The rack of luuurve is not really the funniest place to be. Yet I’ve chosen to spend an unusual amount of time there since I’ve arrived in Aussie-land.

Going back to Bondi after the Farm Life and one full year of living in this beautiful country has shown me how far I’d come but also reminded me of how easy it was to get caught in the twirling game of luuurve without realizing it.

Except this time I did. Realize it I mean.

People say that the opposite sex is so much more attracted to you when you are in a relationship. But I find that’s completely untrue! Every time I’m emotionally available, some lovely handsome boy (or boys) waltzes into my life.

How do they do it seriously?? Are they just hiding, waiting, ready to pounce at the opportune moment or what?? Or is it the smell of my naïve blondeness?

Now I know what you think, what on earth could be wrong with that??? Well the only thing wrong about it is me being completely unable to switch off the wasp factor and repeat the same pattern over. And over. And over again.

So for now, no matter how delightful and charming they are, I am seriously putting my foot down with that bow and arrow. With a firm hand. Because I know the ending of that story all too well if I end up being interested. I get bounced out of the bakery of luuurve, face in the gutter.

But those boys are so nice and interesting (in the beginning at least) that I don’t really want to walk away from them.

Can we be friends? Yes let’s.

Anyway I am leaving for my Eurotrip so qu’est ce que le point of anything else?

Also, the bright side of being my friend is that I will not:

1-    Tell stupid little lies because I think that’s what you want to hear. “If I had to choose between a dog or a cat it would be a dog.” Right…

    

2-    Change my personality to either:

• a. not clash with you. Stay silent. A lot. -_-
• b. nag you “Are you really going to be wearing THAT?” *roll eyes*

3-    Judge every move you make. Is he going to sit next to me or next to his mate…

Oh the horror. I don’t want to be that person ever again.

And I will bet you anything you want that I will be meeting many more sweet and totally adorable men on my holidays. And I will tell them the same thing. Would you pleeeease let me be your friend? Let’s get wasted if you want, dance like crazy and sing completely out of tune as much as you want, but at the end of the night, let’s just carry one another to our respective beds. Or floor. Whichever one we reach first.

Friends for one night. Is that a thing?

Well it is now.

And who knows? A friend for one night might become a friend forever.

XoXo – From Bondi with mucho mucho Friendship.

The more I see, the more I feel, the less I know.

I just turned 25. That’s big. And the last couple of weeks, despite my silence on this blog, have been absolutely epic. So epic that the other night when a friend that I hadn’t seen for 2 months asked me: “what’s the most epic thing you’ve done since I’ve last seen you?”, it took me a while to choose. I finally said “surfing with dolphins”. Even though I was the worst surfer in history, and the dolphins weren’t too close, and the weather wasn’t the best, the feeling I had when I saw them in Jervis Bay… Something jolted inside of me, I couldn’t stop squealing with delight! And sitting on my board, with no one else in Cave Beach’s water but my friend and me… what a rush.

That little surf-trip was the trip of a lifetime and I will never forget it for so many different reasons.

And then it was my birthweek. Yes, not birthday, birthWEEK. I’ve celebrated almost everyday with different people, for different reasons or no reason whatsoever: that place that played good jazz on Monday nights we’d never been, that restaurant I hadn’t eaten at yet… and then came the actual night of my birthday.

I’ve never liked Beach Road Hotel, but it was still, without a doubt, the best night I’ve had in Oz. I was so touched and so blessed to have all these people surrounding me, laughing, meeting each other, having fun.

Of course it wouldn’t have been a properly epic night if something dramatic hadn’t happened.

The last party warriors and I were tricked into going to another club in king’s cross (I really hated every venue of the night) and got left with a 190$ bill without our consent. Well we… my amazing boss from Surfection settled it…

Knowledge no1: never trust a 40 something year old man who promises to pay for taxis and champagne.

And then… well… of course I had to be a major drama queen myself, drunk, emotional, hormonal, and finished the night with tears streaming down my face in front of my surf trip companion and blissful friend.

Knowledge no2: stop drinking (25 different types of alcohol) while on periods.

Well I can blame it on whatever I want, but truly: The more I see, the more I feel, the less I know.

I did know pretty early on that in this land, everything I would experience would be big, every emotion is multiplied, every event is epic, every person I meet means so much more than they probably would have back in France or Singapore. And possibly, they mean so much more to me than I do to them.

Still I always forget. Or worse, those new experiences and emotions just make me more confused. I feel like I know as little about life as when I was 16. All I have is more memories. And probably more fun.

And now in the midst of all that confusion, I have to leave all (so little) that I know of this country, my Bondi bubble, my fav surf-shop and my board, my internship, my flat and… most importantly, the people, my friends.

I’m sad, but it might be good timing for a little Blue Mountains retreat.

Knowledge no3: I’m usually not one to run away from a crackled heart (on the contrary I usually make sure it’s well shattered, broken and out of breath before giving up) but this time, I’ll let the world whisk me away to other another land and give me a second heartbeat.

