Day 25: ICP & a play

Yesterday was my first day of my class at l'Instituie Catholique de Paris (ICP) and I was super nervous for it all day. I was talking to people who already had their first class at ICP and they kept saying things like they understood about 75% of what the teacher said, and how they thought that was good and I was getting really worried that my class would be too difficult for me and that it would be aweful. Also I was worried that the prof and the other students would make fun of my accent or just be really standoffish and rude. Well as it turns out I did have reason to worry but not about the class itself. Finding the actually class room was probably one of the most stressful and hardest things I have done since I got here. I had this lovely map printed out of where to go and had written directions down and got of the metro with 45 mins to find my classroom so I figured I was good. Wrong. First off, there are three ICP campuses, but they are all right next to eachother. I went to the one that my map said to go to and looked around and there were only 3 buildings: F, G, and H. My paper said my classroom was in building C so I said to myself, aha it must be in the other campus. So I walked around the main campus and coundn't find building C. I finally asked the information desk and they said it was in the third campus (which is on the same property as the main campus but you have to enter it through a different street). So I walked over to the third campus and found building C. Great! So than I looked and saw my paper said my classroom was on the 2nd floor room 23. I went up to the 2nd floor and there were classrooms 21, 22, 24, and 25. Hummmm. After wandering around this tiny floor trying to figure out where they hid classroom 23 I went back downstairs and asked a lady who was hanging up a flier on a buliton board. She gave me the "quoi? tu parle a moi" look and was very very rude, the first time this has happened to me when asking parisians questions in french. She basically told me she had no idea where my class was, and that she was locking up building C now so I had to get out. At this point I only had about 10 mins left before my class started and was starting to freak out about would I get there in time, what if I can't find it and miss the first day, will I have to drop it and take another IES class even though I would have already missed 3 days of that. I walked back to the information desk, and asked them where the class was for "The keys of Christianity". He gave me a blank stare and said there is no class by that name. At this point I was absolutly desparate and asked him if there was a class with a similar name at the same time. Turns out the name of my class was switched to "The basics of Chiristianity" between when i registered and yesterday and no one told me. Also my room was changed, and it was in building F where I had stared from. I ran over there and all the way up 4 flights of stairs and ended up getting to my class 5 mins early which was a miracle. And of course, right when the clock struck 7 (the time my class starts) a whole group of Parisians wandered in, knowing exacly what was going on and where they were supposed to be. I took this as a sign that I will never fully understand how Paris works, and I will always be the American. I think I am ok with this. Anyways, my class ended up being fabulous, since it is a review course for my major, I didn't learn anything but it was interesting to hear it from a different point of view. I had no trouble understanding the prof, which made me very happy I definatly got 100% of what he said. He, and the students in my class are much nicer that the norm of what I have heard from my friends, and I think it had something to to with the fact that it is a religion class and all the people in it are religious. I definatly think it will end up being my favorite and most interesting class so now I can't wait for next week!
This evening I went to the first play for a class I am taking called "Theater in Paris". We read 4 plays and go see them all (one we see twice, two different versions) and one that we don't read, and tonight was the play we finished discussing in class today called l'Europenne by David Lascot. Its a very new play, it opened in 2008 and it basically talks about the french peoples' point of view on the EU and what is going on in Europe right now so it was super interesting. It was also absolutly hillarious, much more in the production that in the actual script. It was a lot of fun, and afterwards David Lescot came out and talked to the few people who waited around for him, and he signed my copy of the play :) it was super interesting to talk to him, because he is also the director and he made some changes to the play since he origonally published it so it was really cool to get to pick his brain a bit about why he made those changes.

