Travel Updates!

So, thus far, I've pretty much just stayed in Paris. I had a mini-expedition to Fontainebleau this past weekend to see the chateau that's out there, but it's only a half hour train ride away and still in the same "state" as Paris, which is called Ile-de-France.

That is all about to change.

This Thursday (tomorrow!) I depart for Germany to experience Oktoberfest! I'm going with two friends from Paris, Meghan and Jim, and then we're meeting my friend AJ, who is just starting his year abroad at Oxford. Together, will be staying at the oh so fabulous "Lette'm Sleep Hostel" in Nuremberg. Yes, that is actually how they spell their name... But in all seriousness, it looks like a pretty nice place as far as hostels go. We're staying in Nuremberg because even weeks/months ago when we started looking in to going to Oktoberfest, the hostels in Munich itself were outrageously expensive. So this way, we will get to experience two cities - we'll commute into Munich Friday and Saturday via rail. Fortunately, Bavaria has one of the best (and cheapest) regional train systems in Europe.

Then, next weekend, I will be meeting a bunch of friends in Barcelona! Heather, studying for the semester in Toledo, will be coming down to celebrate her birthday!! My friends Antoinette and Tina will also be there, as well as an entire group of Londoners (well, ND students studying in London, that is).

Finally, I already have plans to spend Halloween weekend in London. It sounds like nearly all of the ND students in Europe this semester are flocking to London to celebrate this holiday, which is generally not understood in most other countries. I only wish it coincided with the ND-USC football game, because I should definitely be able to see our game when I'm in London.

Well, that's all for now - I'm off to enjoy the wonders of having 7 hours of class in one day!

Deep Breaths

I don't think I have ever stared at my computer screen as intensely as I did just now. I swear I nearly went into cardiac arrest waiting for ESPN's GameCast page for the ND-Purdue game to refresh and tell me whether we converted on 4th and goal from the 2 with 29 seconds left when we were down by 4 points.

Tracking the game via GameCast, while better than nothing, is definitely an act in frustration. Basically you can just follow a play-by-play, so you have no idea what's happening with calls, injuries, coaching decisions, and an infinite amount of other intangibles.

And yet, I considered it worthwhile enough to cope with this frustration for 3.5 hours from 2:00 to 5:30am.

I also find myself rather hoarse... ok, don't worry, I wasn't actually yelling at my computer screen like a maniac. (I would never disrupt my Belgian neighbors with such shenanigans). On the contrary, I'm coming down with some kind of cold that has completely wiped out my voice. At first, I was concerned that I might have la grippe A, or, as we Americans call it, the swine flu. So, as is my custom, I searched the web to try to help self-diagnose myself.

I found this website particularly helpful: http://www.doihavetheswineflu.com/

Go Irish, beat Huskies!

General Life Updates

I've been slacking quite a bit on the blogging (as several of you have brought to my attention...) so here's a nice long post of bullet points to bring you up to speed:

• The Welcome Programme - international students had classes for a little over a week in groups of about 15 students. I was the only American in my group (probably because I was, by some error, placed at level 4 of 5 in French and we Americans are not so good with the foreign languages, what with nearly everyone speaking English and all). Anyway, I met some great people through this group - a couple of German girls, an Australian, a Canadian, a Polish girl, a Greek girl raised in London, an Italian boy who studies in Ireland, and the most adorable Chinese girl with Pippi Longstocking-style pigtails, as well as a few others.

• I felt very out of my league in this class - I just didn't have anywhere near the vocabulary of the other students, so I've changed my level of French to 3 for my semester-long course which I think will prove to be a very good decision.

• This was probably the first time I've ever felt exotic as an American. Being "the" American in the class was kind of intimidating but also really cool. Discussions in the class were always very interesting. Hearing a room full of students from all over Europe argue about whether there is a definable "European identity" as a result of the EU was fascinating.

