Bordeaux à Nuit

Recently, it feels as if life has been settling into more of a routine. The work week has become steady (as steady as a three-day week can be). I've started reading more, writing more, practicing the guitar, running - the sorts of things that occupy me at home. My room is bright and warm and feels like mine. It's odd that a foreign country is beginning to feel like home, and exciting that I find my French slowly improving, that interactions in shops or over the phone or in school feel more natural to me now. It's a little bit strange, then, to know I'll be going back home in just a few short weeks and seeing my friends and family and being in a place where everyone will speak English to me.

Even though the beauty of this country has, admittedly, begun to go more unnoticed, today it reintroduced itself when I went for a run up to Montbazillac, a nearby vineyard. It was a gray, windy day with occassional little drops of rain. The further I ran from my house - down a short side street, through a busy roundabout, and up a winding hill - the quieter Bergerac became. It wasn't long before I found myself in the vineyards. The grape vines, lined up in perfect rows, leaned sideways like they were faltering in a storm. Most of them looked bare, even though I've been told that November is a picking month at Montbazillac. There wasn't a person nor a car on the road for ten minutes, and I thought back to all the times I've run in Central Park and had to practically elbow my way between the hoards of runners. I saw the big gray Chateau de Montbazillac at the top of the hill, and the mist gathing over the rolling red and green hills, and I thought, this is my cold and lonely paradise.