Things are pretty good right now. I had my first classes today (I was supposed to have a class yesterday, but due to a complete inability to understand time in this country, I missed it...it's one of my back-ups and it's on Monday morning, so I think I'm going to drop it anyway). If all goes as planned, I will be taking Rome and the World (Tuesday 9-10, 11-1), A Cultural History of the Middle Ages (Tuesday 10-11, Wednesday 2-4), Germany from 1945 to 1990 (Wednesday 4-5, Tuesday 2-4), and Louis XIV's France (Wednesday 6-7, Monday 2-4). This isn't set in stone because the first time is a CM (basically a lecture) and the second time is a TD (basically a discussion section), but you have two or three choices of TD and you request them at the first CM and they assign you. You may have noticed that if I get my first choices, I have one class on Mondays, four classes on Tuesdays, and three classes on Wednesdays...and nothing Thursdays or Fridays. And I only start class before noon on Tuesday. I am going to have a tough time getting back to five days of class a week at Trinity.
The first Rome class was good; the original professor seems to have decided on September 19 that he wanted to go on sabbatical in the US, so the new professor is a little bitter about that, but at least she articulates her bitterness slowly and clearly enough for me to understand. The Middle Ages class was pretty good, although the professor is kind of old and he swallows his words. But I met a few kids (I pretty much guess which people are going to be the nicest and start asking them questions because I don't ever have any idea what is going on) and at the moment I am enough of a novelty to be amusing to them. So far, so good.
My father was here again last night (he finally left the country yesterday--just kidding, Dad!) and we had a last dinner at a pretty funky restaurant that made a lot of flavor-infused foam. Among other things, I ate some bok choy, which I'm told is a vegetable...clearly I am growing as a person. It was all delicious and the waiter told me that if his English were as good as my French, he would be happy. No one has ever said that to me before because EVERYONE'S English is better than my French, so it was overall a pretty good night.
I went to Brittany and Normandy with my program this weekend, which was great because the weather was amazing. There were people swimming in the English Channel in St-Malo, the first town we went to. It was warm enough that we walked along the beach barefoot, which was a nice change from cold, rainy Paris. Sunday, we stopped at Mont St-Michel on the way home. I was there...six years ago, I guess, with my high school, but all I remember about it is that I was sick and miserable and the stone walls absorbed all the heat and it was March so there wasn't any heat anyway. As it turns out, it's a pretty cool town, so I'm glad I went back. The tide changes are huge, and it was low tide when we were there, so even from the top of this mountain, we couldn't even the see the water, but apparently it comes in at a rate of one meter per second. That's about a fifth as fast as our varsity eight is supposed to go, to put it in perspective.
Also, I made what may turn out to be the most important discovery I will make in France. They have an amazing chain of stores here called Picard, which sell only frozen food. Gross, right? No! It's amazing. They have every possible food item, frozen. It's divided into sections like a regular grocery store, so you can buy your fruits, vegetables, meat, "flying things" (I like that translation better than "fowl"), fish, shellfish, pasta, potato items, soups, desserts, quiches, snacks, and obviously ice cream...everything. I had fettucine carbonara for lunch, and I've been told that the chocolate cake is incredible, which is rare praise for something frozen in a country that eats everything fresh. That will have to wait for another day, though.
47.0
I think this is the most impressive-looking private home I took a picture of, although the other ones are pretty good too; you can judge for yourself at the same place (I'm not re-posting that URL--find it yourselves). I guess it's kind of weird that I'm posting a picture of some guy's house on the internet, but seriously, look at it.
Even though it's been a week since the last update, there hasn't been too much activity on this front because I have spent from Monday night until this morning in my bed wishing I were dead. I think my partner for the 10-minute presentation I had to give today on Nicolas Sarkozy (the only reason I was not in my bed today, as well) passed along the cold she had last week and it really knocked me out. Fortunately, the host sister who lives in London and whose room I now occupy seems to be a big John Grisham fan, so The Broker and half of The Runaway Jury, as well of both of Mina's CDs on repeat, got me out of the woods. However, I promptly lost all the weight I had gained, so I guess we're starting from scratch again. Sorry, team. Fortunately, my host mother seems determined to do her part, what with the four-course dinners we have every night (appetizer, main course, cheese course, dessert, bien sur!).
Last weekend was great because my friend Emily came from Florence, where she is studying with NYU, with a friend of hers! And my dad was here, so he took us all out to dinner. Quite lovely to spend time with people whose French is worse than mine, for a change (no offense). I also took a tour of the Marais, the oldest neighborhood in Paris, with my program. It's kind of fun to go on tours with them because one of our teachers gives them, and he speaks the slowest, most understandable French I have come into contact with, so not only do I understand him, but everyone around us thinks that we are little French kids and hops on the back of the tour! Obviously, as soon as one of us asks a question in broken French, the moochers figure out what's up. But we look good when we keep our mouths shut.
