Le fin

So I realised I never wrote a post about the end of my time in France. I really wasn't very good at keeping this blog up.
The last few days we spent in France, towards the end of April, were really bizarre. We had to pack up our entire lives, as we had an unfurnished flat and had to return it in the way we found it, completely bare. So we spent three days completely stripping this apartment of all the life we had managed to fill it with in the first place, which wasn't the most fun thing to do in the world. The cardboard boxes we had turned into coffee tables eventually became cardboard boxes again, filled with all my odds and ends, and the ugly white sofa got returned to whoever actually gave that to us in the first place, but luckily carrying it down eight flights of stairs was a hell of a lot easier than carrying it up there. We got a pretty good workout from de-furnishing (is that a word?) that flat. But it was kind of heartbreaking. Seeing those bedrooms and the living room completely and utterly bare again, bringing back the memories of when Louise and I were literally sitting in the empty living room with just a mattress as furniture waiting for the electrician to come and turn the power on whilst we read free supermarket magazines to keep us amused. It was, in the Rachel and Monica sense of it, the end of an era. But anyway, we stripped the apartment bare, some tears were shed, and then we ended up going our separate ways.
It was a strange seven months, that's for sure. Absolutely full of ups and downs, but still a great experience that I'll probably never have again. It went so fast, towards the end it was unbelievable. We actually felt like we needed more time to sort everything out.
But I was glad to be home in the end. Although Rouen was a great place to live and even though I didn't have the best experience in the world the whole time I was there I would still absolutely recommend it as a place to live.