Hi, Bye!

I guess you could call me a francophile.  No country is perfect, but as compensation for the unabashed promotion of the feminine mystique, I'll take an efficient rail system, subsidizing of pastries, and this fairytale-quality medieval abbey:

Mont-Saint-Michel is stunning.  It sits on a large rock plopped onto a tidal flat that stretches for miles, allowing intrepid visitors to squelch around in the mud around it half the time and alternately gaze it awe at the natural moat that forms around it.

Is that not magical and otherworldly?!?!

But also: Aud's wedding!  Turkish baths with Marta!  Buttery croissants, buttery omelets, multiple forms of soft-as-butter roast pork!  Somehow it was sunny and warm for a week straight in London; also somehow I managed to have a cold for half this trip.  Such a lovely variety of English roses adorned our bouquets, an amount I once would have termed splentiful-spledgible.  The crustless glories and light creamy dainties of high tea, kaleidoscopically delicious Indian dishes, roast and Yorkshire pudding, bao steamed buns, not to mention an unparalleled literary tradition...apparently I am something of an Anglophile.

So it is with a huge store of good things done and consumed that I briefly pause before heading south again to Antarctica.  I will thwart the calendar and continue along with summer (or "summer," what with freezing temperatures), and doubly abscond with time as the sun won't set for five months.  During that long afternoon, I would love you, kind friends, to send notes, funny stories, pictures of flowers, cool stickers, and/or poignant satire when you have the chance.

Claire Veligdan
PSC 769 Box 700
APO-AP 96599-9998
claireveligdan @ gmail.com