Day 22; Munich

This morning I got back from my trip to Munich, but I was so exhausted that I slept almost all day so I am only writing this now. We left bright and early Friday morning for Munich, we took the TGV which was lots of fun, its so much nicer than flying and we got to see the French country side which is absolutely gorgeous. When we got into Germany it was love at first sight for me, it is so cute and lively, for some reason I was expecting cold, gray and industrial. Anyways, we got into Munich around 1:30 in the afternoon, and although we were super hungry we went to our hotel first, which turned out to be a good idea because we got kinda lost (the metro in Munich is not quite as fabulous as the metro in Paris, the train we needed only came once every half an hour!). When we finally found the hotel we got ourselves checked in and everything, it was suprisingly nice for being the cheapest hotel we could find. After we droped off our stuff in the room, we grabbed some lunch at a market close by. We decided to get some cheese and bread and just make a lunch out of that, unfortunatly neither of us spoke much german, so we managed to buy one thing of cheese and one thing of butter (that looked like cheese). Definatly a nasty shock when I cut off a piece of the butter and tried that. It was pretty gross, so we basically just ended up eating the one cheese and a pretzel (which was apparently invented in Germany and they are obsessed with them). After lunch we went to the city square which was absolutly gorgeous, its such a quaint little area. Unfortunatly there were some right wing politicians with slogans a long the lines of down with Islam, and stop Islam. There were a bunch of protesters around talking to people, and I overheard some people explaining it in french and english. They were equating this party to the Nazis and saying that they need to get them out of germany. There were a whole lot of police/swat looking people around so we decided that it was probably not the best place to be and continued walking. We explored the city for a while which was quite fun, and than we went over to Oktoberfest. It was definatly not what I had expected, it was basically a huge state fair with tuns of rides, games, food, shops and the like. In order to get beer you have to go to "tents" which are basically beergardens where you can sit down and order a liter of beer (that is the only size). They are really hard to get into and to grab a table at but we finally managed and ordered ourselves two beers. They came in these giant stiens, which you weren't technically supposed to bring home with you, but we managed to take them as souveniers :) I was very suprised that I liked the beer, but I guess Germany is not a bad place to go to try it for the first time. I only drank about 1/5th of my stien, and my friend didn't drink much more of his so we gave the rest of our beer to these german kids our age who spoke english that happened to be sitting at the same table as us. They definatly were shocked that we weren't goinig to finish our beers and made fun of us a little bit, but of course they were more than happy to get beer for free. After Oktoberfest we went back to the hotel and slept like babies because we were both so tired. Saturday morning we woke up early and went over to Dachau (the first concentration camp in Germany, it was established in 1933 and ran until 1945). It was a very emotional and difficult experience of course; its right in this cute little normal town, and the landscapeing outside the camp was done so that it looked really nice and peaceful, definatly not at all how it felt inside the camp. I don't want to talk about it a whole lot because I don't want to think about it a whole lot, I feel like its an experience that is going to take a few years for me to fully internalize and react to, its just too hard to do that all at once. While I was tearing up almost the whole time, I managed not to cry until we went into the gas chambers and than the crematorium. Those were by far the worst places I have ever been in my life, even though the gas chamber was never used in Dachau. The crematorium was, and I personaly think it smelled really bad in there, I felt like I was going to throw up and had to go outside for air, although my friend said he didn't smell anything. I am glad that we went there, it was important but I don't plan on ever going back. I thing this trip to Germany and Dachau will make next weekend's trip to Normandy very interesting. We spent about 3 hours in Dachau and at the end wanted to get out and back to Munich as quick as possible. When we got back to the city we were very hungry, so we had lunch at this little outdoor market which was really yummy. I had schnitzel (I am sure I didn't spell that correctly) which was really good and very German. After that we decided to do some shopping for souveniers, walked around the city some more, and than went back to Oktoberfest. It was funny, on the metro to Oktoberfest we saw these people that we had met on Friday because they were speaking french in the metro and we were as well. We ended up hanging out with them at Oktoberfest for around 45 mins which was cool because one of them was German and so he knew what to do and how to do it. Anyways, after a while we left Oktoberfest and went to the train station to grab our night train back to Paris. We were in a compartment with a Parisian, a Colombian who spoke french, a drunk TGV conductor (french obviously), and a german (who didnt get on the train until about an hour after us). So we were speaking a combination of french and english and having many very interesting conversations. The TGV conductor drank about 5 beers in an hour, so he was getting quite drunk and it got really difficult for us to understand his french because he was slurring it a lot, which just made it all the more funny. He kept interrupting our converstations with random stories about himself that had absolutly no relevency to our topic of disscusion. It was definatly an entertaining night, but we didn't get much sleep and what sleep we did get wasn't very good since it was on the train, so when we got in Sunday afternoon we decided not to go to Orleans this weekend (because we don't need to buy tickets in advance with our eurails) but to go next weekend or someother time. It was definatly a fun weekend, but I am very happy to be back in Paris. It was frustraing not being able to speak the language with anyone and not really knowing how it was culturally appropriate to act so its nice being back here where I do speak the language and understand the culture (at least a little bit)!

