A Cinci Summer and the Next Step

Well, here we go again! After a three month hiatus in Cincinnati, a new adventure begins. Before I fill you in on the latest and greatest here, I’ll recap the last few months in my hometown.

I got home from France at the end of May and was happier than ever to see my family again. My parents and sister got me from the airport with homemade tshirts, light-up sign, flowers, and all. What a great way to come home!

I spent the first few weeks at home catching up with friends and family here in Cincinnati. I ate Gold Star, Skyline, LaRosa’s, and Chipotle, watched American TV, and played with my dog - everything impossible to do overseas. Once back in the swing of things here, I went back to my waitressing job at LaRosa’s and began my career search. Which was trying. But more on that later.

Some summer highlights: the four of us, my parents, sister, and I, took our first vacation in a number of years. We hit the road after my Friday night shift and drove through the night to Daytona Beach the week of the Fourth of July. We relaxed, tanned, ate, and generally had one of the best family vacations I can remember. Oh, and ABBY AND I WENT TO HARRY POTTER WORLD WHERE WE GOT CHOSEN FOR OLLIVANDER'S WAND CHOOSING. We bought the wands, obviously.

My parents hosted a graduation party for me, and I got to see some good friends from out of town, as well as a number of good high school friends who I haven’t seen in ages. And there was some good spirited family competition in the form of leg wrestling. Nothing new for a Nabel family gathering!

Keeping with Nabel gatherings, this summer marked the First Annual Cousin Vacation! There are thirteen of us in my generation, and the majority of us were able to car pool it to the Outer Banks in South Carolina for a week, then stop over in Virginia Beach for the weekend where one of the cousins lives. I don’t know if our family is odd in that we all really like each other and get along so well, but we managed to all live in a house, share bedrooms, and take turns making dinner for the group. Veronica even made an appearance in animal print bathing suits! I love my family so much it’s crazy. Such a great week! Thanks, cousins and company, for a memorable first weekend. Can’t wait for next year!

In addition to these awesome things, BRoy made it down for a couple of days – great visit as per usual watching movies and talking for hours and hours, I had a few wonderful weekend trips around the state, I watched Allie take off for her own semester abroad in Austria – good luck my friend! I can’t wait to hear about all your adventures, and I watched How I Met Your Mother and am almost caught up to the present season! The only thing missing was a trip to Fort Wayne. You're all definitely at the top of my list of people to catch up with!

And now for the new adventure part: I’m moving to New York tomorrow for a ten week internship with a publishing company in Manhattan! YAY! I’ll be working in publicity doing all sorts of things – I’ll find out more this Monday when I start. I currently have no apartment but I'm viewing several this weekend, and I’ve packed a massive checked bag, a carry-on bag, and a purse. I may still be over the weight limit, but I’ll have to wait till morning to see just what the scale reads. Fingers crossed. It’s still the stupid shoes that get me every time!

While my external hard drive continues to back up my computer, I’ll relate a little conversation I had with my mom and family on the porch while I took a packing break this evening. My mom asked me about the best/worst-case scenario for this internship: do I want to get a permanent offer, do I want to be in publicity, do I want to end up in New York, etc. I don’t have a best and worst case scenario, and I’m really excited for an opportunity like this, but I do have a few goals. I think this amount of time, a few months, will give me the exposure to publishing in general and allow me to live in a major city. I have always loved reading and books, and I can’t imagine a better industry to work in. When I started my job search, I was looking at any and everything that dealt with writing, and I think I really lucked out to get my foot in the door with a publishing company. New York is the biggest publishing hub in the country, and if publishing is what I want to do, then New York is the best place to be! So I hope to figure those things out and give a lot of thought to the future, what I want, who I am, and where I want be, and what I want to do. Oh! Latest scheme that will hopefully become a reality: run the (half) New York City Marathon. It’s in 59 days, so here’s to getting my butt in gear and knocking something off my bucket list! Lots to think about and do!

It’s crazy to think I’ve been home for months. In a lot of ways it feels like I never left, but also like I just got here. My family – parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, sister, grandma, friends – have been so great to me, and I can wait to hear from any and everyone who wants to visit! I’m also ridiculously excited to see Justin, my long-time-no-see native New Yorker friend I met in Australia. So many good things, old and new, and I cannot wait for all of them. Here’s to new adventures, new friends, reuniting with old friends, and bringing the best of the old in with the new!

Here and there,
Kiley

La fin du chemin français (pour maintenant): Partie 1

Well, I’ve really dropped the ball on this last French post…sorry everyone. I still wanted to recap the last of my adventures and reflect on my whole experience this past year, because it is one I will never forget with people who made every second away from home not just bearable, but better in every way than I could have hoped.

I left you in Aix with a week left to go in Europe. That Friday was the APA group fin de l’année dinner where we all got dressed up and got together for one last meal à la français while watching the slideshow our advisers put together. It was great to see everyone all together, since so many of us had divided into smaller groups based on our traveling schedules or classes. It was even more bizarre to realize I hadn’t even met everyone in the group! Part of me is worried that I missed out on opportunities to meet people, but I can’t imagine spending my time with anyone other than the girls with whom I became such good friends.

