Romance on the Road Part 1: Drink the Wine

I may have mentioned that I experienced some romance on my trip this year...Is there anything more cliche than summer romance? NOPE.  And unfortunately, although I possess an above average abhorrence for cliches, I, myself, have fallen prey to this particular one. This was the one thing everyone wanted to know about so here is the story of my travel romance.Let's start at the beginning. I left for Europe DETERMINED to have a good time. I wasn't going to think about exes, school, my new job, my future, NOTHING but having fun mattered. So when I started traipsing around Europe, I had many flirty encounters and some good conversations with a few guys but  as we were all travelers it was all harmless fun since we all change locations every couple of days. And then I got to Nice. I should've known France was trouble... apparently romance seeps out of the very PORES of that country....So how did I meet this guy?

WELL, I arrived in Nice in the early afternoon and decided to go shopping. I was a little cranky from the bus ride and needed a new purse anyway (but actually, mine broke on me in Genoa...), so when I finally sat down to eat at this kebab place, I was famished. About twenty minutes after I sit down and start eating, these two guys walk up. I heard them speaking English but as I was on the phone with a friend and inhaling my dinner, I didn't engage until they sat down and commented on what I was eating. At that time, my kebab was all over my face, so I obviously was able to assure them that it was good. They didn't seem like tools (like so many groups of guys can be) so, I tried to keep the conversation going after they opened it up. After covering most of the small talk points, we figured out we were all staying at the same hostel that runs a promotion every night for free wine (FREE FUCKING WINE), so we agreed to meet up for free wine night a little later and I left the restaurant.

Turns out free wine night was the PLACE TO BE. So TONS of people at the hostel were down there and the two guys and I ended up in a huge conversation with a bunch of other people.  We all had a quite a few drinks and I was definitely a little tipsy. Eventually, the more talkative of the two guys before, we'll call him Jack*, asked to use my restroom because my room was on the first floor and his was on the fifth. Me, being the skeptic, assumed this was a move to get me alone, but I liked him enough by then that I agreed. We went to my room and he used the restroom and then noticed that the window in my room opened onto a small balcony and then onto the roof. So of course he insisted that we go out to sit on the roof, and then we talked. We sat up there for close to an hour and just talked...but not like that superficial bullshit small talk, we really spoke on where we were in life as well as other deeper topics. That conversation is honestly probably where things started to shift a little bit for me because up until that point, all the interactions I had with guys were friendly, flirty, or just fun, but nothing that almost felt... meaningful.

We soon realized that we should rejoin our hostel friends downstairs, but when we returned, they had all left. We shrugged and figured they had gone to the Fanzone (a setup for soccer fans to watch the games of the EuroCup on huge screens) and decided to walk down there. Nope. Fanzone was completely empty. Alone again, the tension started to rise, so we continued our conversation on a walk down to the beach. We walked along the beach and discussed so many things I can't even remember all of them! We just walked and talked until we came to a small cove where we sat and looked for stars. It was a cloudy night so we ended up spotting more planes masquerading as stars than actual stars. But we had gotten closer and closer and the tension was starting to become difficult to ignore. So right around this point Jack pulls such a cheesy move: he says 'if I find another real star, I get a kiss'. Lo and behold, he found another star and I can't say I was mad to give him that kiss.

I can honestly say it only gets better from here so keep your eyes out for my next installment!