best weekend in the bay area

last weekend i went to the bay area and saw some friends that i haven't seen since the vienna airport or outside of the jerusalem center where we were sobbing at two in the morning and we drove away in our buses into the abyss of the night.

and then we met up in the sunny sunny land of the bay area where street photography is fun again:

also, i knew i was obsessed with mary, but i didn't know she was in like every picture i took of our friends:



eating our weight in chocolate at victoria's dad's chocolate factory:



fascinating conversation at the beach in carmel:




mmm. great weekend. thanks friends!

roxanne's wedding!

yay!

i just wanted to show you how some of the flowers i did for her turned out! one of my favorite if not my favorite wedding i've ever been to! roxanne and sam were so cute i couldn't get over it, and i had fun helping set up and be a part of the wedding. i love that girl so so much.

here's her bouquet and his boutonniere:

yay!


other beautiful things from the wedding:





love love love

all images are from fabulous alpha smoot photography
where you can see the rest of the wedding

also, i wrote this the night i got home from roxanne's wedding, and well, i'll just post it here if anyone is interested. i read an essay my professor wrote the other day, and he formatted it kind of like this and it made reading it so fast. so. we'll try that:

Roxanne got married today.
I thought about the first time we walked around a small town together in the Lake District
and one of the last days in London when we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum
and we looked at the jewelry exhibit and discussed each ring excitedly,
deciding if we would ever wear it for our wedding ring.
I remembered visiting together a dozen antique stores and rummaging carefully through the stalls on Portabello Road looking for just the right gifts.

I thought about this while we drove to the Manti temple
and I watched the rolling brown and green hills
and I sat next to cupcakes with melting blackberry frosting in the cold, spring sun for the reception later that night.
I wore a yellow bridesmaid’s dress and a white fabric flower in my hair.
So did the two girls in the front seats.

I actually felt kind of awkward today because I liked just watching Roxanne.
Of course everyone was watching her because she was the bride.
But it was the type of watching that you do when you’re watching TV.
Not usually when you’re watching real life and it’s odd to stare.
I guess it’s less weird to know that she’s a dancer.

When she’s smiling you can feel the smile all the way through her clapping hands,
and when she laughs her whole body laughs with her,
and when she’s excited you can see it down to her feet jumping up and down.

While I watched her dance with her new husband for the first time and then with her dad,
I remembered the way she danced as we walked through fields of yellow flowers
and long grass in Dorset,
both our hands skimming over the top of the grass in the bright, spring air.
We were both without any attachments, really.
Free to talk about our weddings in abstract, non-committal ways.
Free to do whatever we liked, to travel the world,
to assert all of the independence we could ever want,
to work and to live and adventure with each other and with ourselves.

But tonight was the first time she wouldn’t say goodbye to Sam,
and I swallowed a bunch of times—tried to swallow that lump. I watched her from my table as I swallowed a piece of wedding cake instead.

It still looked as though she were laughing
though her face was only smiling
her hips swaying to the music as she gently helped her partner around the dance floor.
She was twirling gracefully,
her gown that reached right below her knees wrapping around her legs,
and her gray, antique wedding shoes helping her glide along the floor.

sort of famous bodies of water:

felucca rides on the nile in luxor. this is when we were sailing up stream. i love this picture:



this was taken while i was on a camel: this kid steered our boat and every girl on the boat wanted to take a picture with him. so, of course i was too embarrassed to get one.



the red sea: greg, me, andrew, jeff, elissa, gretchen, ron. three people decided to jump into the water and got grounded on a free day when we got back to the center. it was so warm...i sort of wish i would have. but, yeah, i was still a bit sick......

(thanks for this last pic gretch!)

Sinai!

So...everyone who's been to sinai at 2:30 in the morning freaking freaked me out that i was going to be freezing. SO.

I wore:

1 pair of cotton socks
2 pairs of wool socks
1 pair of smart wool pants
1 pair of jeans
1 pair of wind pants
1 t-shirt
1 non-cotton longsleeved shirt
1 fleece
1 sweatshirt
1 leather jacket
1 camel's wool poncho
1 camel's wool scarf
1 really warm hat
and a windbreaker just in case in my back pack.

friends...i was not cold sitting there waiting for the sun to rise. but i really don't think i needed to use so much space in my luggage for that...woops! look at my elephant feet in the first pic.

but i took a camel up part way, which i wouldn't take back no matter how many times people told me it was a cop-out. i loved leaning back and staring at the sky. i may or may not have started crying until i realized brittney's camel in front of me kept farting and the bedouins kept using gross slurping noises to control the camels. but besides that, nothing beats seeing the silhouettes of camels on the ridge, moving slowly and steadily forward, and looking at the silent, clear night with my head craned back. Thinking of God, and that at least a few times, He had been here.

after climbing down sinai at st catherine's monastery: me, lindsay, gretchen

on top of mt sinai while the sun was rising. (thanks for the pic ron!)

not at sinai. but i love this picture (thanks to ron again...he's kind of a good photographer.). my roommate lindsay. who i rely on too much socially, physically (as in i almost slip and fall ALL the time), and she takes my candy away when i buy it so i don't eat it all at once.

clear skies and a wheel to sit behind

on monday, all of my friends had finals or studying monopolizing their lives, so i decided to strategically run into people in the library. i couldn't believe i couldn't find anyone i knew on all five floors, and usually i see way too many people i know there while i am dressed in sweats. (mother-this is not that often.) anyway, so i settled down behind a table, pulled out my computer and earbuds, and settled down with a furrowed brow to...write on my blog. yep.

when i woke up tuesday morning, i decided the library was out. and when i walked outside on to 500 n, it was the most beautiful december day, and i seriously was skipping down the sidewalk, smiling so huge because it was so pretty. i could finally see the mountains and the sky, and the snow was still white. i made whitney go on a drive up the canyon with me. my grandparents were so nice to let me borrow their huge white van! i missed driving while i was in paris. the metro is fun, but public transportation starts to get annoying sometimes, and i was starting to want to be able to drive places when i wanted to go there...it was nice.

also, lucky whitney for being with me in pretty places when i have my camera. people will think i'm obsessed with you or something...

