French Diary

Packed with a lot of memories and mementos from my latest trip to France, the Provence-Alpes- Côte-d’Azur region to be more precise, I decided to let you in on some of the photographic evidence of the beautiful moments I’ve witnessed for a week or so.

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I'm in France

As I typing this, I am sipping my very well deserved Fraise et Banana smoothie in Aix En Provence, France, while waiting for my dear Laure to come pick me up. We’ll be heading together for Toulon tomorrow for the first Interrail session of the PEJ (Parlement Européen des Jeunes) where I’ll be chairing once again.

To give my story a bit of a background, I’ll have to tell you how it all started. Last Friday I saw that my friend, Ruru (whom I’ve known for longer than I can remember and met through the EYP), was selected as the president of the above mentioned session. Congratulations were in order and a couple of minutes later I got a message from Laure asking why I’m not applying. “I don’t speak French!!” was my prompt answer which came in response to an earlier EYP France session where my utter inability to speak French proved to be quite an obstacle. “Dude, there’s no French involved!” she almost yelled back and my application was in just an hour later.

The next day, I got my confirmation e-mail and the quest to find suitably affordable tickets began. I’ll take this chance to publicly apologise to the boyfriend and to my friend, Ana, whom I managed to annoy over the legal limit because I couldn’t find tickets that were “cheap enough”. I ended up buying an Interrail pass and bus tickets Lincoln-London, though it ended up being much more expensive than by plane. Or than any other combination. Life.

So, with little hours slept the night before due to last minute packing and planning, I embarked on a 5 hour coach at 7:20 coach on Friday morning and went to meet Ana in front of the Buckingham Palace. Delightful as it might seem, my trolley wasn’t the best accessory to accompany me on this adventure.

But we made it in the end, had cereal for lunch and went back in town, to do some touristic activities: we strolled through Hyde Park, saw Kate and William’s “little” house and dived into the fashion section at the Victoria and Albert Museum. For dinner (or “tea” to sound more Brit) we stayed in and Ana’s boyfriend, a lovely German business mastermind, cooked spaghetti with mozzarella, oysters and home-made tomato sauce. Delish!

But enough for that nice stuff, let me tell you the “this could only happen to me” stuff.

As I said earlier, in an attempt to minimise my costs, I booked a coach ticket from London to Paris, as the Interrail doesn’t cover the Eurostar, that left Victoria Coach Station at 22:00 and made a 9 hour trip to Paris.

The bus? The seats were probably rehabilitated medieval torture chairs. The water bottle in my bag decided to open its cap (I’m guessing it grew hands overnight) and flood all of the things in my bag: laptop, camera, cables, planners, books, cookies.

Such a delight, right?

Still, I’m finally enjoying my French routine: sitting at a fancy table in a fashionable (I did sit outside for a while, but it’s still chilly) bistro called Food Simply and enjoying my Parisian inspired meal. This time, it’s also organic(ish)!

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On the job

10 a.m. Preparing myself for a Journalism seminar when I casually check my e-mail, waiting for the delivery date for a Body Shop order. Looking through the unread file, my eyes stop upon a response, “ RE: Lincoln Promo”.

I quickly open it to see if my job application had been successful and realise that if I am the first to reply to this e-mail, I’m actually getting my first real job.

And I do.

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Finding the perfect concealer - a matter of knowledge and luck

Given a random thought, cosmetics and philosophy don’t really go together. One’s about appearance, while the other is about essence. But what happens when the two meet and intertwine in the mind of an over thinking 20 year-old?

I was in Boots a couple of days ago, desperately trying to figure out what concealer to buy in light of my imminent EYP trip (e.n. they involve quite little sleeping time) and realizing it looked like it was shaping up to be Mission Impossible. I went through all the stalls, from Bourjois to No.7 and to Guerlain, but the only thing I succeeded to was confusing myself even more.

In less than 10 minutes I had managed to try a dozen shades of concealer in a variety of textures, all on the back of my hands, as well as reaching a record amount of walking in and out of Boots trips, in order to test the shades in natural light.

By the time I had found one that seemed to resemble my skin tone, all the creamy stuff had blended into one patchy mess on both my hands, so there was no way to know if the lovely color was actually my ideal shade or just a made-up one which I could never reproduce at home.

I was running out of time (and patience) so I decided to go with my gut and pick the nuance most similar to my skin tone, despite fearing it might have just been a work of the hazard. And it also had the cutest puffy applicator (see, design sells!): bonus points!!

I went home, removed all the make-up from my face and tried the little quirky and puffy concealer. It blended in perfectly; it had the most comfortable texture and the exact color of my skin.

“Wow.”

Yes, that’s what I said.
I’ve researched all possible types of cosmetics, from high end to high street ones, looked up tips on how to choose them and how to apply them, but this real-life straight down boring situation proved that even heaps of knowledge can be, at some point, easily set aside.

So come to think of it, I might have made an educated guess or just gotten lucky. To be fair, I just think that sometimes luck hits you straight in the face, no matter how much research you’ve done to discover that perfect concealer. Or the perfect university degree for that matter.

It applies to all sorts of things, from trivial lunch choices to life-changing decisions.
Though the main lesson that should be learned from this isn’t that you can always count on luck, you should always treasure it and be grateful for those moments when karma decides to send some your way and be thankful for them. Maybe give some of it back.

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Open-mindedness

My entire life I’ve been annoyed by the way I look, by the frizzy curls I naturally have and by the other completely insignificant details that made my life awful, while others wouldn’t even notice them.

As I grew older and started meeting people from different backgrounds and with different mindsets, I started understanding that I should be more laid back and more pleased with who I am, though I never truly liked myself and always strived to change it.

I’m guessing that some parts of it have been embedded in my mind by the society I was raised in and cannot be as easily removed. It is a sad society, where the “perfect shape” is so coveted and so many people fall into a trap with no return, but it is, nevertheless, a much more productive one.

This type of society brings competition to the table: competing to look the prettiest, competing to be the smartest, competing to be the best. It motivates you and it helps sift the best from the average.

Coming back to the self-image issue, there’s something I noticed since I first arrived in the United Kingdom and it’s been bothering me. A lot.

This idea of “everyone is beautiful” and “everyone can do it” is sincerely bothering me, mostly because, at its roots, it’s the global equality desire everyone strives to obtain misshaped to please the majority.

But to see a 19 year-old girl taking up 3 bus seats and having, at the same time, the necessity of wearing see-through leggings is simply appalling! And before anyone comes with the “maybe she’s having hormone issues” reasoning, let me just clear that as long as you have a problem with your weight, especially not being your fault, you will not spend your free time munching on king size McDonald’s menus.

But this type of society tells her she’s pretty no matter what.

Flash news. She’s not!

On a more sensitive note, which will probably bring me tons of hate (yes, strong word), some people with special needs develop this self-entitlement that just doesn’t suit them. I understand their sorrow and I am sorry for them, but having a problem shouldn’t make you develop a worse personality. On the contrary, it should make you more understanding.

This comes in response to a little incident while I was on trip and had been waiting, with my 30 kg bags, to get the elevator from the 5th floor. When it finally happened, I was stopped at a 1st floor by a girl in a wheelchair demanding me to get myself and all of bags out so she could go downstairs then and not wait an additional 2 minutes.

In the end, it all comes down to one as an individual. Why choose to be something people don’t like?

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