Day 18: More classes

Last night I was too tired and stressed to post so this will again be for the past two days. Yesterday I had my other two classes at IES (translation and intro to french lit). Unfortunately the translation class is ridiculously hard, we did a worksheet in class and wern't allowed to use a dictonary, so there was a lot of random vocab that I didn't know (like "fast buck"). I think it will force my french vocab level to get a lot better though so that is good. My other class is super rediculously easy which will be nice, there are a lot of students in it who don't speak french very well so the teacher doesn't expect a whole lot from us it seems, at least I have one easy class. I signed up for my class at the Catholic Institue of Paris yesterday, I am taking a class called Keys to Christianity so it should be a lot of stuff that I have already covered in classes at Tulane which is good because it will be easier to do in french. Also yesterday a friend and I spent 2 hours trying to buy eurail passes to go to Munich this weekend and Italy in November. After going to 2 different train stations and getting pointed in the wrong direction by about 10 different people we finally found someone who knew what she was talking about and was able to sell us the eurail passes and book us seats on a train leaving for Munich friday morning and coming back to paris late saturday night, getting in on sunday morning. Since it gets in sunday morning we have all sunday to travel around france for free, so we are going to go to Orleans (since we both go to school in New Orleans). It was super stressful trying to find the eurails, but I am very happy and I can't believe that I am going to Germany in a day! We will be there for the start of Oktoberfest, which is supposedly one of the best times to visit :D I also found out that I got on the Normandy trip with IES so I will be going to Normandy the weekend after next and than the weekend after that I go to New York for my aunt's wedding, so the next 3 weekends I won't be in Paris :( but I get to see lots of cool places so thats ok. I spent today doing all of my homework for the weekend so that I won't have to worry about any of it in Germany. Since I spent about 5 hours strait doing homework when i was finished I majorly needed to walk around outside and relax so I found this cute park right across the street and walked around there and than sat and read my book for a while, which was a nice relaxing end to a very stressful 2 days.

Day 16: First day of real classes

Well, as you might have gathered from the title of this post, today was the first day of the real classes. My host family was shocked when I walked into the kitchen to get breakfast at 7:40 this morning, that is probably the earliest I have woken up since I have been here. I only had two classes today, but even that meant I was in class for 3 hours strait which surprisingly was not too bad. my first class was Theater in Paris, which seems like it will be really cool we read 4 plays and than go see all of them preformed which I am really excited about. I started reading the first play and it is really fascinating because it is a play about the European Union and how it is reshaping Europe from a french prospective, I feel like it is the first time that I have really gotten to see completely inside the french perspective. My second class is called Comic Strips and Society, and it is really different from any other class I have taken. It consists of analyzing comic strips (which are considered an intellectual art form in France) from both a literature perspective and an artistic perspective, I am super excited to get the book for that class and start reading. I got done at 12:15 so that was really nice, I had time to go buy my theater books and grab some lunch before I had a meeting at IES to check in about my homestay. When I got home I read the first play for a bit (it is called L'Europeenne) and than went to the kitchen to help my host mom prepare dinner, which was nice because even though I didn't help much we got the chance to talk more. This evening a friend and I tried to figure out how to get to Munich this weekend for Ocktoberfest and some sightseeing...quite frustrating until Nick (who I was complaining to on skype) found out where one can purchase a eurail pass in France, so we are going to go try to do that tomorrow. I have to say one thing that bugs me a lot about France is the lack of useful information they have avalible on the internet, apparently it is just a cultural thing for them, but I am definatly used to being able to find whatever I need on the internet. I found out that the postworkers are staring to strike tomorrow, which is kinda dissapointing because I put a bunch of postcards in the mail yesterday...oh well I guess they just will take forever to get to the USA. I feel like this is an important step to becoming more Parisian, experiencing a french strike! As my host mom said, it probably won't be my last.

