General irresponsibility

Lately, I've mostly been keeping on keeping on, studiously not studying, spending as much time as possible picnicking and dancing and eating ice cream and sitting by the Seine (sometimes all at once!) as I possibly can. There's a French national holiday once a week, essentially, during the month of May, and this year all of them fall on Tuesdays, so my friends and I have been reveling in a series of 4-day weekends. This is not making it easier for me to get excited about leaving. So I just don't think about it.
The weekend after spring break ended, I headed back to Amsterdam with friends Selene and Rachel to see the city in its springtime glory. We were there for Queen's Day, so we got to ride this neat-o Ferris Wheel in the central square, and the waiter in the pizza place where we ate dinner one night was handing out lollipops, just for being female. We spent most of the rest of the weekend doing things we normally do: sitting in parks, eating, etc. The one exception is this: as much as it hurts me, and as hard as I try, I'm never going to be French. Specifically, I'm never going to be a French woman. However, there is a part of me that sincerely believes that I could be Dutch -- I'd have to sacrifice Camembert for Gouda, but other than that I'd just need to buy a bike, try to sound serious speaking a language that sounds like something a Muppets character would make up, and move into a riverboat on one of those charming canals. This impression was only reinforced by someone mistaking us for locals while we were eating raspberries canal-side. I am smitten.
The other big deal over on this side of the pond has been the presidential election, which ended with Nicolas Sarkozy, the more right-wing candidate, winning the majority of the vote. It's been really interesting to be here for this, and to hear such varied opinions on it all -- my host family are big Sarkozy fans, which has been a huge learning experience for me -- having lived in Vermont, and being a student at a small, east-coast liberal arts college, it can sometimes be easy for me to think of conservatives as a nebulous, rather destable group of money-hungry billionaires and racist backwoodsy types, determined to push the States into a state of ruin. However, here I am, living among them, and they're not all bad -- they cook me dinner and let me sleep in their house, and teach me things about France and French, and I've grown pretty fond of them over the last 8 months. So I've had to reconcile political beliefs that I have a hard time understanding and which I have always alienated and reviled with my feelings for this wonderful, warm family that's welcomed me into their home. It's been frustrating and hard, but probably good for my larger world view in the long run. This is all balanced out by the people I work with, who are all loyal "Royalistes," fans of Ségolène Royale, the female socialist candidate. I haven't gotten a chance to talk to them about the outcome of the elections yet, but last week they were telling me that they're worried that a Sarkozy victory would spark another '68 -- people taking to the streets, violence, endless protests, etc. etc. So far, that hasn't quite proved true -- there's been some rioting, but it's been pretty localized (I haven't noticed anything apart from a few extra sirens here and there), but things do seem like they have the potential to get nasty. We'll see how it all turns out. In the meantime, I'll continue to revel in this ridiculous life of mine until my flight home June 1...