A Fresh Start (up)

It all started with me having my licence…and ended up with me buying this car (on the picture)!

OK, let’s do that chronologically (I don’t even have time to get creative while giving you some news!). On Tuesday evening we had dinner in SF with Thibault and Anne-Laure who were starting their tour of California: wow, that was so great to see some friends, and listening to them arguing about the next steps of their trip felt like home, and more exactly poker parties in Paris!

After a crazy week at work, on Friday night we went celebrating Jenni’s move from our team to the Motors team (this girl really helped me getting settled at work, this is so bad she’s leaving), in a great French restaurant called Foreign Cinema. God, I missed foie gras so much!! Pictures are here.

On Saturday, Audrey, Cecile and I attended a Fashion show organized by the Academy of Arts to recruit new students (pictures here)… It was absolutely great, exactly as we see them on TV, except that the models are even skinnier in reality… To sympathize with them, we went eating chocolate pudding just after :-). And then we went to the SF MOMA, I think I could spend my life there… This afternoon, and in particular seeing those prospective students at the Academy, made me realize that, since I decided what I wanted to do so early, I am not really aware of all the other type of careers and lives people have outside of the business world. I’m not saying that I imagine myself as a fashion designer (even if my mother would have preferred that!), but I would love to meet people with more diverse backgrounds… Speaking of which, on Saturday night Nicolas invited us to meet Thomas, his partner, who just joined him in the US: a true artist, graphic designer and photograph. If you want to check a great photoblog, Thomas’ one will definitely be worth your time. After eating with them and Seb around Castro St, we went to a pub in the same street… and I was the only girl, surrounded by guys who were obviously more interested in Rémy than myself… I’m definitely in SF!

And today… Rémy went checking some cars this morning and came back with a big smile: “I found it, we just have to sign the papers”! 200 hundred signatures later, I found myself writing a check of $11,000, on the verge on falling from my chair, imagining that the next time that I will check my bank account there will be a huge difference… In these kind of moments, you just want to be a kid again and have Mom&Dad (this is almost a brand) take care of everything, so I called them and they scared the hell out of me: “have you checked that the engine is clear? what about the brakes? how can you be sure that it wasn’t involved in any accident?”… Anyway, I bought a really nice Toyota Yaris, that I’m going to pick up probably tomorrow since I need to get an insurance first. What do you think? I find its “face” (no, I’m not crazy, I know that it won’t speak to me like Disney’s ones) really cute

To relax after this stressful choice, we went to… Alcatraz (I know, a spa would have probably been a better choice)! We chose the evening tour, and it was awesome, first of all for the view on the City, but also because you really get to see what you have in mind: the alignment of microscopic cells, the ways prisoners took to escape, the cells of famous prisoners… and you can’t of course miss the entire story of Al Capone… Eh, you know I love Mafia stories! Pictures are here.

After a nice work and a nice apartment, I start to have nice friends and a nice car. This expatriation is going well, right?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 11:07 am and is filed under American way of life, Art, Entertainment, Expatriation.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.