Well, I've almost been in Paris for a week. Technically, I've been in Paris for a work week since they consider their weeks Mon-Sun... which is odd... because if you buy a week long metro pass like i did on Tuesday, its only good through Sunday. Silly Frenchies.
Anyways. I'm really hating the time difference. 9 hours is so huge, its frustrating when I want to talk someone from home but I cant cause they would be asleep or at work/school. Its like if I want to talk to anyone I have to plan it at certain times here, but I don't want to spend my time here trying to plan out things based on when I'd be able to talk to my family or the important people from back home. I'm sure this feeling will pass once I get more use to being here, but for now its quite difficult.
So far I am definitely loving a lot of the people on the trip. I've adopted one girl as my petite sœur (little sister) for the trip, she's so adorable. The girls across and to the right of me are awesome, I've spent most of my time with them so far. We are more on the same page of yes we want to go out and have fun and party, but we're not trying to end up being the real life version of Taken. Especially for the first weekend.
So this week. I feel like we did a lot and yet I also feel like we did almost nothing. We had orientation everyday during the week which kinda sucked but also got us very familiar with the area in which our school is located, at least the English school. The French school we only had one orientation for and didn't even get taken into the campus, so that "tour" seemed quite pointless, but I'll figure it out. The study abroad company also provided a bus tour for us, which was kinda cool for the people who haven't been here before. But since I came in the summer of 2007 and had taken a bus tour then, I mostly wanted to sleep on the bus.
Its really cool to be walking down the road. Everything seems normal and like a normal life, and then you turn a corner and there is the Louvre, or the Notre-Dame cathedral, or the Eiffel Tower. Don't get me wrong, the architecture of even the normal buildings are not like the ones I'm use to in Seattle, but its easy to get use to those nice apartment buildings until you come to an area with a huge monument or ridiculously impressive church. That's when it hits me again: I'm living in Paris. For example, ma petite sœur and one of the guys on our trip and I went shopping. We were walking along and all of the sudden we were at the Louvre. So at that point we decided to just keep going down and walking to the Champs-Élysées. Once we got down there, we were close enough to the Arc de Triomphe so we just decided to walk there. We left at 11 am to go shopping and ended up walking all the way to the Arc de Tromphe by 5pm. My feet were definitely killing me by the time we made it back to our dorm!
Speaking of the dorm, my dorm is at Cité University or Cité U. There are tons of dorms here, all sectioned off by country. So you have our dorm, les Etats-Unis, but then next door is the Belgian house. Down the road a little bit is the Canadian dorm, and the Argentinian dorm. They've got a bunch of them, I'm not sure how many different buildings in total, for different countries. The cool thing about our dorm that Idk if they do with the others, is we actually have some diversity. all of us CEA girls live on the third floor, but a few of us went upstairs and met the people from floor 4 earlier in the week. There were lots of americans (And another guy from Seattle!!!), but there was also a girl from Greece, a girl originally from Paris, a girl from Belgium, and a guy from Switzerland. They all lived in the US dorm! I may be missing some people and where they are from, but those are the ones I met and talked to for a little bit. It was really cool to meet people from other countries, and I found it quite amusing that they were in the US dorm. I guess it made it a little more like America, since we are supposed to be known for having people from everywhere come to American to start a new life and everything.
Well, considering I slept in until noon I should probably go actually do something with my day. Sundays here in Paris (and i think Europe in general) are dead days. I may have to google and at least try to find some place to get some food or something, but it could be a very lazy boring day. That could also be exactly what I need today.
Au revoir! <3
