108. Thursday thoughtful thoughts and a terrific transportation to France

30 Nov, 2023

This is a continued story from the Crazy people, crazy stories - a week of meeting colorful characters post.

Thursday

I like to make friends at the climbing gym. When I went with my "acquaintance" to the gym a couple of weeks ago, I actually made a new friend while climbing! This particular friend was doing some boulders alone, so I watched her try out some routes and gave her a couple of tips on solving the problem. I knew she was a foreigner like me, so we bonded off of that connection. She's from Dijon, like the mustard. We became fast friends that day.

It was her birthday, so we planned to get together, just the two of us, at a French bistro. My Dijonaise friend was missing her home cuisine and wanted some authentic tastes from her country. However, she was running a bit late and our dinner reservation got pushed up until later in the evening, so I decided to meet up with my Danish friend from yesterday.

He was sitting at a coffee shop alone. I had some time to spare so I joined up with him. "Kayla, try this espresso lemonade." was the first thing that was said when I arrived in the loud cafe, which reminded us of a night club, loud and bustling. He described the espresso lemonade as:

"Thai food- the bitterness combined with the sourness kind of reminded me of tamarind. Honestly. It's not that bad, but the cold brew tonic served with the dried orange was much better."

Honestly, had to pass it up unfortunately. I was saving my appetite for some anniversaire bread and cheeses later in the evening :) I sat across from him and had to finish writing my birthday greeting to my friend. It was a little bit difficult since I had to search up some grammar rules up because I had forgotten how to phrase certain things. Meanwhile, my friend was finishing up his journal entry. We worked silently for a couple of minutes and smiled at each other.

For the rest of our cafe meeting, we conversed about cultural differences, different foods, and different life perspectives. One of the nicest things we discussed that I remembered from our conversation was about the feeling of restlessness and the drive for adventure. I think we both thought of the highs and lows of this sort of "vacillating motivation" as graphing a cosine function. Except, maybe not exactly as "stable" honestly. We were trying to pinpoint why this happens- why life is a never-ending hamster wheel of the ups and downs, of happys and of sads. Who knows at this point? We're still a little stuck. Hopefully, the next time we meet up maybe we'll inch closer and closer to an answer. Not a final answer, of course- but maybe a more clarifying one.