In other news, I have also recently become an avid supporter of the fleece vest. What a great layering item! Purdie, I feel like you should have my back on this one.
45.0
I don't mean to keep harping on this authorized/unauthorized grass thing, but I have procured further evidence of this madness.
Anyway, it has been a very good week. At one point (I don't remember what day), a bunch of the kids in my program and I went to the Jardin de Luxembourg and had a picnic on the authorized grass. Pretty soon after we arrived, a couple showed up and sat down next to us. They spread out their blanket and sat down for what we assumed to be a romantic picnic. As it turned out, the man's hair was a little too long for the woman to focus on her food, so they pulled out a towel and a pair of scissors and she gave him a quick haircut before they returned to their regularly-scheduled programming. Half an hour later, at 7:12 on the dot, the police started blowing their whistles and screaming at everyone because the park was closed. Good thing they were there to enforce the traditional 7:12 park-closing time.
There has also been a major breakthrough in the language department: I can now tell jokes in French. They are not always well-received (which I'm sure is a shock for anyone familiar with my unparalleled sense of humor in English), since I often lose something in translation, but it is a start. And my host parents are also starting to make jokes with me, which is great. Even when I have no idea what they are saying, they start to smile before the joke is over and I realize that I am supposed to laugh. So if nothing else, I am getting to be great at reading faces.
My host parents also took me to a huge antique show on Wednesday night. I grabbed my wallet, thinking that I would buy my dad a decanter if I saw a nice (and fairly cheap) one for Christmas. Well, as it turns out, they were selling Picassos there. Needless to say, my dad will have to settle for a card or an Eiffel Tower keychain or something.
Tonight I met up with some kids in my program by Notre Dame and we walked around the Latin Quarter. We meant for it to be a girls' night, but some of the boys showed up, so I guess we didn't communicate that too well. I got a crepe Nutella at the beginning of the night, and after we walked around for a few hours, I got another one just before we got on the Metro. But everyone else was having French fries and that meat-sicle stuff you get at falafel places, and I really wanted that too, so I got one and double-fisted dinner and dessert. It was almost 1:30 by this point, and the Metro closes around 1:45, which would have been fine except that I had to change trains and I ended up missing the last train at the connection point. So I wandered all over Creation (actually back and forth on the same block since I didn't know the neighboorhood and I was afraid to walk away from the lights by the Metro) until I saw someone getting out of a cab, and I deftly swooped in. The cabdriver thought I was Spanish (so I guess Amory and I are descended from the same stock), but other than that, the ride home was uneventful and way more comfortable than the Metro would have been.
Tomorrow we are going to the Marais, which is the Jewish Quarter. It doesn't make much sense to me that we are going there tomorrow, when everything will be closed, rather than Sunday, when everything will be open, but maybe they don't want us shopping on their time. Also my daddy is coming to see me!
Pictures of the haircut and more are at http://picasaweb.google.com/stephanie.apstein/Paris2008.
46.8
It has been kind of a tough weekend over here. I hope this does not become a recurring theme, since I am trying to stay positive, but I really do not speak any French whatsoever. I think the biggest thing I have learned so far is that good grades in French classes do not correlate in the slightest with an ability to speak this language. I can write papers, read books, order dinner, whatever, but I cannot carry on a conversation or watch TV.
Friday was fine: it was the birthday of one of the kids in my program, so we went to his (French) friend's apartment to celebrate. The Harvard lightweight rower and Yale coxswain who are also in my program and I talked about rowing for over an hour and then we all bumbled along in half English, half French with the kids there. The metro closes at around 1:30 here on the weekends, so it was an adventure trying to make it home (the last train leaves at 1:30, so even if you leave wherever you are at 1:00, if you have to change trains a few times, you can end up out of luck). I made it home fine, fortunately.
Last night was more difficult because my host parents had friends over. They invited me to eat with them, which I thought was strange at the time, but I accepted and found out that my conversational skills are poor at best. Over the course of the three-hour evening, I understood maybe a third of the conversation in the first hour, and 5 or 10% thereafter. It is so exhausting to try to understand French spoken by people who have had a few glasses of wine and are speaking rapid-fire that by the end of it, I just sat quietly and stared into space.
Then, tonight, I accidentally took a nap (I was reading and then all of a sudden I wasn't) and woke up about half an hour before we usually had dinner. I wandered into the living room and watched the news with my host dad for a little while until finally he asked what I was doing about dinner. I immediately came up with a story about meeting a friend at 9:00 and said I was just watching TV until I left. As it turns out, our host families only have to provide us with dinner five nights a week, so
I guess I am on my own for weekends. Of course, there was no friend to meet, so I wandered around the Latin Quarter and Notre Dame and had a crepe until I thought I had been gone long enough.