(yep...that's my jacket.)

also, look who greeted us on our way up to sundance. I don't think i've ever seen this many deer in utah ever:

8 months is way too long

at least that's what i thought when i got to utah on saturday night. on sunday morning, the sidewalks were built up with slush and water and snow and i had decided to wear some really great heels. good idea. i ended up almost completely soaking my favorite heels, getting roxanne's car stuck because i couldn't make it over a giant puddle, and staring at a puddle for a long time before sam, roxanne's sam, came and lifted me over the puddle as he had been doing with roxanne while we walked to and from the conference center. later that day, i walked around on 800 n for a long time trying to get to the sidewalk because it was slushy and puddly everywhere, and i seriously couldn't even get to the sidewalk. i don't know if i've ever made a worse fashion practicality decision...have i?

how???

don't worry! i still thought eight months was way too long without being here. the last time i saw the lady above, we were saying goodbye in dublin. the last time i saw roxanne, we were saying goodbye in rome. some people i had seen for the last time in london, and all of my other lovely friends, i hadn't seen since APRIL, beFORE i went to England! EIGHT months. there were a lot of glorious reunions. i wish that i had cute pictures of all of them! but alas, you can't really take good pictures of having fun conversations and laughing and eating on the couch of people's apartments, can you?

and this last week, all of my luggage, a large suitcase, two overly stuffed carry-on-sized bags, and one huge study abroad backpack barfed all over whitney's house. isn't she the greatest.

it's great to be back in the states!

salt lake parents.

Kent looking for a place to eat. Pam and I waiting for the verdict.

I can't remember, but I think the first time I met Kent and Pam, it was the fall of 2008 and we were at Jane's house--their house. I can't quite remember why. But I do remember that Pam ended up telling us stories in high school when Jane was low, and she gave me a couple of snickers candy bars for emergencies. I took these candy bars very seriously, and when Jane slept through classes whether on purpose or not, I would throw these chocolates at her, yelling, "Jane! Are you low?!" and some of the time she was, but sometimes she wasn't. Either way she said she wasn't low, so I just assumed she was low at all times unless she had just eaten. I was very angry to come back to the apartment one day and see that the plastic bag I had put the snickers in and labeled "for emergency use only" was gone. Along with the chocolate. Jane had gotten hungry.

Anyway. Jane's parents were in Paris this last week, where I took them to some of my favorite places.

surprise surprise...where did we end up, and what did we end up drinking. Kent doesn't even like hot chocolate that much, but he still drank some. And Pam and I finished off his portion.

h-core travelers.

We sat and talked about a lot a lot of different things, and we all got mad together at someone who I am irritated with, and we talked about relationships, and about that one time last winter when Pam promised Jane something if she did something, and then when I did that same something, that weekend I was at Pam and Kent's house and I was having a breakdown and I was feeling numb and Pam just talked and I listened while I sat at the kitchen bar and Jane and I exchanged lots of smiles while Pam cooked some onions that sizzled, and I watched them get clearer while I told her about another friend of mine who was struggling with other issues and she told me her experience with those issues. But the main point is that I could just forget, try to open my eyes wide enough to make a well for my tears to stay in, to try not to make my voice shake, I could just drink in all of the emotion, all of the experiences she had had, and nod my head, wanting to stay in that warm, red kitchen in Salt Lake where we were making pizza and never go back to my cold, white apartment where all I had to eat were eggs and cereal. And Kent would chime in from the table.

We did that again here in Paris, the topics jumping all over the place, but I talked as well, and we talked about Europe, and they both liked talking to people who were here, people who spoke English, why they were here, what they were doing, and we talked about Jane and ate, and ate some more, and Kent was calm, very calm as we shopped and as we ate, and polite and kind and easy. On friday when I was waiting for the RER, I got a phone call, and I heard Kent's voice saying "Bonjour!" to me, and I listened to his calm, friendly voice asking where I was, what I had done that day. I remembered when we went to the Orangerie and the Cluny Museum and he listened to my unoriginal ideas that came from sitting in those places for a long time, and when he waited for us while we shopped, or even waited in line to pay for something while we went across the street to another shop. We talked about where we would meet to go get lunch, and that Pam was currently shopping and then they would head to the Saint-Chapelle where I would meet them, and he told me he would pay for lunch. Such a sweet man.

Don't look at my face please.

I am skyping my mother, and she just said: "Emma, do you think anyone really cares about your blog?"

My mother. The one who birthed me. Who has given me my life and that is the last time I am ever mentioning her in my blog again.

boring/annoying post unless you went to england in the spring avec moi.

even though i really feel like i have no reason to be wanting to do anything except what i'm doing right now,

i do miss doing this tonight:

and this:

I miss not being embarrassed by using my study abroad backpack.

but mostly, I miss being with these people:

even this guy:

and i miss my guitar. even though this is chris bennion's guitar:

it just seems almost unreal that we were all in england together. ugh i hate myself, because i was trying to overcome nostalgia in that trip to england. it follows me. maybe i follow it...and maybe i'm just letting it smooth out any annoyance i had, all of the boring, problematic parts in england, but really, i don't think i am that much.

ps if you came to england with me and are not pictured here, please be not offended. it has only to do with facebook. blame it on them.

i expect to see all of your faces in december. i guess the rest of your bodies as well.