Day 14: Rue Mouffetard

I had another fabulous day in Paris (I am beginning to think that it is impossible to have a bad day in Paris). Today I had a welcome lunch with IES which was really cool, we went to a kitchen and learned how to prepare our lunch and cooked it ourselves which was lots of fun, and it was really yummy. After that I went to the Senate with some friends because this is the one weekend in the year where it is open and free (along with a bunch of other things). On the way there we had to walk up this street where a Techno Parade was going by which was interesting so we watched that for a bit. My standards for parades is definatly pretty high after experiencing two Mardi Gras but this one was cool because the people (not on the floats but just the crowd) kept doing interesting things, like breating fire or dancing in fountains. It was really funny because the parade went past the Parthanon, La Sorbonne, Saint-Michel, and Notre Dame so it was all these old fabulously historic sights with this loud crazy young parade going by. Anyways we finally made it to the Senate which was really cool, it was so pretty inside. When we were waiting to get into the actual room where they hold the Senate the President of the Senate walked out and he literally walked right next to me which was pretty cool. After the Senate we went over to Rue Mouffetard, which is officially my favorite area of Paris (aside from walking along the seine). It is really vibrant and lively, and is also cheeper which is nice. There are a lot of french students there because it is near the Sorbonne and a lot of great shops and restaurants and a cute square. We did some shopping there and than ate dinner and got gelato (which they made into the shape of a rose) and at it in the square. It was a very nice finish to a great day, and I am definatly reminded of how wonderful it is to be in Paris! On a side note, today I finally decided to wear my comfy but not entirely stylish shoes, and my feet are much happier for it :)

Day 13: I love not having Friday classes!

Well again, this blog will be for the last two days because right after I turned off my computer last night I realized I hadn't bloged and was too tired to turn it back on. Yesterday was the last day of the "intensive" language class (otherwise known as rediculously easy language class even though it was the hardest one) and we had our "final' exam which took a whopping 15 mins. Needless to say I was really happy that it was so easy. After that I went to Rue Mouftard (which has just about the silliest name ever) where my friends and I had lunch at a very yummy restaurant that had curry chicken, I was quite happy. After that we took Rue Mouftard over to the Parthanon, there was some nice inexpensive shopping on the Rue so I finally found a cheap purse that I like that is big enough for me to put my school stuff in, and I am very happy because the previous purse I was using didn't have a zipper or anything at the top, it was just open so I was always paranoid that my stuff was going to get stolen without me noticing. Anyways, so we went in the Parthanon which was very cool, we saw the graves of such famous people as: Voltaire, Marie Curie, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Emilie Zola, etc which was really neat. Today was the first day of the three day weekend (I LOVE NOT HAVING CLASS ON FRIDAY!), and my friends and I took full advantage of it. We met at Saint-Michel and had lunch over there (near a mexican restaurant which made me really happy because everyone says you can't find mexican in Paris but clearly I did) which was super yummy. Than we went to Montmartre which was interesting. It was very touristy and the area is transitioning from being very trashy to being somewhat classy so its interesting. Like I said it is very touristy, so people have developed this trick of standing on the street with yarn for frendship bracelets and asking passer bys to hold the string for them so they can make the braclets, than right when they finish the quickly put it on you and make you pay 10 euro for it even if you don't want it, because they made it special for you and you have to buy it now blah blah blah. Thankfully we knew about this so when they hassled us we just kept saying no and walked away but I imagine many tourists fall for this trick. Anyways, we went to Sacre coeur which was fabulous of course. It was very beautiful and the view was stunning. After that we walked over to the Moulin Rouge (which was significantly less impressive that I had imagined) and on the way over there we walked through a small park where there were three americans playing jazz so we sat for a while and listened to it. It was really nice and reminded me a lot of New Orleans. After the Moulin Rouge we went to the Louvre, which is free for students on Fridays and Wednesdays after 6pm, so we got in for free which was really nice. Of course we only saw a very little bit of it, but we plan on coming back all the fridays that we are free to see more. One of the funniest things that we saw was a group of 10 construction workers putting up a portable stage right behind the louvre for something, they went about it in a very french way. It was entirely inefficient and uncoordinated which we found entirely amusing and we watched them for about 10 mins. After we left the Louvre night had fallen and I was absolutly struck with the beauty of Paris, and it reminded me of how happy I am to be here. I feel as though I had started to take the city for granted because I have been here for 2 weeks, but seeing it at dusk with the Eiffle tower in the background reminded me of how fantastic it is. We were planning on walking along the Seine to the Eiffle Tower and finding dinner along the way but that was expensive so we ended up just wandering around and finding a yummy pizza place where we shared a pizza. The cheese was brie which is AMAZING on pizza, they should definatly make pizzas like that in the USA. We have become very euopean in our eating habbits, we ate dinner for little over 3 hours (lunch was a little over 2 hours) so by the time we left it was time to take the metro back home. All in all it was a fabulous day in Paris, and I am very happy that I didn't have pesky classes to interfere with my exploring ;) The only downfall is my feet are quite sore right now so they are very content that I am laying in my bed writing this.

