The other night, one of my friends in Paris invited me and my other friends over to her homestay to cook dinner. A few of us met up early and went grocery shopping, buying “appetizers,” which would in fact turn out to be pre-cooking fuel boosters AND we even bought the ingredients to cook our dinner!! Once we got to the house, the rest of the crew trickled in and we cooked a bacon and cheese quiche with slices of goat cheese on top, a red wine chicken recipe, a delicious salad with avocados and mustard vinaigrette, and Nutella cookies. If it wasn’t generous enough for my friend’s host mother to invite us to cook dinner at her house, she also had bought a pear tart for us to enjoy.
Everything about this night was just wonderful – I was with some of my favorite people, we were cooking which is always a ton of fun, the food turned out quite well, we were playing Christmas music, and then we got sit down have a lovely little dinner, candlelit, in an apartment in Paris. Obviously being the twenty-somethings we are, not everything was Stepford perfect – we had no baking soda, we were too lazy to go get another baguette since we had finished the one we had bought before we had even started cooking, we weren’t playing music from a sophisticated stereo but from my iPhone which I had put in a cup for better resonation…you get the picture.
But I wish we had had more nights like this. Or do I? I don’t know if they would have gotten old, but this night was just so special. It’s not going to be so easy beyond this semester to just get a bunch of my close friends together to take the time to go grocery shopping, cook dinner together, and sit and chat for hours, warming up on glasses of wine. We’ll have schoolwork, we’ll have jobs, relationships, other friends, other things to do…It’s surreal the kind of liberty and time I’ve had here. My time here in Paris is already narrowing down into an blurry Instagram filter. It’ll be a special time in my life that’ll be hard to return to, that’ll exist only in my memory and in this isolated bubble in time. But it’s not just here, Paris, that I’m going to miss. It’s being at the dining table eating with my favorite people, talking and laughing and being happy. I’m going to make sure I have time for nights like these, whether I’m in San Francisco or Seoul or New York.
Four days and counting.