• Almost all of the other students in my class were trilingual, which was part of what intimidates me. They all know their native language, be it Polish or German or Italian, plus French, and then for most of them, their English is about as good as my French - or better. When we would talk about this, they'd say how lucky I am to have it so easy since English is my native language. I tried to convey that I don't entirely agree with that sentiment. Yes, it certainly is much easier for me to converse with a larger number of people - and almost anywhere in the world for that matter. But it also comes with the unhappy consequence of being judged as less intelligent (and to a certain extent, I'd say that's a valid judgement). So I'm intimidated by them, but I'm starting to realize that they're somewhat intimidated by me. They all really want to improve their English, but are very self conscious about speaking it because they think they're terrible when they're not at all. At any rate, I'm very glad I've met this people - they've made my experience here much more interesting already.

On to the real classes, which really started this week:

• Monday 14:45-16:45, Espace Mondial lecture: This is shaping up to be my least favorite course - an opinion which my Polish friend shares. The course is trying to so hard to teach us everything, that it in fact seems as though it will likely teach us nothing. The class is in a huge lecture hall and while the professor is very nice and tries to crack jokes (which I can sometimes even recognize the humor of), two hours is way too long for me to focus enough to understand what he's saying from so far away. I think this Monday I'll sit near the front with a coffee and see how that goes.

• Monday 17:00-19:00, Histoire de l'Environnement XVIIe-XXe siecle: I think this class is going to be great! 1. Almost all of the readings are in English, so I'll at least know what's going on when I get to class, which will make it all that much easier to understand what's going on in class. 2. The professor is relatively young, so he's not yet a jaded snobby French man - always a plus. 3. There are a decent number of other foreign exchange students in the class (probably about 5 out of 22 or so), and the professor is very aware that we exist and may need him to slow down a bit. 4. I am still the only American in this class, which will make it that much easier for me to participate because, let's face it, the US has a very interesting and controversial role in environmental history. I have a feeling that the Russian boy and I will both get called out a fair bit this semester. 5. My expose, 10 minute oral presentation, is on Gary, Indiana. I kid you not. Specifically it's on a book called Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana. I wanted to pick Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, but someone had already picked it... bummer.

• Wednesday 14:45-15:45, La Vie Politique Francaise d'aujourd'hui Lecture: This lecture is only an hour because prior to coming to class we are expected to watch an hour-long presentation that is posted online. The online lecture is synchronized with a PowerPoint and downloadable documents that appear as they are mentioned by the professor. It's a really cool set-up. This class is entirely exchange students, and the professor really caters to us, which is much appreciated.

• Wednesday 17:00-19:00, Vie Politique, Conference (discussion session/tutorial): Again, given that this class is all exchange students, it seems like it will be manageable. My assignments include a short oral commentary on a political cartoon, an outline of a paper, a paper, and an expose (that lovely 10 minute presentation these Frenchies are so fond of) on "Les altermondialistes en France," which, fortunately, I have until December 16th to learn about...

• Wednesday 19:15 -21:15 (yes I have class until 9:15PM) Espace Mondial Conference (discussion group): Ok, this is the class that has me quaking in metaphorical boots. We did not introduce ourselves. The professor made one reference to there being 4 international students in the class and quickly moved on, speaking rapid French non-stop for two hours. I'd say I understood somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of what he was saying. Unfortunately, it seemed like I was always missing the most crucial part of what he was saying. For example, I understood that he was talking about our using English sources for our assignments, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out if he was in favor of this or against it. He seemed like the kind of Frenchman who might be against English sources, but once he started singing the praises of Foreign Affairs, I deduced that he thought it was a good idea for us to use some sources in English. My other main concern is that a significant portion of our grade for this class is based on maps. And were not just talking "name all the countries of the world" kind of maps - thanks to Sporcle.com, I'll be able to handle that. No, we're talking about creating maps that show "the role of multinational corporations" or "identity tensions in the post-Soviet world"or "the power of China." How do I map those?? Oh goodness. This will definitely be interesting. The good news is I only have to pick two out of ten. The bad news is they all seem equally impossible. Joy.

• Thursday 8:00-10:00 Architecture et Urbanisme: This class is probably going to win out as my favorite class of the semester. The professor is awesome, if slightly deaf. The class is about 50-50 foreigners to Frenchies. My expose is only 5 minutes instead of 10. And the other major assignment for the class consists of taking photographs which demonstrate major architectural principles. So aside from requiring me to get up at like 6:30 in the morning, this class is going to be great!