Day 10: I miss TOUR

I guess this blog post will be for today and yesterday since I forgot to post yesterday (oops!). Yesterday I had my meeting with my academic adviser. She told me that I was the first person out of everyone to sign up at IES for my classes (for which I was very proud) so I won't have any difficulty getting into them. She also recommended that I take a class at the Catholic Institute of Paris, so I am. Apparently however since religion is so taboo here, the only people who take religious studies classes are old people, so she said not to be shocked if everything in my class is of an older generation. Anyways, I spent today trying to decifer the nonsense that is the class postings at the Catholic Institute, and I think I have finally figured it out but I definatly appreciate and miss TOUR (Tulane's registrar system) a lot. Of course there are no classes that work well both time wise and subject wise so we will see what happens....I guess I need to talk to my advisor again. Right now it looks like I will either be taking Fundementals of Buddhism, The Keys to Christianity, or Introduction to Judaism. Anyways, today I went to L'Eglise Saint-Etienne-du-Mont which is a gorgous church dedicated to the Martyr Stephen (who is incedently one of my favorite New Testament persons), it had some stunning hand painted glass windows and also is home to the tomb of Sainte Genevieve (the patron saint of Paris). I took the bus home from L'Eglise Saint-Etienne which I like much better than the metro. I hate going underground to take the metro, and since my communte is about 30-40 mins generally it means being underground with nothing to see for a while so I was very happy to take the bus where, although it is slightly slower (45 mins) I got to see a lot of Paris. I recognized the names of a lot of the stops as metro stops on my normal metro route, so it was nice to actually see what those places look like. The buses are a lot nicer here than in the USA, and are set up differently so there is a lot less room to sit but tons of space to stand.

Day 7: La Saint Chappelle

Today (or actually it was yesterday because I was too tired to write this last night) I had a nice relaxing day. I had a long lunch in a restaurant close to my house which was quite good, it was a little annoying though because I was speaking french to them and they were speaking french to me until I pulled out my english book to read while I waited and than.....they spoke english to me. So I asked them to speak french to me and after that they said everything first in english and than in French. So I went to a used book store and bought a french book to read so I don't look like a tourist and don't get spoken to in english. Anyways, than I went to meet a friend at Notre Dame, but the line to get in was long and the line to go up was even longer so we decided to go to la Palais de la Justice instead. We went and waited in a much shorter line there and when we got to the front we realised it was a line to go to La Saint Chappelle, but since we both like to see churches we decided to do it anyways. What a good decision that was, I can honestly say La Saint Chappelle was the most beautiful church I have ever seen, it definatly look my breath away. Lots and lots of beautiful stained glass windows and beautiful painted ceilings. It was phenomanal. Anyways after that I bought my french book, than I came back home and had dinner with my family after which we watched Grand Torino, which I have already seen but it is such a great movie that I definatly wanted to see it again. It was kinda confusing though because we watched it in english with french subtitles and I was listening to the english and reading the french and the version's wern't matching up exactly so it was really confusing me and I decided I had to pay attention to only one. I didn't watch very much of the movie though, because I had to go call my mom and than talk to nick on skype so the weird two language thing wasn't a huge problem.

Day 6: Its the weekend!

