I decided after much soul searching that a great way to celebrate my 25th birthday would be a really low-key but romantic dinner with my boyfriend where he would surely propose to me and then whisk me off to the Bahamas where we would land right on the beach and deplane to find all of our close friends and family assembled for a surprise wedding ceremony.
This plan didn’t work because my boyfriend doesn’t have the ways and means to coordinate something like this.
Also, I don’t have a boyfriend.
So, plan B it is, let’s go to France. Why France? That is an excellent question. My good friend and former roommate, we'll call her Tabitha, lives out there and she had a couple weeks of vacation in February so we decided to meet up in Paris and do our thing.
I feel like I really backed poor Tabitha into a corner though. When she first asked us (us being her girlfriends from college) to come visit she was probably just doing it to be nice, the whole time knowing that we wouldn’t take her up on it. Everyone is either too busy working or too busy being poor because of grad school or too busy having a life due to their boyfriend/husband or too busy due to all of the above.
I, on the other hand, have the time (no life) and the money (no life again). However I am very lazy and have zero interest in leaving the United States so she was in the clear with me too. But then I started thinking about it and I made the mistake of mentioning it to my Mom who was all for it and thought it was just a great fucking idea and bugged the hell out of me to at least consider it. Then Tabitha came to visit while she was back in Ohio around New Years and we had an awesome time and we might have gotten really drunk and I might have told her I would come and that she should plan the trip and away we go.
On paper Tabitha and I seemed like the perfect traveling companions. It's the basic law of supply and demand. Tabitha is a very generous and giving soul, I am very demanding. I demand that she spends her vacation with me in France, she supplies the hotel accommodations, plane tickets to Toulouse, and all other travel arrangements. I demand a visit to the Eiffel Tower, she supplies to Metro route. I demand dinner, she supplies KFC, you get the idea. (This might not be exactly the law of supply and demand but I got a C in Econ so moving on.)
In addition, Tabitha and I are both cheap. Maybe thrifty is a better word for it. Tabitha only buys generic. I used to drink Maddog in college because it was only $3.00/bottle and you were drunk when you were done with it (incidentally you were also deteriorating the lining of your stomach but whatever, people do dumb shit in college). Also, on no less than two occasions during the week did we have discussions on the best way to get the last possible drop of lotion out of a tube. Christ, we ate at KFC once and Subway 2.5 times while we were in France. Not to mention that one night we found a bar that served Sangria for 2 euros a glass and after about 5 of those a piece we went to a Chinese buffet offering all you can eat cold Chinese food for 10 Euros and we regarded it as the best discovery since that gay DJ at 45 East introduced us to Britney's "Toxic" senior year. (You get it, we're cheap) My point, I knew this would be an extremely affordable trip and Tabitha was the perfect companion because she's laid back and flexible.
Oh and one more thing I might have failed to mention, Tabitha was a French major (among other things) in college. That bitch speaks fluent French! That means my contact with the French people was kept to a complete minimum. There was one time she made me order dinner myself but all I did was point at the menu and I'm almost 100% sure they brought me the right dinner anyway.
So yeah, the trip was amazing. Paris is glorious and that's a hard statement for me to make considering I thought I hated France. And Tabitha was the best tour guide ever. And holy shit was that trip cheap. My Dad took care of air fare but outside of that I probably spent $700.00 (American) for the whole week, that includes 7 nights in a hotel and airfare to Toulouse. Obviously we weren't staying in 5 star hotels (imagine porch furniture for seating and one toilet shared by everyone on our floor) and we ate some questionable meals but it was all we needed.
I'll spare you the details of the rest of the trip because the only thing worse than listening to what someone did on their vacation is having to tell people what you did on vacation. But the moral of the story is this- I'm glad I finally got my passport, I'm glad I went to Paris & Toulouse with Tabitha, and I'm glad that there were three microwaves at the end of that Chinese buffet because that cheap-ass food was really cold. If you ever go to Europe, you should definitely go to Paris because it's great and I've been there once and have no other European cities to compare it to so obviously I know.
