I am in love.

It came on me, suddenly, without warning, on a London day like any other.

I woke up at 9 a.m. to the warm sound of my various flat mates laughing, soft voices and heavy accents wafting to me from the kitchen with the clank of spoons in cereal bowls. I cannot remember a time before arriving in London when this phenomenon — waking up with a smile — occurred. Similarly, as I look in the mirror, my reflection is strange to me. I do not recognize my face without bags underneath my eyes.

At 1:30 p.m. I threw open my curtains to another sunny day. It was an honest warm day, rather than one of those — brilliantly sunny, but a chill forty degrees — that catch newcomers to London unawares.

When passing by the metro station Tuileries, I am greeted by a larger-than-life image of Josephine Baker’s breasts. I don’t note this because I have any particular attraction to her breasts. Rather, they are a blatant paradigm of the cultural difference between the French and American attitudes toward sex.

Several weeks ago I found myself in a very familiar situation. For the second time in four months I stood at Logan Airport’s International Terminal in Boston, preparing to board a transatlantic flight from the United States to Paris. In some ways, nothing had changed since September, when I first arrived in Paris as an American student on the Educo (Emory, Duke and Cornell) in Paris program: though I was certainly more familiar with my European destination, waiting in airport terminals always conjures uncertainty in me. I inevitably fall into asking myself banal questions.