The End of an Era

No sooner was I back from England than Laura and Cristina, two of my best Italian friends, arrived on the train from Parma for the weekend, bearing much cheese and salami and enjoying a swift but fun tour of Lyon's best delights before dashing back again to face exams.
The last week of June then promptly disappeared in a muddle of flatmates coming and going, negociations with the next people to occupy our wonderful flat, worries about what to do with most of the furniture, packing, and a sense that we ought to be making the most of the last few days together and not faffing around with rental agencies, cleaning or furniture removal. We managed a couple of relaxed nights in during which most of my friends who were still in Lyon popped round to say goodbye, not that it felt permanent at that point! It didn't really sink in that we weren't coming back to live in that lovely flat until Gareth and I were walking along the road with our suitcases, and even then it felt rather as if we were going on holiday (well, Gareth pretty much was as he has now returned to Lyon, albeit to a different flat)! We met Louise, a girl I'd met at church and who was on an engineering erasmus year, at the airport, and travelling together distracted us a bit from the reality of leaving it all behind.
It did feel like the end of an era that week, and it was the end of this blog's first era too: I shall no longer be reporting much on the whims and wonders of the French lifestyle, although I shall attempt to carry on reporting the odd thing or two of interest from life back in the UK now that I am a grown up linguist (or something like that).