Back in June my friends and I were grocery shopping for dinner ingredients, and I called my mom to ask if we happened to have celery in the fridge. The deviled eggs recipe called for just one stalk, and as we were recently-enough graduated from college to be YesThatCheap, the asking had to be done. Her reply: "No, but there's some in our garden".

My parents have gone all organic and hippie from their suburban bastion in the past few years, as if their daughter living in California co-ops really did a number on them from 2,900 miles away. First came the garden, which has grown in diversity, square footage, and rabbit-proofing every year. Just before we went to the airport my dad picked out leaves of three — three — varities of basil, and I'm finding rice milk tetra-paks in the fridge. What's really going on is a full circle: my parents grew up on farms where the chickens were always free-range and the fruit harvests from trees in their front yards were always organic. And now that America has been touched by the magic of Whole Foods they have access to the good stuff again. More power to them, I say.

Among this garden has been, all along, a highly fertile squash plant. In July this was a leafy greeny thing that provided. When I came home six weeks later it had magically high-jumped up to the second-story rooftop and curled gently around my window, three tendrils just starting to get a grasp on the bug screen. In the five days I was home I am convinced that it sprouted as many new dinner-plate-sized leaves. Good thing winter will wreak an icy, icy death upon this plant, else I would be highly loathe to come home for the holidays for fear of being eaten alive by overzealous zucchini. In the meantime, it's a pretty addition to the plain old vanilla siding you first see when coming around the curve to my house. Have a look-see:

So how was Paris, you ask?

I've finally come to a draw with city life; Paris gave me a fairly gentle introduction. The métro system is super (no matter where you are, there's almost always a station within 500 meters, and I can count on one hand the number of times I had to wait more than five minutes for the next train). I miss being able to plop myself into a perky sidewalk chair amidst a gaggle of classmates and nursing an Orangina or a panaché. Admittedly this isn't uniquely Parisian nor even French, but I'm unlikely to find this strange and awesome straddle of public-private in suburban California.

On the other hand, I can finally relax that vacant, pissed-off public transportation stare. At the airport on my way back to the Bay Area just now, faced with a one-hour layover in Dulles thanks to booking my ticket far too late and no onboard dinner thanks to booking my ticket on one of them newfangled low-cost airlines, I splurged on a newfangled garlic chicken pie from California Pizza Kitchen. In a boho move designed to infuriate airport travellers they baked each one to order, and so I spent ten full minutes sipping my unsweetened Lipton and staring into the blazing inferno of their pizza oven (seriously, who decided to build a wood-fired oven in an airport terminal? Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?). In this span of time all sorts of belchy old men passed by on their way to collect more Dijon mustard packets for their Sundried Tomato and Turkey Panini AND THEY DID NOT SAY A SINGLE WORD TO ME.

You cannot begin to understand my bliss.

Classes were great. There were of course the peeves (the locker room! oy!) that need must arise from being immersed in anything for five weeks straight, but the general consensus among my classmates seemed to be that we liked the course, the chefs, and each other, a trifecta that made even our 12-hour marathon days appreciable in some way.

Between school and neighbors and ultimate and friends thereof, I've met a smattering of folks with whom I wouldn't be surprised to keep contact in the future. For the most part I did seem to spend more time with anglo-friendly people, even if I did speak to them almost entirely in French. Between my across-the-street neighbor Cécile having spent a year in western Massachusetts, and ultimate being a very international sport, almost all of the young people I met had spent six months to a couple of years in England or the States and spoke anything from conversant to fluent English. Seriously. Try finding a random group of young Americans and seeing if they can all converse in the same foreign language.

Of course I did get a couple of lengthy tirades trumpeting socialism or lambasting Bush, which does noone any good. For one, the libertarian in me doesn't think unemployment insurance should be so generous as to make it an attractive second option for people who doesn't really feel like working, as one guy gloated (apparently this only lasts 9? months at a time, and you must show proof of actively seeking work, but still, he was gloating about how to milk the system). For another, thank you France for being the poster child against the Iraqi invasion and kicking up enough of a fuss to cast a shadow on American foreign policy in this arena, but I didn't vote for the W. and neither did 49.23% of this country in November 2004. One of the good things about the way our country runs is that there will be another election in 2008.

One evening found my flatmate incredulous and outraged (putain de merde! reverberated in the loft that evening) that his beloved Maille pickles or cornichons were actually owned by Unilever. Ironically enough this week's Economist takes a sharp jab at protective French nationalism in "Europe's nascent merger boom": rumors that Danone might be taken over by PepsiCo spooked the government enough to plan a list of strategic French industries that will be protected from foreign takeover. Meanwhile, France just edges out the US by $0.9 billion as the top acquirer in European cross-border merger and acquision activity in 2005 to date. Ha! So there! (And in self-defense: Yes, I did read the Big British E cover to cover; no, it wouldn't have happened if I didn't have 9 hours of air-port-or-plane time today.) But dogmatic nationalists are everywhere, starting right here in the U.S., and those types of exchanges were pretty rare birds during my time there. For the most part folks didn't generalize from me to my country's foreign policy, which was both (1) as it should be and (2) pleasantly surprising.

As for language, my written French hasn't improved a whit, especially since conversation makes hot and heavy use of on (even more than Stateside French classes would lead you to believe). Ergo, conjugate those verbs in seven tenses and three voices I cannot. On the other hand, I've become immensely more comfortable with opening my mouth and letting it roll, which I've found gets me 98% of the way there. I've picked up enough colloquialisms and slang that I can hang out with friends and shoot the breeze with random store proprietors.

A couple of months ago, after coming back from Iceland, I read about being excited to visit somewhere whose language I spoke. Sure enough, it does make me feel more grounded, more connected, more like a visitor than a tourist. After a complicated post-tournament cost calculation and early-morning cash handoff squeezed into the 12 hours between getting back into Paris and my leaving for good for Charles de Gaulle, it turned out that the car rental bill was lower than expected and I was owed some money. Via email I responded: "Keep it, 'cause I'm coming back!" And I fully mean it.

Mostly what is wonderful about travel is that you approach it as a traveller. That is, before you embark on the voyage you've tied up all loose ends at home, school, work. You arrive with a clean slate and a thirst for milking the hell out of your precious time off. I was one lucky duck to get to go to Paris and attend culinary school, but if one could spend six weeks at home in this wide-eyed, dewy-faced fashion they might be almost as wonderful and revelatory — but one can't. Home is inextricably tied up with commitment and responsibility. Home is car insurance bills and vacuuming to do and, oh yeah, mom, can we call the opthamologist because I think I'm seeing blurry again?

And so we travel.