• Saturday 10:30-12:00, Basketball, Girls Beginner to Intermediate: Yes, you read that right. I have a 2 credit course in basketball. The credits obviously won't transfer for anything, but that suits me because I'll probably miss a decent number of sessions to travel. I have my first class tomorrow morning, so I'll let you know how that goes!

Coming soon to "Life Less Ordinary":

• ... and then I went to the Louvre
• "La Grippe A"
• French Footwear
• Am I in a library or Gringotts?
• My favorite metro advertisements

Get excited!

Laundry Day

Currently (when I wrote this anyway), I am sitting on the floor of our laundry room, which in the somewhat eerie basement of the FBL. It's not quite like Walsh Hall where you can leave items of clothing drying for a week and know they'll still be there (or at least just be in the donation bin if SJ's been through recently), so I'm sitting down here while my clothes wash and taking the opportunity to do some handwritten blogging.

I have some company - Jim happened to be down here too - he's enjoying the riveting read of Strunk & White (mostly because he left his novel in my purse - that's what you get for having other people lug your stuff around for you. A related side note for guys studying abroad - get over yourselves and just invest in the man purse. You'll be so much happier and you'll blend in better.) There's another guy down here too - probably just a few years older than us - I call him "the Whistler." He lives on my floor you see, and is always whistling. At an impressively loud volume, I might add.. His generally cheerful a nature is also demonstrated by his regularly flamboyant choice of pants. Today, he's sporting Hawaiian swimtrunks, which I'll led slide given that it's clearly his laundry day. However, I can find no excuse for the vertically striped rainbow shorts that he was wearing in our kitchen the other night...

Moving on, laundry here is very expensive. Our building gives us a pretty good deal, but that "good deal" is 4euro per washer with free drying - that's about triple what I pay in Walsh :( But, as I said, that's a lower price than all of the street places I've seen and the convenience definitely can't be beat.

Another cultural note on laundry. Dryer sheets do not exist outside of North America. They are not sold in France and no one will have any idea what you are talking about if you try to explain the concept to them. People I've met from Australia are likewise flabbergasted by the concept. Personally, I don't know how these people deal with static cling, but I guess that's just one less expense.

Football, the real kind

Last week I tried to see the ND home opener at a Canadian sports bar, but was thwarted by the inordinate number of "football" matches that were not football at all in the proper sense of the term.

So for this week's game against Michigan, I did my research much more carefully. There can be no mistakes when it comes to the ND-Michigan game.

I found a wonderful website called "Allomatch.com" that keeps track of all of the sports bars in Paris and what they will be showing each night. The bars get reviews based on how consisent they are and I found one showing the ND game with 4 stars, which means they've shown 500+ games with out making a mistake in their schedule. This bar also already indicated that at least 1 Michigan fan will be in attendance... pitty the fool.

Even this was not enough to fully convince me that I would be able to see this game (I was concerned because the bar's website said they had Dance nights on Saturdays), so I contacted them through their website and just received the following email back:

Hi Julie,

the website needs to be updated.

We will be showing Notre-Dame/Michigan this saturday.

See you then!

Wos Bar Team!

And they will indeed see me then, which is very, very soon!!

GO IRISH! BEAT WOLVERINES!!

"Is that a mummy on the bench across the street?" and other musings while wandering Paris

For the past week or so, I've spent a fair amount of time just wandering Paris on foot. I usually start from my school, Sciences Po, in the heart of the 7th arrondissement (district or neighborhood), pick a direction and go. Generally, I'm motivated by a need to find cheap food. The 7th is a gorgeous district, but super expensive. So I frequently walk for 20 minutes to find a place where I can just take a sandwich to go (à emporter).

I've discovered a wonderful hole-in-the wall panini and crepe stand that will probably keep me alive this year. Wedged in between a McDonald's (or simply "MacDo" as the French call it) and an internet cafe, this place, which is so small that I'm not even entirely sure it has a name, offers a panini and a drink for only 3 euro! This is an incredible price for anywhere in Paris, as a panini alone usually costs at least 4 euro. So, when any of you come to visit, expect at least one trip to "my panini place" - there's even a park across the street where we can sit and eat our wonderfully cheap sanwiches.

