I’m back home, my adventures in Namur are over. I have to admit I’m kind of glad to be done, which is not to say that I’m not also happy I went. I would even suggest it to anyone who wants to work on their French and live in Europe with virtually no living expenses. (If I were capable of resisting sales at the Body Shop and weren’t such a picky eater I could have literally not spent any money for the entire six weeks.) But a lot of things were starting to get  old like hostel beds, hostel food, internet that works only when it feels like it and only in one noisy room with one rarely available outlet…Namur is not exactly a sprawling metropolis, which has its advantages. It’s clean and friendly in a way that larger cities just can’t be. But after one afternoon of wandering around I saw everything I wanted to see. After one night at a bar I felt like I met just about twenty-something Namurois.

I know some people like that but I prefer Paris, which is where I am right now. Okay, technically Montrouge, but still not beyond the reaches of the Paris metro. As much as I hate to say this, my job right now is stay at home girlfriend. I’m trying to find a job babysitting or teaching English or showing tourists around, but seeing as I’m visaless and only staying for a month I’m probably only going to work a few hours a week at most. So I’ll keep living off my graduation gifts and—I’ll be honest here—mooching off Ader. I’ll fill my days with writing and trying to get my legs as tan as my arms are and I hope catching up with the handful of friends from junior year who still live in Paris.

And I’m going to start cooking dinner. I never cooked before for both ideological and practical reasons. Having dinner on the table when the man gets home from work just seemed too much like something the Christian Right would approve of. Plus I never really had to learn what with a mom who’s such a good cook and a brother who’s an actual chef. I do need to feel like I’m contributing to making our little household run smoothly though; not doing so seems more lazy than feminist in these circumstances. And I don’t really cook as much as I dump ingredients in a salad bowl, crock pot, or on really ambitious days a frying pan and wait hopefully for it to turn into something yummy.

I’m not going to be on the Real Housewives of Île-de-France anytime soon. But I have to admit I really love this lifestyle, and in a sustainable way. So the plan now is to write a best seller so I can live like this forever with my own money. Just kidding, there still is no real plan.