There have absolutely been highlights: we had a field trip Saturday morning to L'Institut du Monde Arabe, whose principal highlight is its roof, which overlooks the Seine and Notre Dame. Absolutely gorgeous. We also went to a boulangerie this morning and had a pastry tasting, which I obviously enjoyed. And my host dad and I were watching TV the other day (they are really big on American cop shows dubbed in French, but unfortunately I have been unable to find Law & Order as of yet) and I found that he loves rugby. I know nothing about rugby in English, so his attempts to explain the rules to me in French were somewhat over my head, but I was able to establish when things were going poorly because this older, immaculately dressed man whom I've never seen take off his shoes or his sport jacket would throw his hands in the air and scream, "MERDE!" Never a dull moment.
Anyway, we start to pick our classes tomorrow, so things can only improve, I hope. Plus my dad is coming on Saturday, as is one of my friends from New York. A few familiar faces will be welcomed.
46.6
Well, if nothing else, I am certainly getting some exercise here. I literally get lost at least once on my way to anywhere, so I finally bought a map yesterday and that has really cut down on the wandering. At one point, I got so lost after getting off the metro that I had to get back on it at another stop and go back and try again! I honestly don't even remember what I did yesterday, other than end up in an entirely different arrondissement than the one I was looking for. I guess I went to school and then came home and had dinner. Oh, and I tried to watch a movie with my host family and only made it through about a half hour (with approximately zero comprehension) before the effort was too much and I had to go to bed.
Today I built some time into my day for walking aimlessly, though: I didn't have class until 3:00 (this schedule ROCKS) and there is an incredible park down the street from my school, so I arrived an hour early so I could eat ice 
cream and explore. Every path in the Jardin de Luxembourg is lined with trees, so as pretty as it is now, it's going to be out of this world when the leaves change. The grass is also lush and green and perfect, in large part because it is illegal to stand or walk on it. There are police officers whose sole job is to blow their whistles at and then start walking menacingly toward offenders until they return to the designated pathways. There is one stretch of lawn that is not "interdit" (forbidden), but I'm pretty sure it's meant for kids and you need to be able to produce a child to sit on it. Today was warm and breezy and gorgeous, for only the second time in over a week, so the park--and especially that area--was packed. I also got to see the original model of the Statue of Liberty, which is on display there! You can totally tell who the Americans are because they all take pictures of themselves in front of it.
Then I went to my class, which is ostensibly French Language, and we talked about Marcel Proust's "Questionnaire," just like I have in every other French class ever. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically a survey that Proust used to hand out with questions that range from "What is your favorite color?" to "Who are your favorite authors?" to "What character flaw can you most tolerate?" It's also something that every American student of French has studied and no actual French student has studied, according to my host family, who laughed when I told them about it. A bunch of us walked around the Quartier Latin after class looking for some tea shop one of them had heard of. I really hope I end up taking my real classes at the Sorbonne, which is in that area, because it is so cool--it's like a college town in the middle of a big city. Really great location.
I finished tonight with a lovely stroll down the the Champs-Elysees with a new friend, Clare, who plays water polo at Princeton and understands what it is like to be in withdrawal from a team. We tried another milkshake, with similarly poor results. I will just have to keep trying. Or buy a blender and do it myself.
Also, I managed to put pictures up.
47.4
I think I figured out the picture thing, which is good because this place really defies description. On the right is my street (my building is the one in the middle, before the red awnings).
I am definitely having a good time here, but I may have underestimated the culture shock element. It's not stuff like 9:30 dinnertime and the catacomb of a metro and not having a shower curtain or door or anything to protect the rest of the bathroom that gets to me; it's more the fact that I am truly immersed in a language that I do not speak as well as I thought I did. We showed up at orientation today at 2:00 and were immediately bombarded with crucial information--all in French, of course. Then, just as we started to absorb what was going on, they passed out the placement test that determines how we spend the next three weeks and possibly the rest of the semester. After an hour of that, we were allowed to mingle--with the stipulation that we speak only French. Maybe I'm naive, but I had figured that CUPA could be kind of a refuge from the nonstop French, at least for the first few days as we get acclimated. Nope. By the time I left at 5:00, I was actually thinking in French, which certainly limited the thoughts I had. I also got lost four times on the way home and had to get back on the metro at one point because I had wandered so far from my house.
BUT I found the best store ever: Monoprix. It's like the French Target, but with a grocery store in the back. Seriously, I exited through the "boulangerie" (pastry shop). This is a great country.
Oh, and of the 27 people in this program, at least three of us are/were on our colleges' crew teams. How weird is that (and how weird is that I know the word for "rowing" in French so we could figure that out)?