At the end of the night, Emily, Roz, and Caitlin came back with Carly and I to hang out as a group one last time. Unfortunately, I had to pack for my trip to Paris the following morning to meet my extended family, so I didn’t hang out so much as run around frantically marking things off my list.

The following morning, I caught the train up to Paris and met my family just outside of Paris in what I guess you would call the suburbs of the city. Quick family note: my grandfather was French and migrated to the US after World War II, but his sister stayed in France where she started her family just as my grandpa did stateside. Having this personal connection is a large part of what motivated my French studies and made me want to go to France. The relatives I stayed with are technically my second- and third-cousins. I’d been to their home once before when I was fourteen and spent three weeks of the summer with them. The family sends and receives each other’s kids for a bit of time over the summer to help expose the other half to a new culture and practice their language skills. But I digress.

It had been years since I’d seen my French family, they were so welcoming to me, and it was so great to see them. Especially in France while speaking French! And understanding it! I went into the city to do some shopping with two of my cousins, Anne-Zoé and Alix, and eventually Alix and I split off to meet up with her friends. We picked up a few bottles of rosé and headed to the Seine where she and her friends talked and bickered over incredibly similar things as my American friends and I do: what other friends are up to, movies and television, politics (this was just before Hollande was elected!), etc. I didn’t catch entire conversations, but I was glad to generally keep up! After drinks, Alix and I went to her boyfriend’s house where he and another couple of friends were making dinner. We spent the night talking, drinking, and listening to music, and I was again comforted by the familiarity of simply spending a night having dinner with friends.

Alix and I woke up the next morning and went back to her parents’ house where the rest of the family was gathering for a big brunch. Some of the second-cousins (who are really more like aunts and uncles, since they’re my grandpa’s sister’s kids and the same ages as my aunts and uncles here) I had met on my previous trip, and it was entertaining to meet them again seven years later, more grown up and with a much better grasp on their language! I had a similar reaction to meeting my then-four-now-eleven and then-seven-now-fourteen year old third-cousins, but I was able to communicate and take part in the conversation.

It also made me miss home so incredibly much, not only because they were asking and were interested in how this side of the family is doing, but they also assured me of how proud my grandpa would be of me. He passed away over three years ago now, but I haven’t felt so close to him as I did then, hearing my French family talk about him and share stories of when he visited them. The family dynamic was also so similar to my own at home that it made me that much more homesick too.

Later in the afternoon, the family started to disperse and I took off as well to find Jackie and her good friend, Abby, who were on their six-week post-graduation trip of Europe. I found them at the hostel and we spent the next few days gallivanting around Paris hitting a number of the national monuments that I’d seen but not really experienced. We went inside Notre Dame and the Louvre on our first afternoon together, then headed to the Champs de mars for a picnic on the lawn in front of the Eiffel Tower.

The next day was spent just outside the city at Versailles and traipsing around the city again, as well as taking some much needed recovery and relaxation time in the hostel.

Once recovered, Jackie and I opted to trek up the street and huge hill to Montmartre and Sacre Coeur where we saw the lights of the city come on, sitting on the steps at the highest point in Paris. We sat talking for a long time about life and where it’s taking us over the Heinekens a man was walking around and selling out of the box. Jackie was about to depart for Barcelona, Italy, and a handful of other places having just started her travels in London and Paris, and I was preparing to go home to the states for an indefinite period of time after ten months abroad, and we were both nervously excited of what would come of our post graduate lives. Still, sitting and discussing it over a drink in one of the most glamorous cities in the world, having traveled around the world together, we decided that things are going to be okay. And that we would keep traveling, no matter what.

It was a sad goodbye the following morning, but I had to catch my train back to Aix for … GRADUATION! Since a few of us were finishing our undergraduate careers in France and missed our ceremony at our respective home campuses, some of the girls decided to send us off in the finest French style. Tessa delivered the most brilliant commencement address I’ve ever had the pleasure to hear, and then we were presented with diplomas (mine is a major in English and French, with a minor in “International Gnome Relations”) and a sunflower. We finished with another picnic in the park, everyone enjoying each other’s company and another sunny day in Aix.

I had planned to only write one post, but this seems like a good stopping point for now, and there’s a lot to tell about our trip to Amsterdam and Brussels, as well as my last week in Aix and some more goodbyes.

On another side note, to all of you who I met in Australia exactly one year ago, my thoughts are forever with you: in the form of daydreams, actual dreams, my obsessive search for plane tickets back to Sydney, and in every last techno-pop-y kind of song that I hear, as well as every other photo I see or outfit I wear, including the I-House soccer t-shirt I’m currently wearing. I can’t begin to tell you all how much I miss you and wish that our session had never ended.

To my family who has made coming home more than worth it and the idea of leaving again violently turn my stomach - no matter how badly I think I want to take off again - I love you and am so, so glad to be home.

Here and there,
Kiley