Springtime has arrived in Paris, complete with spontaneous April showers and pretty purple blossoms in the trees. In the course of this afternoon alone, it's gone from sunny and warm to cold and rainy at least twice. Overall it's been getting warmer (not California status), which is a welcome change. Hard to believe that not too long ago I would not think of leaving the house without the scarf/hat/glove ensemble.

Last week consisted of frantically finishing schoolwork that had (intentionally) gone untouched the week before. I had a 10-page paper for my english IR theory class due on Tuesday, a small paper for my french class, and an exposé for one of my french classes to prepare for Friday, which ended up being moved to Wednesday (tomorrow). It all got done though, and not horribly either. Despite having to pull an all-nighter to finish it, my english paper ended up being almost fun to write because having completed a paper from hell the week before Spring Break in French, I suddenly had all the confidence in the world when writing in English. And it kind of seem like, even though I usually don't feel like I'm getting a lot out of lectures (considering teachers don't really teach here but rather subcontract that job to all their eager students in the form of exposés), I do think I've done a good job of getting the most I can out of my assignments, insofar as I've tried to tailor them to what I study at home and what I'm interested in. My scary exposé a while back was about human rights, I wrote my IR paper essentially about UN reform, and for my exposé for my french class about resistance movements, I chose to talk about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (which my teacher enthusiastically okay'd even though I was unsure if he'd be on board). All subjects that have been touched upon in my classes at Berkeley and that I've been able to explore more here. Not a bad setup!

My spring break was WONDERFUL and just what I needed. I just put up lots of pictures on Picasa and I was more diligent about providing captions so I wouldn't need to go into too much detail here (http://picasaweb.google.com/rsevenlima - there are also two new Paris albums). I loved Dublin and I honestly learned tons about Irish history while I was there (considering I knew about zilch before I went). My friend Matt who is a bit of a history buff and of Irish origin (like Katie and everyone else I hung out with in Dublin!), as well as a literary pub crawl (where you go along with these two Irish actors to different pubs and they perform scenes and give you historical facts--highly recommended!) helped with this. There was also pub-hopping, of course, where I discovered my taste for Guinness (at least the Irish kind-I hear it's different elsewhere), as well as that Irish people are ridiculously friendly. You get "cheers" from random people and I was the victim of more than one anonymous hug. One place we went to had live music all the time (featured briefly in the video below!) and it was really fun. Dublin is a tiny city, Katie wasn't joking when she assured me I shouldn't worry about seeing all of it in a couple days. But it's definitely somewhere I'd pay a visit to again.
Bristol was much bigger than I expected, on the other hand, and although it seemed like a cool place to live I didn't see much of it in the day and a half that I was there. Plus, Yael and I went to Bath on one of the days, which is about 20 minutes away by train. More unexpected (but very welcome) history lessons followed.
Finally London to visit Stacy and spend more time with the Dubliners (Katie, Matt, and his friend Andy) who made it over that weekend for the Van Morisson concert. We saw a lot for the limited time we were there, even though higher priority for me was getting a feel for Stacy's life there--which I did (and it's wonderful to see her thrive). London is definitely my kind of city and I felt a slight twinge of sadness at the fact that I didn't have time to bum around for a bit longer. But even though I started to get a little bit of the end-of-vacation (and oh-shit-I-have-to-write-a-ten-page-paper-tomorrow) depression on the last day, there was NOTHING like coming "home" to Paris the next afternoon. Boy, was that an amazing feeling. I was all smiles on the RER home.
I had a great time on my trip exploring the current homes of my friends but of course, the best part about it was getting to spend time with some of my favorite people, and I know we would have had fun regardless of where we were. And amazing to see my girls again (granted one of us was missing) and get that wonderful borderline-panicked feeling where I'm not sure if I'll be able to withstand my laughter ("Man, I forgot what it was like when you three get together," as Matt said). I already knew it but it's always nice to be reminded that I have the best friends in the world.