better idea than wine...

So we went to what has become one of our favorite places, Haricot Rouge. This place has it all. They have the most incredible hot chocolate, teas and coffees, along with literal milk shakes. and all of which come with a little bite of brownie... SO GOOD!! But today we not only got tea, but we got 5 cookies to share. I think we looked pretty pathetic too because we usually get like one little brownie with our tea, but the woman put like 3 of them on each of ours... but we ate it all. We sat there for 3 hours just talking about life and how we've gotten to this point. We watched people come and go as we sat there slowly drinking our tea and eating cookie after cookie just talking about boyfriends and high school, family and college and what comes next. We joked that we were having our quarter life crisis and that this is the time to have it. One of the things that really stuck with me was a story Liza told me while we were both stressing out. Apparently she had this friend who never finished what she started. she never finished college, and would start a diet just to say forget it later the same day. One day Liza was eating a burger and her friend asked her for a piece which confused Liza because her friend had said just that day that she was giving up eatin red meat. To which this girl responded "Sometimes you just gotta live your life, you know?" It's so simple but just struck me as so extraordinary. Liza said she was just blown away by it and it's stuck with her for year now. It really seems like such an obvious thing but I think it's interesting how hard it hit me.
Anyway, by the time our teapots were completely cold, we were starting to feel a little less overwhelmed, so we started making a grocery list for our vacation foods. We decided to continue by going to the grocery store and looking at foods as this is one thing that we have complete control over. So we walked around the grocery store and then galerie lafayette which is somewhat like macy's just talking and window shopping. Liza was still hungry so we went to a kebab place, then we went back to my house to get my wallet. Tomorrow is my host mom's birthday so I wanted to make her something. I decided on rice crispy treats with chocolate chips, so we went back to a different grocery store in st gregoire (closer to my house). The grocery store is HUGE btw... A lot like a super walmart or something... it has anything you could ever want to buy! After we found what I needed and explored a little, Liza went home and I went back to my house.

My host parents went to dinner with friends for the night so I invited ashley over and made dinner and the rice crispy treats while catching up as we hadn't hung out for over a week. anywhere else that would be really weird to say, but those of us who are here or who had been in morocco can attest to it; when you see the same people every day for weeks and weeks, then go a couple days without seeing them it feels like a lifetime. Oh the beauty of study abroad!