47.4
I now officially live in Paris. I dropped my stuff off with my family this morning, went for a farewell tour around the city with Mom and Dad, and am now sitting in my room stealing wireless internet from a neighbor because I don't know the Dourdins' wireless key yet.
They're great and the house is great: my parents met them and they get along well and they have a 23-year-old daughter who is much cooler than I am but is still nice to me. She just finished working on a fashion show: they asked her to model, but that was too boring, so she ended up in some executive role as well. University in Paris is five years long and most people commute, so this is her last year here before she moves to New York with her boyfriend for six months. As I sad, way cooler than I am. I am trying to put up pictures of the house, but this Picasa thing is taking years to download and I may have to go to bed first.
I start orientation tomorrow at 2:00 p.m., which seems to me like a very civilized time for school to begin. I hope that keeps up. Obviously I Facebook stalked all the people on the email list for my program, and they seem interesting from their pictures, but I guess it's tough to express yourself in one square inch.
I would say that the worst thing about Paris is their total lack of understanding about what a frappe (or milkshake, as I guess everyone not from Boston calls it) is. I tried to order one today and despite the waiter's assurances that it would be creamy (if there's a direct translation for "thick," I don't know it), I received an expensive glass of very cold chocolate milk. Not quite what I was going for.
I was really excited to write this, but now that I look back on it, I really don't have too much to say. I promise my life will seem more interesting when I can accompany it with pictures.
46.8
I picked up my visa four hours before my plane left. We landed this morning and have pretty much done nothing but nap and eat since. I say we because my parents flew over with me to "help me settle in" aka bum around Paris for four days. They're weird, though, so we had to fly over in two separate planes ("So Marissa won't be an orphan if the plane goes down...although, on the other hand, we've just doubled her chances of losing a parent." Seriously.) My mom flew separately and, in a move that should surprise no one, my father got himself bumped up to business class while I enjoyed some exciting shenanigans in coach. The woman I was initially seated next to, who seemed to have decided that the best way around the no-smoking rule was to smoke a full pack just before boarding the plane, announced as soon as I arrived that she had a back problem and needed two seats to herself so that she could lie down, so could I please sit with the man in front of us, who had an empty seat next to him? You're all by now familiar with my non-confrontational demeanor, so I did as I was told and spent the next half-hour helping the man import his Windows Media files into iTunes. The seat next to my father remained empty for the duration of the flight.
Things improved dramatically once we got off the plane--we're staying in an apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower until I move in with my host family (pictures to come when I figure out the technology here) and they've rigged it so that it glows blue at night and blinks white every hour (the Eiffel Tower, not the apartment) and obviously I am eating well. Unfortunately, this whole city is absolutely frigid, so the six pairs of shorts I packed are looking like a pretty bad call right now.
I am much more jet-lagged than I thought I'd be, but I'm staying up to watch the first few innings of the Yankees-Devil Rays game online. We'll see how long this lasts.
I actually got an astonishing number of requests to do this, which kind of goes against my personal opinion that my life is not especially interesting. However, I will not be sending out mass emails with the address of this blog just in case I am right and it ends up being lame. I'm not promising anything.
The only real thing going on in my life right now is my introduction to French bureaucracy. As many of you know, getting my visa has been a nightmare, and the latest installment in that adventure is that all the computers are down at the French consulate in Boston and they are unable to process anything. So I may or may not be able to get my visa tomorrow on the way to the airport. If not...we'll see how good my French really is when I have to explain to the University of Paris why they should break the law and allow me to study there without a visa.
Other than that, not too much going on here: pretty excited for what will hopefully be my last dinner in the US (Legal Sea Food), getting ready to watch the Red Sox...really, nothing that should surprise anyone who knows me at all.
Oh, I should add that I really hate the tagline of this thing, but I promised at least four different people that I would use it, so for now...it stands. And Purdie wanted credit for suggesting it initially, but I refuse to give it to her.
46.8
I went to Brittany and Normandy with my program this weekend, which was great because the weather was amazing. There were people swimming in the English Channel in St-Malo, the first town we went to. It was warm enough that we walked along the beach barefoot, which was a nice change from cold, rainy Paris. Sunday, we stopped at Mont St-Michel on the way home. I was there...six years ago, I guess, with my high school, but all I remember about it is that I was sick and miserable and the stone walls absorbed all the heat and it was March so there wasn't any heat anyway. As it turns out, it's a pretty cool town, so I'm glad I went back. The tide changes are huge, and it was low tide when we were there, so even from the top of this mountain, we couldn't even the see the water, but apparently it comes in at a rate of one meter per second. That's about a fifth as fast as our varsity eight is supposed to go, to put it in perspective.
