Europe, tea, and other romantic things

If all the world smelled like tea, I might die of sheer euphoria.

Tea isn't quite a fetish of mine, but still something I relish. It's more of an indulgence of smell than taste, and it is that notion in itself that makes me like it so much more. I drink it in gangly, inelegant cups with no china or porcelain plates at the bottom. I have a hard time deciding between green tea, ginger, chamomile, mango, orange spice, and all those other scents that line the racks. The small space of apartments should smell like tea, and so should studies, if only so that I might work faster.

I'm also going to Paris in October. My post-it note list of destinations while there fleetingly includes the Eiffel Tower, only because it's unmissable and a world famous landmark. But all romantic context put aside, to be honest, I could barely tell the difference between the crane and the tower(in construction) in the photo.

However, all that put aside, Paris seems like a nice place-- the sort that attracts curious tourists such as myself, anyways. Would I move there? Likely never, since vegetarian food is rare and since I would much rather prefer Munich, where the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics is located. I plan to visit the Louvre, the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Palace of Versailles, maybe the Pompidou Center and fleetingly the tower (I wonder if they have elevator rides).  Still, as far as architecture goes, the below has got to be my favorite set of photos.

And as to other romantic things, I'll briefly mention the afterlife. I found a paragraph in the archive of tentative passages for that novel of mine(ever since I've introduced it to you, I can't seem to stop talking about it, can I?) that had something to do with that. I'm not sure why it's in the tentative folder, but here it is.

" We’d all spent so much time conjuring ideas of what happened after the final flash and fade that it all couldn’t possibly be real. I thought that there might be a sudden flash of light or pain, just to startle you, and then everything might pulse and fade away. There would be a moment of suspension in which you could absorb that that was the finishing moment of this chapter, this set of things which you knew, a moment in which you might love everyone that you had ever loved. Before you knew it, you would be sliding out of someone, slick and wet, and just for a split second, you would recollect all the people that had loved you, right into the palm of your hand. And then you would forget, cry because you could not remember, because all that previous love had been spent, because then, you were awake in a world I did not know. "

Yes, I'd prefer no afterlife to a heaven, Lovely Bones style, in which you could moon over life as it was. Life isn't, I think, meant to be mooned over.

love,

Julia