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I took a long train ride through the hills of France—while the sun was setting. It was pure beauty followed by the “pleasure” of the woman sitting next to me singing along to her CD player for about 3 hours. Around 10:30pm Thursday, I made it to the Aix-en-Provence TGV (the fast trains) station and then had to take a bus to the town. I met Laura and her friend Lauren there and we walked a long way back to her dorm.

Now, Laura walks more in Aix than I do in Paris and it was not fun. Paris walking is fun because there are always things to look at (extremely gaudy boutiques for example) but Aix, being a smaller town, has less to look at (and a lot of graffiti).

We went to a club that was opening but only stayed a few minutes because I was tired from my travels. The club was a lot less elitist than all of the other establishments I have come to know in Paris.

On Friday, we walked through the whole town and then went to the workshop of the artist Cezanne who is from Aix--two euros to see 2 jars of paint at the top of a huge hill that made me sweat bullets just walking up it. In the evening we went to see Broken Flowers, and I don’t understand what all the hype is about.

Since we had seen the entire city on Friday, we decided to take a day trip on Saturday to Cannes—home of a great beach and the internationally recognized film festival. I love spur of the moment trips, but in this instance, I didn’t bring any beach clothes, so I had to make do with pajama bottoms as beachwear. The town of Cannes is as spectacular as I imagined—with more designer shops per block than Paris, it seems. The beaches are perfectly clean (and there are no bugs in the sand or sea creatures close to shore). I spent the day on the beach reading a book about an Australian woman who moved to Paris. And of course I also visited the building that is home to the film festival and took pictures on the “red carpet.” On the beach, there were people from EVERYWHERE. I was situated next to a group of young British families with their small children. Their accents were priceless. When the father wanted his son to join him in the water, he would shout, "Louie, come here, Louie." With the Louie sounding like Loo-Ay.

On the train ride back to Aix, there were two German students sitting next to me and we talked for a while. Before the train stopped, the asked me if Americans still think that Germany is run by Nazis because they have heard that we think that. It was definitely a shock.

Today I took the train back to Paris. I got back to Paris and realized that my cell phone isn’t working. I got a text message saying that if I didn’t go to the store with some ID by October 1, it would be shut off. I went September 15 and 20 but it was still shut off October 1. Damn. Hopefully the bastards who said they fixed it before will fix it tomorrow.

Being back in Paris is nice. I have never been anywhere where there is so much to do and so many places to see that I probably won’t finish seeing it all in 4 months. Speaking of which, I have decided to stay in Paris only for the first semester. I will be studying at Washington University next semester. There were several reasons for my decision, but since making it, I have been enjoying myself more--I have been doing everything that I possibly can (and with that goes spending my savings) because I realize that I have only a short amount of time here.