I miss France. I miss France so terribly. I miss the loved ones I have there and the culture as a whole. I miss the language, the fashion, the food, the music, the art, and all of the beautiful people. I miss the country so rich in history that they have wines older than America. I miss walking through small cobblestone streets and hearing French small talk among the natives and smelling bread everywhere. I miss the weather which necessitates an umbrella on your person at all times, and the sun seeming to rise earlier and set later than it does in the Western Hemisphere. I miss volets and having open windows always, but especially when I sleep. I miss the picturesque beaches and ordering fruits de mer from a menu to eat some of the best food in my life. I miss ending words in -erie to simply mean a store specializing in whatever the prefix may be. I miss seeing boys with clearly European facial features and body hair with scarves and handbags, all over the place. I miss the tiny, almost unnoticeable, linguistic idiosyncrasies that you will only hear coming out of a French person, like a sigh with "alors" or the elongated "euh..." between catching their breath in a long-winded story. I miss the moment of proud epiphany when I understand a slang phrase like "Che pas" and how it translates to what I learned in a classroom years before as "Je ne sais pas". I miss not being carded for ordering a glass of wine with my dinner or a beer on a Friday night. I miss wearing dresses everywhere, all the time, and receiving less that one-tenth of the disgusting, leering looks from male passersby as in America. I miss ordering a meal, any meal, and it automatically arriving with a side dish of baguette. I miss chocolate everything. I miss all of the coffee. I miss fast public transportation and not driving a car for weeks.
I miss many things about France, but more than everything else, I miss my family there. I miss the little girls whose baby French voices I could hear floating up the stairs from breakfast as I woke up in the mornings. I miss learning playground songs and clapping games from two beautiful children with chocolate brown eyes, and experiencing their adorable French frustration when I still couldn't understand them after asking them to repeat themselves several times. I miss my international host parents who were experts in four cultures and five languages between the two of them. I miss grocery shopping in giant French hypermarches with them weekly and still being culture-shocked by something new every single time.
I miss the culture and I miss my family. But mostly, I guess I just miss feeling so much at home, so far away from where I was born.
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