One week flown by

Hello again! If any of you were disapointed by the lack of blogs this past week, allow me to explain: I am only going to update this blog once a week. This is to limit my extensive use of English, keep blogs interesting, and make the blog easier to maintain.


This week has been amazing. I'm rapidly getting to know the city around me in small doses and feeling like I can truly integrate myself into this culture. I live on the Île Saint-Louis, which is a small island in the Seine south of Île-de-la-cité, where Notre Dame is located. Paris is divided into 20 "arrondissements"or basically legal neighborhoods. But then there are smaller unofficial neighborhoods within that. Generally the nicer richer areas are in the center of the city, and you move your way out it becomes more immigrants, more students, etc.

Since we started at IFE this week, I've been spending time with a few other girls (and one boy) exploring the neighborhoods together. The metro is really the first thing to master. Not all the lines intersect, of course, so figuring out where to hop on and off has been interesting. It's not always convenient. It's for this reason that I walk 20 minutes to school every day. There is a metro stop really close to me, but it doesn't connect with the metro stop by IFE. I could walk to a further metro stop to go to IFE, but that would be a 10 minute walk, then a 5 minute metro ride to a stop that takes me 15 minutes to walk to, followed by a 5 minute walk that I would have had to do anyway. All in all I'm going to choose exercise over the metro fair.

Wine is ridiculously cheap here (the 2 Euro bottles are even good!) so we've been having a lot of picnics in parks and along the Seine. I'm not always going to have to cook my own meals, but the kitchen in my dorm is closed right now. We've also been going to cafes, buying fruit, making gourmet pasta (because when you're in the country of gourmets, the ingredients are not nearly as expensive). Most of our explorations, now that I think about it, have something to do with food or drink. I'm going to have to start walking more.

Classes are interesting, we're learning about contemporary French History (so the french revolution til now) and in the afternoons we have work on our speaking ability. My class has 3 oral presentations that we'll have to do, all having to do with modern french events. We also do the occasional visit to places in Paris. Last Thursday we went to the BNF- Bibliotèque National de la France (French national library). It it a very large building that has millions of books, and a very complicated system for retrieving them (all mechanical). I'm probably going to live there when it comes time to write my thesis paper on my internship.
This week we'll be going to the National assembly and the Shoah memorial.

See you next week!