Well I had a great day in Paris today, I had class for 2 hours today and after that I was free! I had lunch with some IES friends at a yummy cafe close to IES and than we went to the Catacombes (the entrance to which is right near IES). They were really interesting, very dark and cold and wet. It would be a great place to set up a haunted house. Anyways, the Catacombes is where a bunch of bones from church graves were moved to in the 1700s ( I believe), and its very interesting and pretty in its morbid way (sometimes the bones make designes, often times crosses, but there is a heart made out of skulls). We were in the Catacombes for about an hour and a half to two hours, there was lots of stuff to see and there were lots of interesting quotes engraved on the wall about death, it was very morbid but definatly something to reflect upon. I was irritated because my camara couldn't take good pictures (you can't use a flash), but my friend's camara did so I will post those on facebook or piccasa when I get them from him. When we exited the Catacombes we had no idea where we were because the entrance was definatly not in the same space, so we just wandered around for a while before we realised were were close to IES but we sill didn't know exactly where. We did see a pretty church though and decided to go in it, which was really nice because it was very peacefull inside which was a nice change and was very refreshing after the Catacombes. After the church we decided to go to le jardain de luxembourge which is a very beautiful garden near Saint-michel that the parisians love. We walked around there and sat down and read and people watched for a while, it was absolutly beautiful there. Than we walked to Saint-michel, on the way there we saw the Parthanon and La Sorbonne. It was really cool to see the "old paris" the buildings are even prettier than the rest of paris (which is saying something), and they have tons of beautiful historic buildings that we saw like Notre Dame and La Palais de la Justice. We crossed over le Seine and kept walking for a while, the area is really beautiful and old but it is also more touristy than other areas in a not so pleasant way, there are much more neon signs, pizza huts, Macdos (mac donalds), and even a KFC so it takes away from the old romantic atmoshpere. It was still nice though, we had a good dinner at a very american friendly restaurant there (the entire menu was both in french and english) and all the entrees came with sides of fries, so it was not as good as more french places, but it was a good price and still fairly tasty. We were of course speaking in french, and there was a british couple sitting at the table next to us that we ended up talking to at the end of the meal, and they thought that we were french-canadian which we found rather amusing. They were a very funny couple and we had a long converstaion with them, they asked us about who is going to visit us and I mentioned that my boyfriend is because he can fly for free, the husband decided that ment i must be dating superman, and started doing really big flying motions with his hands, it was quite funny and I am suspicious that they were a bit drunk (they had finished a bottle of wine between the two of them). After dinner I went back to my appartment and got over my fear of taking the metro when it is dark out. Anyways, it was a very good day filled with lots of adventures and I feel like I got to see much more of Paris. I can't wait until tomorrow when I get to see even more!

Day 5: la vie est belle!

Today I made a fabulous discovery! It was our first day actually at the IES center today, and it was on my way there that I discovered that there is an Indian food restaurant right across the street from IES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This of course made me quite excited because I was sure that there would be no Indian food in Paris, yum yum yum. I haven't gone there yet but I plan to very soon :) Well, so as I said today was the first day at IES and I liked the metro communte there much better, I only had to switch trains once instead of twice. The street that it is on (Rue Daguerre) is amazing, it is so vibrate and beautiful. There is basically an outdoor market at the end of it, and it is full of these cute little restaurants and chocholat shops. The area IES is in has a lot of good cheep(er) shopping, and I was quite excited because I finally found a place where they sell unbrellas. I had lunch at a yummy greek place that was fairly cheep, and had really good fallafal, definatly a place to go back to. We had our first day of language review classes, and I was really happy I was in the later group so I got to sleep in a bit. The class was fine, just a lot of easy grammar review. I was happy because I tested into the most advanced class which means that if I pass the next test at the end of the 5 classes (which basically just confirms where you are supposed to be I think) I don't have to take a grammar class and get to take a translation one intsead which seems much more interesting. I am really excited for the weekend, after class on friday I don't have any more IES stuff until Monday so I will get to see more of the city. Hum not much else intersting to report, I am still geting used to french cuisine and am asking a lot of "qu'est-ce que c'est?" at the dinner table. I like almost everything, but it is very different than what I am used to, for example tonight we had zuckinie (humm i dont really know how to spell that) soup and rice. Than after dinner we had cheese, bread, and plums. It was all really yummy but definatly now what I would eat at home. hum nothing else terribly interesting to report, my french is improving drasticly which is good, and I am definatly having more and more converstaions with random french people (someone stopped me on the metro today to ask for help figuring out which line to take and i was able to tell her no problem, which made me really happy that i could not only speak french but I knew the metro well enough by now to direct her). Well I can't think of anything else interesting to say so I guess I will leave it here!

