Wednesday, February 4, 2009

I would like to begin with a formal apology to both my travel companions and the readers of my blog. I’m sorry if my entire trip/blog turns into an enormous exaltation of this city, but it’s day three and I’m pretty sure that my amazement isn’t going to die down any time soon.

Yesterday, I attended my first of many orientation activities at UC Paris. I think the only information I got from 3 ½ hour meeting that I couldn’t have figured out myself was that Parisian men often take eye contact and smiles the wrong way—an observation which now has my struggling against my nature and attempting to appear disinterested and unhappy on the metro. However, it was great to meet the other UC students who will be studying with me at Sciences Po.

After the meeting, a group of us--Rafaella, Melissa, Tami, Andrea, Neema, and myself—decided to meet up for dinner and ended up at a small Italian place looking out on the Seine with Rafaella and Melissa’s friend Allie, who has been at Sciences Po for a semester already. We were all incredibly charmed by our waiter, a quintessential “little old man” who spoke in an extremely heavy Italian accent. Next, the seven of us headed off to an Irish pub and chatted over Kilkenny. We had a lot of fun and I can already tell that this is a really solid group!

Coincidentally, the UC center had given another girl (Alisa) and me Allie’s e-mail address prior to my arrival in Paris and we had arranged to meet for coffee today. So, Allie, Alisa, and I met up this afternoon in the 5th arrondissement for some cafés, and Melissa and Rafaella joined us. It’s particularly fun hanging out with a group of semi-bilingual students because throughout the day we occasionally switched to speaking in French. The highlights of this rendez-vous were discovering the world’s most delicious banana and Nutella crêpes (I think it was the thinness of the bananas that made these truly special), all of the charming architecture, parks, buildings, etc. that we constantly came across (see wall art above), and just enough falling snow to totally excite me.

After parting with the group, I decided to get (quite literally) lost in Paris, with Metro card in hand. I found my way through the first, fourth, eighth, and seventeenth arrondissements, with a few metro rides in between. Some highlights of my journey were passing by Saint-Eustache cathedral in the first, the store and gallery windows in the 8th (Christian Louboutin’s Marie Antoinette emerging from an Easter egg was a particularly theatrical display), and the Parc Monceau, also in the eighth.

As I concluded the evening sipping some wine at a café near my house, I reflected on my day and came to the realization that Paris is truly a magical city—each time I began to lose my way over the course of my four-hour long exploration, I would come across a Metro station, landmark, or, as in one case, even a randomly placed map. I can see why existentialism has many of its roots here! Assuredly, this trip will be full of magic and wonder, and I’m so excited for it all.

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