#2 - Nikki Smith

5. L'amour En France

            As our plane landed, I couldn't help but glue my eyes to the outside window. There were so many new sights and buildings, and I wanted to see them all. There were new buildings to explore and new accomplishments to be made.

I didn't think this was going to be our permanent home, but I did want to start minimizing the number of times I took money or food from places in the area here for two main reasons. First, I didn't want any descriptions of criminals or other newsworthy information to follow us. If either of us were ever spotted or described along the way, they would describe two random children, or one since I'd likely be working alone, who broke and entered buildings, stole money, and stole food. I don't know how common those descriptions are, but there's a chance that information could follow us even to different countries if it wasn't a common occurrence. Second, I don't know how long we will stay in this city or country. The longer we stayed in the same area while stealing items, we would have a greater chance of being caught.

That meant we eventually had to earn money and food the normal way. I had some money to hold us off for a few days, but what about after that? We would eventually need a steady source of risk-free income.

I had a "to-do" list right away when we got off the plane. I had taught Nolan as much language as I could teach on the plane. He simply does not pick up language as quickly as I do, so I couldn't teach him everything that I knew while on the plane. That was the first thing to do. My second item was to find a public library and learn the language.

We first needed to find the airport currency exchange center in this airport. Unfortunately, it was costly to exchange money. Russian rubles do not work in France. But I could purchase an exchange of rubles for what's called the "Euro," which was the official currency of France.

There was a thing the "exchange rate." The value of one ruble wasn't the same as the value of one Euro. Because of this difference in value, I would receive a different amount of Euros. In fact, for every 25 rubles I had, I only received one Euro. It was certainly odd, but I could still purchase a similar number and value of items with that rate in mind. Either way, I didn't have a lot of money to work with from here on out.

"What's the game plan?" Nolan asked as we left the airport.

I playfully retorted, "You just never live life just one moment at a time, do you?" I certainly made that statement knowing how much irony there was in it. I planned as much as I could, so I never lived life just one moment at a time. Still, he could just live life freely while I do all the planning.

I think it came off as a little too aggressive instead of playful. Nolan looked like he was taken aback by my response. He didn't actually answer my question, but he instead asked, "How are we going to communicate here without either of us knowing much of the language?"

We were still speaking in Russian, even though everything was written in French and everyone else was speaking French. "The only thing I need is access to a computer, and all our worries will be gone," I said with a smile directed to him.

He either doesn't notice my non-verbal expressions, or he just ignores them. Without much emotion, he simply said, "Well, we don't have access to one right now." I didn't blame him or anything. For all I know, he could still secretly hate me. I was going to just keep playing around with him. I kind of hated to think about it, but he might not have the cognitive capacity to pick up my flirtatiousness. At least right now. He is still young – well, I am too – and supposedly brains continue to develop and learn well past age twenty. I really don't know what that means for us, though. We were both going to be exceptions to that rule since we were created in a lab.