Day 3: Orientation

Today was my first day really interacting with IES (the study abroad organization I am with). They were all very nice and made everyone feel very comfortable right away. I had to take the metro to get to the place where the orientation was happening, and I was pretty nervous about that because it was my first time taking the metro by myself and I knew it was going to be rush hour. It was very crowded by not at all bad, and I made it to the orientation with plenty of time to spare. Most of the students didn't know anyone else so it was easy to make friends because everyone was in the same boat. I met a few really nice people that I didn't know, and met up with a friend from Tulane. It feels nice to have friends in Paris that, even if I don't know them very well yet, I feel comfortable calling up and asking if they want to do something with me. Orientation was not terribly exciting, it was a lot of information about saftey, immigration, getting around Paris, and other practical aspects. Absolutly everything was done in French which for some reason I wasn't really expecting, so it was really my first full day interacting with people all day in French (since I didn't talk to anyone for an extended amount of time except for my host family yesterday). Thankfuly it wasn't too overwhelming and I understood everything, at this point it actually feels natural to be interacting in French. I was really plesently suprised that all the students were trying really hard to converse with eachother in french, which is good because it helped me get in the hang of just speaking french and not being embarrased if what I said wasn't perfect. It shocked me how many Tulane students are at IES, when we were eating lunch I was talking to some guys sitting next to me and they were from Tulane which was funny because I had never seen them before and apparently one of them lived in the same dorm as me last year only on the 3rd floor instead of the 4th. I did have one moment of extreem panic and homesickness when they did a lecture on safety. I am so used to Menlo Park being extreemly safe and I know how to be safe in New Orleans that it is really scary to think about being in a big city where I don't know all the risks. It definatly made me want to hop on a plane home that instant because I was sure that I would be mugged on the metro home that night, but I eventually calmed down and decided that they tell us this stuff not to frighten us, but to make us aware of our surrounings and aware of how to proactivly protect ourselves. Other than that everything went well, and I am excited for the rest of orientation which will hopefully be more interesting. This evening was an interesting one, the 11 year old son through a temper tandtrum at his mother because he didn't want to do his homework. It wasn't a bad temper tantrum, but he was definatly still in a bad mood at dinner, and when his father found out why things got really awkward. I guess his father considered it completely unacceptable that his son had thrown a tantrum when I was home to hear it, even though I said that I understand and that its no big deal. Anyways the son got punished, and I felt a little guilty because I knew the reson he was in so much trouble was because I was there to witness it. I still definatly have some jet lag to get rid of, I woke up at 5 am this morning and couldn't get back to sleep so now I am completely exhausted. I can't quite bring myself to go to bed at 8:45 pm though so I think I will study some before I go to sleep, I have my language placement test for IES tomorrow morning and I definatly need to review le subjonctive!

