La Vie à Paris

I had really hoped that putting this blog up and having actual people read it would guilt me into updating it more often, but apparently that didn't happen! Oh well, c'est la vie. So as of Monday I've been in Paris for a month. In that time I've gone to Normandy, Versailles, Oktoberfest, and Giverny and have spent every free minute exploring the city. I've decided the best way to cover it all is to split my writing up into three sections: everyday life, weekend adventures, and trips. So here is the first installment of what it's like living with a host family and studying in Paris....

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." - Ernest Hemingway

 

Home Life



I took the train from Frankfurt to Paris and arrived in my new neighborhood in the late afternoon of Monday, September 9th. My host mom is a retired widow who lives on the top floor of a beautiful old apartment building in the 17th arrondissement. It's pretty close to Montmartre and the Arc de Triomphe, but across the city from where I go to school, so the morning metro commute is about 45 minutes. The apartment is huge, especially by Paris standards. My roommate Mollie, who is one of my sorority sisters back at Richmond, and I each have our own bedroom. We have dinner with our host mom 3 nights a week and she is a very good cook! I was a little worried about living in someone else's house, and it is still a little uncomfortable at times, but Madame Rolloy is super nice and we have a lot of independance. She only speaks French and is 80 years old, but is super active and has a great sense of humour. Her favorite little joke is teasing us about the few times we haven't drunk wine at dinner: she says "oh, you must be very sick then!" Her husband passed away a while ago and her granddaughter is grown and has children and a house in the suburbs, which Madame visits a lot.

 Our neighborhood

 

Our building

 

One of our living rooms. Our host mom spends her days sewing dresses in here for children in the local Catholic orphanage and playing bridge with friends all around the city. She's the best.

 

The elevator in our building, which is the coolest and oldest I have ever seen. You have to physically open the metal door, then pull the wooden grate across. It can squeeze in 3 people maximum.

 

This is our shower.

 

As much as I love our apartment and host mom, there have definitely been some adjustments to the French lifestyle. For instance, take another look at that shower. Notice how the curtain doesn't move, much less swing around the front, and how there is no hook to hang the faucet on. So why not just take a bath? Because there is no plug. I have yet to figure out a better way than sitting down in the freezing empty tub and pouring water on myself. :(

 

However, I think the thing that has taken the most getting used to is simply living in a big city. In Boulder and Richmond I've never really dealt with basic things like morning commutes, crowds, being lost, and even meeting up with people who live on the other side. It's both exciting and overwhelming.

 

Exploring the City

My friends and I usually get out of class around 2pm and spend the afternoon doing stuff around town. Mollie studied here one summer in high school and loves desserts so most of our outings involve going to famous sweet places, like La Durée and Pierre Hermès macarons and Bertillon ice cream, but we like to go shopping and visit the gardens too.

 

We've decided Pierre Hermès is underrated and better than the more famous La Durée.

 

Le Bon Marché is one of the huge luxury department stores. Its name means cheap, but that's a little Parisian joke.

 

Les Jardins du Luxembourg

Mollie and our friend Elizabeth met Dakota Fanning in the Tuleries Garden during Paris Fashion Week a few weeks ago!

 

Not Bertillon ice cream, but gelato from this wonderful Italian chain called Amorino.

 

I've picnicked under the Eiffel Tower twice!

 

 

We go home for dinner at 8, and meet back up again at night. Unfortunately the metro closes at 12:30 on weekdays and 1:30 on weekends and the night busses are a little confusing, so it's taken a while to figure out the timing of our nights. I've recently started taking the bus instead of the metro more often during the day which is awesome because not only does it help me figure out this huge city, but it's like a free tour every day! If I take the bus home from school we casually pass Les Galeries Lafayette, the Eiffel Tower, the Panthéon, the Madeleine Church, les Invalides, and the Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysées. It's so amazing here; for the first few weeks I would alternate between feeling like "omg I'm in Paris!" and "of course I'm in Paris, I've lived here forever."

 

I wish I could post some People of Paris pictures, but seeing as people glare if you are eating a croissant (or anything) in public, I don't think I could get away with taking photos of them. My sociology teacher says the most popular Parisian sport is to sit at a café for hours, smoking, drinking coffee, and judging people. Seems pretty accurate to me. Everybody here is so fashionable and beautiful, but they definitely have some hilarious habits. Lots of people carry a purse and a rolly backpack, I've seen multiple professional people on Razr scooters, and everybody has a tiny dog! They also do this thing where they open the door and get off the metro before it comes to a complete stop, which I think looks really cool and have obviously tried to copy, but one time I smacked into a wall because the train was still moving too fast, so I haven't done it since...

 

School

I'm in a program called IES Paris with all Americans from different schools around the states. Our teachers are French and they are all very nice and intelligent, many with jobs at the Sorbonne or published books. All of our classes are in French, but the teachers realize that everyone is at different levels, so it's not too bad, even though I really had to concentrate at the beginning. When we first started, if I tuned out one sentence I would be lost for five minutes, but it's definitely improving. I'm taking two sociology classes, one on contemporary France and one on immigrants in Paris, a course on the history of photography, and a English-French translation grammar class.

 

I am also taking an outside course at a French university called the Institut Catholique de Paris with real French students. It's pretty funny to see how different our standards are. The French kids literally talk through the entire class (it's 3 hours long, once a week) and last week one guy was straight up watching a movie. The professor ambled by and said "pause it, you wouldn't want to miss anything because of me." Any of my American teachers would have hit the ceiling if they'd seen that. I really can't figure out how anybody learns anything, since they don't even have textbooks. It's a developing economies class so it's definitely a challenge, but two of the guys in my American program are taking it too so that makes it better and we can whisper about words we don't understand. We didn't have internet for a while so we couldn't look up any vocabulary. The teacher kept saying "croissance" in Africa. Apparently he wasn't talking about Africa's obsession with delicious flaky pastries, but rather their levels of economic growth. So yeah, it's a little rough. After the 4th week we finally broke down and asked somebody for the notes and he was all, yeah totally and I'll add you to the Facebook group too. So now the weird foreign kids are in the Facebook group and it's great; actually, from what I can tell, two kids in the entire lecture pay attention and take really good notes for everyone else. Socialism!