May 18 By some miracle, I got to see Kasey Furutama today. I GOT TO SEE KASEY TODAY!!!
(Also, concerned family... The nose ring is not real. Thanks for the panicked texts though.)
Kasey, for those of you who have been following this blog since my European adventures (and mishhaps), is one of my most cherished friends from Paris. She was part of an amazing group of friends that I made, and they acted as my second family. They celebrated my birthday with me and we ate Thanksgiving dinner together and we drank espressos in Florence. They saw the world with me, one cobblestone street at a time.
I haven't seen Kasey since December. Our last moments together were spent in between the set of double doors to my foyer. We were hugging, crying, and laughing. It was the oddest set of emotions. Saying goodbye is never easy and not knowing when you'll get to see that person brings out the emotional in a couple of frightened young girls. (The frightened emotion was stemming from leaving the home we had come to love those four months, not knowing how the States would feel to us or how to exist without our newfound and extremely important friends)
But how lucky am I that I got to see her just 6 months after our goodbye?? (Not only that but I will get to see her again before the summer is out!!!)
She met me in San Franscico cause she is the NICEST. And she toook me to her favorite sandwich shop, Ike's, which may or may not have created the most magical sandwich I have ever eaten (it might even rival my mom's mushroom sandwiches...) We got coffee; I picked up a free book on European Union policies (ask me why in 5 months... I'm still working on the reasoning there).
Getting coffee was such a familiar comfort with Kasey. Not that we did it that often in France, but we sure did it in Italy and Belgium.
To explain our friendship a little further... Our friendship really was forged when we got lost in Bruges for hours. I got blisters on the bottoms of my feet, and Kasey cried on the patio furniture of a closed waffle shop. (To be honest... I was another 20 minutes behind her on it) Imagine being young women, lost in a foreign city, with no phones, no map, and worst off.... No address for the hostel you are sleeping in. By some amazing miracle, we got back to our hostel, both of us nearing our wits end. So naturally, we became dear friends.
We called Anastasia, our third wheel friend. We picked her up to help cover the cost of our hotel rooms in Italy. She's mediocre at best. (Well, I might be using an intense amount of sarcasm, since that is the native language of Anastasia and our main form of communication.) Kasey and I were able to talk to her for an hour; how we managed to pull off convincing her that we were paying attention for that long is mind boggling!
(To preface, Anastasia introduced herself to me via Facebook. We had a good chat before she said goodbye, telling me to never contact her again since I seem incredibly uncool. I appreciated her honesty, but it turns out it was sarcasm. Whew!)
So here I was, sitting on a bench with Kasey, my first real friend in Paris, and we were chatting with Anastasia, my first sarcastic and sassy friend in Paris. How lucky could a girl get??
EVEN LUCKIER. There is apparently a 99% chance of a reunion occurring in NYC this summer. It is not set in stone, but my excitement is through the roof. REUNION. A REUNION.
I love these humans, and a reunion needed to happen the day I stopped seeing their faces everyday. But oh, you bet that I'll take a reunion.