Target me manque

Well today was my first complete day in Paris! I slept very very well last night after hardly sleeping at all the night before on the plane. When I woke up I was dreading going out and speaking french for some reason, but after I laid in bed for a while my hunger got the better of me and I went out to find breakfast and got over my temporary fear of speaking French. After breakfast I went out to do some shopping, my host mom had given me some recommendations and directions to l'Arc de Triomphe which is only about a 10 min walk from the apartment. I decided that the shopping could wait and walked over to l'arc. In that 10 min walk I went from a normal Parisian feel to a completely tourist feel, which wasn't all bad but I definatly liked the feeling of Paris without the tourists. It was quite exciting to be able to walk around Paris and take things in without having to worry about making sure that I cram everything into a short vacation. I ended up walking aimlessly down les champs-elysees until I bought a map. I then was very tempted to walk over to either the Louvre or the Eiffle Tower, both of which were about 20-30 mins from where I was. I ended up just finding a bench on les champs-elysees and people watching which was very facinating. I decided to leave the major tourist attractions to this weekend when I have more time and don't have to worry about getting my shopping done. I had a very good lunch in a little sandwich shop, it was a great deal actually everything else around was advertising lunch for about 15 euros ( about $22) and this place had a sandwich + drink + dessert deal for only 8.50 euros so I was happy. As I walked back to the appartment after lunch I went to the streets that my host-mom had recomended for me. I guess I should have told her more explicetly what I was looking for because everything seemed to be food and shoe stores which is great, but not exactly what I needed. After several unsuccessful stops I started to miss target very very much, all the stores that looked promising that I went into seemed to have only shampoo and maybe really expensive soap but none had conditioner, nailpolish remover, or hair blowdriers. I was shocked with the ration of shampoo to conditioner and I guess maybe the french are really into shampoo....in any case I finally asked a lady who worked in one of the shops if they sold conditioner, she looked at me like I was crazy and said yes. Than she asked what kind of hair I have to which I replied....uh normal hair? Apparently there are different types. Anyways long story short it turns out that they had about 50 types of shampoo and only one type of conditioner so I bought that. The toiletries were rediculously expensive and I definatly wish that I had just brought them from home but c'est la vie. When I arrived home I realized I had absolutly nothing to do. I was hesetent to head back out since I had just gotten in and my feat hurt a little so I just hung out at home until the kids got back from school. The 11 year old boy got back first and he chatted with me for a bit and than invited me to play a game of darts with him. Having never played darts before I decided to try it. After getting a bullseye on my second throw I proceded to suck the rest of the 3 games that we played so that he won all of them except the first. He was very nice though, and just came in to give me a kiss goodnight which was very sweet. At dinner the girl (who is studying english at school) had a fun time asking me words in english and than asking how to spell them and how to use them, which I thought was really funny. Her favorites were "awesome" and "freaking cool". It was a little bit reassuring to see that her and her parents also struggle a bit with english and it reminded me that I am trying to speak a foreign language and that it is difficult for (almost) everyone. Well tomorrow is my first day of actual IES programs. My host-mom showed me a great web site that shows you the fastest way to get somewhere using the metro so that helped me plan my commute. I have no idea what I am doing for orientation, but hopefully it will be fun! At the very least it will be nice to meat the other students. A bientot!

Day 1: Arrival

Well I made it to Paris. My first flight was pretty awful, it left at 6:50pm California time and got to London at got in at 5am California time (1pm London time). I think I slept an hour total, I was very uncomfortable and too excited to sleep. I did watch many movies and sit there with my sleep mask on for a while though. The best thing about the flight was when we flew over Greenland and I looked out my window and saw all these glaciers and icebergs, it was really cool. My second flight was better than the first, and I got so excited when we started our descent into Paris and I could see the Iffle Tower. Somehow I didn't have to go through customs when I got to Paris (which was really nice) and so it was just a quick hop out to where my host family was waiting for me with a sign so they were easy to find. My host family consists of a husband who is 45 and works in a bank, a wife who is 38 and stays at home, a 16 year old son who goes to boarding school during the week but is home on the weekends, a almost 15 year old daughter, a 11 1/2 year old son, and a 1 year old son (who took his first steps today!). They are all very very nice, not at all how I expected. They picked me up from the airport (which they definatly didn't have to do), let me stay here a day early (technically I am not supposed to get here until tomorrow), and are very nice and considerate of all of my possible needs. They are Catholic and obviously very religious so I will probably end up going to church with them once or twice which will be an interesting and difference experience. They have a beautiful (but kinda small) flat that is a 10 min walk from l'arc de triomphe. I have my own room which is tiny, it is just a little bit bigger than my closet at home, but it is nice and quaint, and supprisingly all of my stuff fits in it with lots of room to spair. I think I might have actually packed exactly what I need and not overpacked for once. The language barrier is hard, more for me speaking than for understanding them because sometimes I just don't have the vocabulary to say exactly what I want, but I am bumbling along. I am happy that I can understand almost all of what they are staying, and they all speak english too some degree and the kids are very eager to practice with me. I must say I really am enjoying living in the french language because I like it so much! All though I am sure it will get annoying at some point. Well I am exausted after my sleepless night last night and feel like going to bed.....A bientot!