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Check out my year in review video! (There is a naked derrière in it, but it’s modern art. Otherwise, G-rated. The songs are The Weight of Living Pt II – Bastille, Best Be Believing – AlunaGeorge, and Higher Love – James Vincent McMorrow)

Today is my last day in France (or it was when I wrote this because now it’s my first day in the US), and I (probably) should not be wasting it on a blog post, but since I have to be at the school in an hour to help with cleanup of last night’s barbecue, here I am. Writing. Just like I was nearly a year ago, when I was sitting at this laptop writing about blood tests.

The past 40 days have been a rollercoaster, and in the next few days I’m going to post one last Flickr update so that you can see it all and not just read about it. There are far too many photos to include in one blog post.

After I left you guys last month I spent one week in school studying for APs. I lived, I didn’t disintegrate into a raging ball of stress, and I think I did decently on all of them. Woohoo.

After that last week of real school, we had yet another vacation and I went to go meet my mom and my grandma in Paris, where we spent two days. We wound up taking the scariest cab ride of my life (cabbies that solicit are not real cabbies, my friends) and had some Thai food. Same Paris routine: Eiffel Tower (which we climbed!), Musée d’Orsay, Tuileries, Champs Elysées. Then we headed to the Gare du Nord at 8 am to take a train to London. Capital hopping. My grandma lost her phone on the way to the Gare du Nord, and the resulting scramble almost made us miss our train.

I had a little immigration mishap (is this turning into a habit?): my mom and my grandma took the other line because I had already filled out my landing card and the line I was in was longer. No big deal. When I presented my passport, the immigration officer’s eyes flicked between my ID pages and my face. “Are you travelling with anyone?”

“Well, yeah, my mom and my grandma, but they’re in the other queu—I mean, line.”

“You should have stayed with them.”

“Huh?”

“Well, since you’re a minor, you aren’t allowed to travel alone.”

Hmmmm.

She ended up letting me through, but it was still an odd situation. The only time I have adults with me is the only time I get in trouble for not having adults with me.

Snafus aside, we had a great time in London at the National Gallery and walking along the Embankment. There was a tube strike in progress while we were there, but once again, we lived. The trains might have been coming once every twelve years, but with a combination of luck and tired feet we managed to see everything we planned on seeing.

Then, off to Rennes to take the SAT (bleghhhhhhh) and hop on a 15-hour bus to beautiful Provence. That was a rough one. Once there, we spent a lot of time (studying) on the beach and (practicing calculus) by the pool. Aren’t we such good little students? There was some relaxation time in Arles (one of the many places Vincent Van Gogh lived), where we looked at antique ruins and Pascal wrangled with multiple city officials *cough*FN*cough* to allow us to get into the museums, etc. without an adult. It was quite amusing watching his caustic sarcasm inflicted full-force on complete strangers. In the intervening days we went to Aix-En-Provence, Marseille, and a few smaller towns. Interestingly enough, the landscape reminded me of New Mexico, especially in the mountains, only with an ocean. We could use an ocean. Susana Martinez should get on that.

Hélas, we had to return to Rennes and take our French AP and study for the next week’s APs. I suffered alone, the only one to study for US History (it’s cheaper than taking the summer class). My compatriots, however, joined in the sorrow of the BC Calculus exam. Scores aren’t for another month. We won’t worry about it.

My last weekend I went to Bécherel—the “village of books”—with Martine and Célina, Martine’s American student from three years ago. Of course, as would be anything called the “village of books”, it was brilliant. I managed to get a free book that was covered with someone’s old annotations. We also got rained on. Hard.

The following day we went to St Brieuc to see Mathieu and Marie’s new baby (finally!) and visited the coast one last time—for me, at least.

On Monday, we cleaned the school and received our diplomas for completion of SYA. Tuesday, we packed and I went for one last run. Then, at midnight, Martine drove me the sixty seconds to the school (my suitcase is huge), we hugged goodbye, and the majority of the class boarded the buses. Goodbye, Rennes.