This plan didn’t work because my boyfriend doesn’t have the ways and means to coordinate something like this.
Also, I don’t have a boyfriend.
So, plan B it is, let’s go to France. Why France? That is an excellent question. My good friend and former roommate, we'll call her Tabitha, lives out there and she had a couple weeks of vacation in February so we decided to meet up in Paris and do our thing.
I feel like I really backed poor Tabitha into a corner though. When she first asked us (us being her girlfriends from college) to come visit she was probably just doing it to be nice, the whole time knowing that we wouldn’t take her up on it. Everyone is either too busy working or too busy being poor because of grad school or too busy having a life due to their boyfriend/husband or too busy due to all of the above.
I, on the other hand, have the time (no life) and the money (no life again). However I am very lazy and have zero interest in leaving the United States so she was in the clear with me too. But then I started thinking about it and I made the mistake of mentioning it to my Mom who was all for it and thought it was just a great fucking idea and bugged the hell out of me to at least consider it. Then Tabitha came to visit while she was back in Ohio around New Years and we had an awesome time and we might have gotten really drunk and I might have told her I would come and that she should plan the trip and away we go.
On paper Tabitha and I seemed like the perfect traveling companions. It's the basic law of supply and demand. Tabitha is a very generous and giving soul, I am very demanding. I demand that she spends her vacation with me in France, she supplies the hotel accommodations, plane tickets to Toulouse, and all other travel arrangements. I demand a visit to the Eiffel Tower, she supplies to Metro route. I demand dinner, she supplies KFC, you get the idea. (This might not be exactly the law of supply and demand but I got a C in Econ so moving on.)
In addition, Tabitha and I are both cheap. Maybe thrifty is a better word for it. Tabitha only buys generic. I used to drink Maddog in college because it was only $3.00/bottle and you were drunk when you were done with it (incidentally you were also deteriorating the lining of your stomach but whatever, people do dumb shit in college). Also, on no less than two occasions during the week did we have discussions on the best way to get the last possible drop of lotion out of a tube. Christ, we ate at KFC once and Subway 2.5 times while we were in France. Not to mention that one night we found a bar that served Sangria for 2 euros a glass and after about 5 of those a piece we went to a Chinese buffet offering all you can eat cold Chinese food for 10 Euros and we regarded it as the best discovery since that gay DJ at 45 East introduced us to Britney's "Toxic" senior year. (You get it, we're cheap) My point, I knew this would be an extremely affordable trip and Tabitha was the perfect companion because she's laid back and flexible.
Oh and one more thing I might have failed to mention, Tabitha was a French major (among other things) in college. That bitch speaks fluent French! That means my contact with the French people was kept to a complete minimum. There was one time she made me order dinner myself but all I did was point at the menu and I'm almost 100% sure they brought me the right dinner anyway.
So yeah, the trip was amazing. Paris is glorious and that's a hard statement for me to make considering I thought I hated France. And Tabitha was the best tour guide ever. And holy shit was that trip cheap. My Dad took care of air fare but outside of that I probably spent $700.00 (American) for the whole week, that includes 7 nights in a hotel and airfare to Toulouse. Obviously we weren't staying in 5 star hotels (imagine porch furniture for seating and one toilet shared by everyone on our floor) and we ate some questionable meals but it was all we needed.
I'll spare you the details of the rest of the trip because the only thing worse than listening to what someone did on their vacation is having to tell people what you did on vacation. But the moral of the story is this- I'm glad I finally got my passport, I'm glad I went to Paris & Toulouse with Tabitha, and I'm glad that there were three microwaves at the end of that Chinese buffet because that cheap-ass food was really cold. If you ever go to Europe, you should definitely go to Paris because it's great and I've been there once and have no other European cities to compare it to so obviously I know.
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