ErikaMoen

2005

Added 2023-03-13 19:38:32 +0000 UTC

Matt found some photos he took of me (on film!) in 2005.

I was 21, an American spending her semester abroad in France while he was a 19-year-old student in England who had been reading my comics on LiveJournal for a couple years already.

We met in London over a weekend, texted furiously back and forth on our flip phones after I returned to Aix-en-Provence, and then, once both our school programs had ended, we spent three weeks winding through France on our student rail passes and staying in a new hostel, sometimes every day.

We had no itinerary.

We had a book listing hostels (Auberges de jeunesse) that belonged to the same chain.

One of us would hold it open, making the pages flick past in a blur until the other would shout STOP! and then whatever page we had landed on, that was the hostel we’d travel to that day. We went to Lille. We went to Montpellier. We went to Angoulême. We went to so many more places and I do not remember all the names now.

One time, after a full day on the rails, we arrived at our hostel locked up tight for the night, so we settled against a picnic table on the property, passing a bottle of vodka back and forth to stay warm.

We were the first people at the door when the hostel worker opened up. It was too early to check in he told us.

We must have said we arrived last night, because he asked where we had slept so we pointed at the picnic bench. His eyes opened wide and then he ushered us in, gave us a bed even though the protocol was all wrong, the rules said nobody could be in the rooms during these hours (or something along those lines.) We hung our towels from the top bunk to block the light streaming in on us in the bottom bed. We burrowed into our nest, dozing off and on between giggling and kisses.