It really is a small world after all.

So something really crazy happened on the Metro today.
I got on to go to Sweet Briar, and just after I sat down, I hear, "Hey. Don't you go to Wooster?"
So when I looked up there were two Wooster students sitting right across from me! Tim, the one who recognized me, comes into the athletic training room all the time, which is how I know who he is, and he was with a girl who I've only seen on campus but don't really know. They're going to study in Spain this semester and had just come to Paris to sight see for a few days.
It was totally bizarre.

with the roar of cars/and the lulling of the cafe bars/the sweetly sleeping sweeping of the Seine

Yesterday was my first class with Sweet Briar. It was Atelier d'Ecriture, which is a writing class focusing on improving grammar and vocabulary, and getting rid of the anglaisismes (Englishisms) in our french. The professor had us translate some English sentences into French, and most of us tried to translate word for word, which led to incorrect translations.
I feel like I'm going to learn a lot in this class.

Tomorrow starts my Art History class, which I'm pretty excited about. We have a lecture class, and then in the evening we go to the Louvre (after closing hours!) for weekly "visites". And since we get a card to get into the Louvre free as art history students, we can get to a lot of other art museums free. Saturday I went to the Musée Rodin with a couple people and we got in free for being art history students. It's a pretty sweet deal.

ALSO on Saturday we discovered a spaghetti bar where you get free pizza with any drink you buy during happy hour. Since most of us don't get dinner with our families on Saturday night (we get 7 breakfasts and 6 dinners a week with the program), we decided to go there for dinner. Three euros for a glass of wine and then enough "free" pizza to fill us up. I love finding cheap ways to eat.

Today I went to Musée Marmottan Monet with some people. It was a really nice museum, and just the right size (not exhaustingly huge like the Louvre). After that three of us checked out Shakespeare and Company, which is the famous English bookstore and ex-pat hangout near Notre Dame. It was really neat, and luckily we are all people who can easily spend a lot of time in bookstores, so nobody got impatient for the others to finish looking. :)

Thinking with the Thinker at Musée Rodin:

"This is ridiculous." "This, Madame, is Versailles."

The trip to Versailles today was really fun.

During the morning we had a tour of the palace [in French] given by Sweet Briar's history prof here. Last time I was at Versailles [Spring of 2005] the Hall of Mirrors was only partially open, and now it's finished with it's renovation, so that was neat to finally see that.

After the tour we had a wonderful lunch at a restuarant in the Chateau's park, La Flottille, and then free time where we could wander around Versailles at our own pace and return to Paris whenever we felt like. A small group of us decided to visit Marie Antoinette's estate and the Grand Trianon, which I also hadn't seen on my last visit. We had a lot of fun just wandering around the grounds. It was amazing how huge the grounds were. They were really gorgeous, but so unnecessary.

Check out that backyard!:


A group of us after lunch:

D'accord then

So I've been in Paris for awhile now, but I decided to start this blog just now, to make it easier to tell people what's going on here.

So, here's a quick entry to get you guys up-to-date:

First of all, I'm living with a family in an appt in the 8th Arrondissement [district of Paris], which is the same one that has the Champs-Élysées and Arc de Triomphe, but I'm further up in the Arrondissment, by the Gare Saint-Lazare. My family is super nice, the dad is an amazing Cellist in an orchestra. I saw him perform once in a small concert, and it was really awesome. The mom doesn't speak English, but she loves to chat.

They have four children, but I've only met three. The youngest is Grégoire, he's 25 and a med student, so I never see him because he's either at the hospital or studying. Then there's Charlotte, who is 27 and I've only met her once. I don't know what she does, she doesn't live in the appt., but she's getting married soon (in March), so there are a lot of preparations going on for that. Pauline lives in her own appt in Paris, she's 30, but she's always here practicing the Violin, which she is super awesome at. And the oldest is Antoine, he's doing chemistry research somewhere, and I haven't met him.

As far as school goes, there are two weeks of orientation, and we're in our second week so I haven't even started classes yet. I'll let you know how those go when I do.
Orientation is ok. We have to take this methodologie classes where they tell us how the french universities work and how they're different from american ones. And there are a couple classes about contemporary France, like how our politics differ. And there are a bunch of outings around Paris. They've taken us to Notre Dame and the Palais de Justice, Montmartre, the Bibliothèque [Library] National, and on a boat tour. Tomorrow we're going to Versailles.

We also saw a ballet. It was at the Théâtre National de Chaillot, which is right by the Eiffel Tower. So a bunch of us went out to dinner before hand to this café where you could see it all lit up. The ballet itself was kind of modern, it was called Métamorphoses, and it was pretty strange. But it was still cool.

On free time I'm seeing stuff on my own with a few other students. On saturday I went to Père Lachaise with a few people to see the graves of Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and Jim Morrison. That was pretty cool. We also go out to cafés and bars.

So that's all I can really think of to put in here for right now.

My room in Paris:


Guardian of the Dead at Père Lachaise:


Typical: