Meeting People Is Fun And Easy: VF

While talking to a French girl at a French house-party this weekend, she told me that there's a saying in French, which I now no longer remember word-for-word, but do remember that it translates to something along the lines of "Lose one guy, find ten more." I have to say that this has, in fact, held true for me, but I'm finding that it extends beyond le monde des garcons. At the end of the first semester I lost two very good friends to the U.S.'s gnarled clutches, and while I still miss them quite a bit, I've met four new people who are quickly becoming very close friends. And that's just in the American realm. In the past three weeks or so I've met so many new people; I'm left wondering what happened between this semester and the last that brought such a great change. I don't know, maybe having a French boyfriend for a month gave me the confidence to continue talking to random francophones. I don't know why it's happening, I just know that it is.

On a somewhat related note, in a city of 2 million people, one would think it nearly impossible to see the same person more than once. And for five months this was, more or less, true. The people I recognised were those who played a consistent role in my life: friends and their families, boulangerie and salon de the staff, professors and classmates. And I never saw these people outside of the environments in which we interacted.

It follows, then, that I am supremely weirded out by the number of strange faces hat have appeared over the past week that aren't so strange anymore. I'm seeing people I saw only once before, in line at a crepe stand, or at a large game of cache-cache at Trocadero, or even on the metro for a second time. It makes me wonder who else is going to turn up in the weeks to come. Jacques Chirac in a bear suit? God, I hope so.