XoXo – from the Blue Mountains with Love

 

When I ended my story with Australian boy no2 (turns out the romance was meaningless and short-lived) I directly asked myself why I was repeating the same pattern as frog no1 from not too long ago? Yes I am making a frog and princess analogy here.

At first I tend to think that it’s so easy with Aussie boys, I do nothing and they just come and get me, and I let them. But when I start getting involved and passionate then everything slowly crumbles down and I find out they didn’t want anything too serious. Yes I had The Talk. The Talk didn’t go too well. I still hate The Talk.

And when I found out it was definitely over and there was no going back, of course I went out, got drunk, and ended up kissing a French boy.

By the end of the night, Frenchie called me his girlfriend. How significantly different this whole experience was…

And everything was easy, I knew what every move he made meant, I knew how to play, I knew those rules. Because I’ve always played by those rules. But of course, I wasn’t interested in being serious with Frenchie. He was just… too… French…

A couple of nights after that, I coincidentally meet up with the guy I had kissed once while getting over frog no1. You can probably guess what happened… yes we kissed again. I was less drunk this time so I could appreciate how cute and funny he was. He was also a very good kisser but something didn’t quite click so, same as Frenchie, I decided to call it a night (but accepted a breakfast date a couple of days later).

When I woke up this morning I realised I was also making the exact same rebound pattern I had done with frog no1… If this goes on, maybe I can predict that the next guy I’m going to meet is going to seduce me very quickly, and in about a month time when I’ve invested enough emotion and thoughts into it, he’s going to tell me he’s not interested in having a girlfriend, and me, instead of being heartbroken and ponder on what went wrong, I’d just shrug it off and go have fun. Too much fun maybe.

Let’s make a bet.

How do you break your patterns?

They say the French have the most romantic culture. Even though I was raised mostly in Asia, I was brought up in French culture and only going to French schools. As such I always fiercely doubted that belief. In my eyes French boys had no idea on how to operate, usually leaving the girls to do everything and they would just go along with it. Not my idea of romance. I wanted men who had guts, who would woo me before I even laid eyes on them. You know, a classic Disney romance. When I came to Australia, I found pretty much that. My first encounter was with a boy I met on my last road trip day that ended in Sydney in March 2013. He saw me walking into a bar. Spent the next 45min pondering on how to talk to me, when he finally did he didn’t leave my side till 7am the next day and I had to take my plane back to Singapore. He then stalked me on Facebook and pretty much spent the next 3 months waiting for my return to Sydney. Now that is romance.

Until I landed.

I was soon faced with the facts that in this country, engaging intimacy with someone doesn’t necessarily mean you are WITH that person. Even if we shared our deepest secrets, even if he picked me up from the airport and didn’t let me leave his place for two days, even if he introduced me to all his friends and talked to his mother about me, we still weren’t an item. Now that baffled me.

Because for most French people, if you’re kissing someone for no apparent reason, seeing that person more than you see your best friend and sharing the same bed two nights in a row or more, that person would be called a girlfriend/boyfriend to you. Without any need of talking about it, within days of the first kiss, sometimes minutes, you would be in a relationship.

That was my understanding of romance.

I’ve talked about this with a couple of Aussie boys I met when I first arrived here. And for them it was clear that there needed to be a discussion before being officially a couple.

After about a month of my arrival in the land down under, I was having lunch at a café with that particular boy. A distant friend of his’ ran into us and asked: “who’s the girl?” to which he answered: “oh this is Stella. She’s French”. Instinctively I thought I was going to hear the word ‘girlfriend’ somewhere in there. But that never came. Two days later I was sleeping with someone else. Hell if I wasn’t a girlfriend, then I wasn’t cheating was I?

A couple of days after that I ‘dumped’ the boy. Well I can’t say dumped because we weren’t together now were we. So let’s say I decided to stop seeing him. Also I didn’t want to engage in that awkward conversation. I didn’t want to be the cliché of the girl who goes: “we need to talk” and the boy runs away in the opposite direction. I didn’t want to feel like I was tying balls and chains to his feet. I felt like I would want to grow and move smoothly into something deeper and that there wouldn’t be the need to engage into such a pragmatic discussion about feelings or put a relationship into boxes.

Box 1: dating. Seeing each other, possibly having sex. Able to see other people.

Box 2: couple. Having a logical talk about the role the other has in your life.

Box 3: … well I wouldn’t know what box 3 is, I haven’t gotten to that stage yet 😛

A couple of weeks after that, I met someone else. And even though every detail of that new story is pretty romantic and more importantly feels easy and natural (unlike the previous one), I am still at the stage of not being a girlfriend. That awkward in between moment that I have no idea on how to deal with, and worse, living in fear of having to deal with “THE TALK”.

So I want to say this: congratulations to Australian men, you have guts and know how to make every first steps to get a girl, unlike the French, but when it comes to the rest of the story, who’s more romantic?