Nuit Blanche

This has been such a good weekend.

I made a friend at school (my host family and all the kids in my program are shocked, although I would like to think that has more to do with how fast it happened than with their opinions of my personality). She is in three out of my four classes, and I went out with her and some of her friends on Friday night. We were supposed to go to some club that I guess is a big deal here, but we had forgotten that it is Fashion Week and thus everything is invite-only, so we ended up just strolling along the Seine and sitting at a cafe. I am definitely learning a lot about the culture here from my host family, but it was really interesting to talk to kids my own age. They were shocked when I declined a cigarette and wanted to know why people didn't smoke in the U.S. I tried to explain that a) I spend a fair portion of my time around athletes who can't smoke for obvious reasons and b) we have some pretty aggressive ad campaigns. They certainly have better Surgeon General's warnings (they range from "smoking kills" to "smoking is dangerous to you and everyone around you"), though, so I guess that one is a toss-up. Then they wanted to know why our drinking age is 21 (it's 16 here for wine and beer and 18 for hard liquor) and I couldn't explain that either. They were also really interested in our university system, which has almost nothing in common with the one here. Also they told me I didn't have an American accent, which is the best compliment I have received since Natalie told me I was tall.

(Side note: French phone plans seem to charge by the character in "textos," as they're called here, so people have compensated by totally eliminating most vowels and also abbreviating almost all words. In addition, just as a fun game, they also sometimes use abbreviations you have to sound out--so "elle" would become "l," etc. So that's always an adventure.)

Saturday night was Nuit Blanche, which is an annual event in Paris where all the museums stay open all night and the major metro stations turn into performance spaces. They also open all the grassy areas that you can't usually sit on, so it's a blast. Another highlight was that I finally figured out the night setting on my camera. Of course, the metro stations don't stay open (typical French bureaucratic inability to communicate among departments), so the night was sadly cut short.

Today I woke up late and decided that I felt like going to the Louvre. So I did. What a terrific city, that I can just pop over to the most popular museum in the world on a whim. Sometimes I walk around here and have to remind myself that I live here now. It's incredible to be in awe all the time.

Additionally, I discovered a raspberry yogurt in drink form that is by no means delicious, but certainly palatable. Between this and the vegetables my host mother makes my host father and me eat (he doesn't like them either), I may become a healthy eater!

46.6