Once I receive my metro pass, my search for cheap food won't be quite so difficult, but I probably won't get that until the middle of this week at the earliest. The pass for students is called the Carte ImagineR; it gives you unlimited metro/bus/tram access for a year and costs about 300 euro. As expensive as that is, it's definitely my cheapest transportation option, and I've definitely been limiting my trips around the city while I'm still buying paper tickets for individual trips.

That said, I've still managed to see quite a bit of the city on foot, which is much more interesting anyway. Here are a couple of the amusing things I've walked past:

Is that a buckeye? Between this and seeing an OSU fan at the bar for the OSU-USC game, I'm beginning to feel like I never left Ohio...

Or maybe I'm actually in Egypt...

Chalk one more up for the "Fail" column

Soooo..... about the address I just gave you.... it was missing a very important piece. Use this address, please:

601 Fondation Biermans-Lapotre

9A Boulevard Jourdan

Cite Universitaire de Paris

Paris 75014

A Note on the Fonts

I'm sorry that the font changes kind of erratically in the last two post. I can't figure out why it's doing that - I think it has something to do with the fact that I copied and pasted those entries from Word because the internet wasn't working in my room, which unfortunately is a pretty frequent occurance in the FBL.

Success/Failure Ratio

I’m finding that my life abroad can easily be classified into two categories: success and failure. To take the examples from my earlier entry –

• Running away from my disgruntled cleaning lady: failure.

• Having an administrator think I wasn’t a foreign exchange student: success.

Now let’s consider today, shall we?

• Translating a tour of the Marais given in French to a Japanese Sciences-Po exchange student who understood English pretty well but knew not a word of French: success.

• Emailing my parents about money during my second week abroad: failure.

• Navigating a busy French post office to get a money order and send a letter without offending anyone: success.

• Locking my key in my room and having to pay 1 euro to retrieve it: EPIC failure.

Ideally, I’d like my Success/Failure ratio to stay above 1, but really, as long as it it’s above 0, I think I’ll be doing ok

A Tale of Two Fondations

I’ve only been here two weeks and I’ve already had two homes: the Fondation des États-Unis and the Fondation Biermans-Lapôtre. The first one, I’ve already told you about and shown you pictures of. Had I known I would only be staying there three nights, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to put up pictures of it. I also probably wouldn’t have unpacked nearly as much as I did…

When we arrived in France, we were all under the impression that we would just be staying a few nights in the FEU (sidebar - this acronym is kind of funny in French because “feu” is the French word for “fire” so I always have a mental image of flames when I talk about this building). We were originally supposed to move to FBL on September 1st, but we soon learned from a sign on the FBL’s front door (well, main door would be more precise because it’s actually on the side of the building) that it would be closed for continuing renovations until September 17th. This caused momentary panic, as we thought it meant we would be homeless from September 1st to the 17th because we only had reservations in the FEU for the first few nights. After a flurry of emails, we were assured that we would be allowed to stay in the FEU until the 17th.

Turns out all of that was unnecessary because the FBL actually reopened on September 1^st like it was supposed to, so we were told, on the 2^nd, that we could move in on the 2^nd. So after the frenzy of registering for classes, we repacked all of our belongings and moved them over to FBL.

Fortunately the FEU and FBL are right next to each other, so I could lug all 150 pounds of my belongs over in two loads. The fact that FBL has a fully functioning modern elevator was also a major plus, seeing as I now live on the 6^th floor…

So, my permanent address is:

601 Fondation Biermans-Lapôtre

Cité Universitaire de Paris

75014 Paris

So send me things! Just kidding, but if you do send me something and clearly mark your return address, you will most certainly receive at least a postcard from somewhere in Europe!

Here are a bunch of pictures of my new room, which is great! Less color than the last one, but a lot more space.

On the Importance of Verb Tenses

I recieved a note in my room yesterday, which, upon reading quickly, I decided said that my room had been cleaned that day. However, had I been more attentive to the future simple verb tense, or the day's date for that matter, I might have realized that the note was actually alerting me to the fact that my room was going to be cleaned today, September 8th. Sadly, I remained under the rather dense impression that they had already cleaned it but had done a kind of shabby job since I saw no visibile signs of its having been cleaned. I did however read the rest of the note which reminded me to straighten my room for the cleaning crew by making sure that I pick things up from the floor under my bed and desk. But, as I thought the cleaning had already been done, I figured it was unnecessary to do any such straightening until next week when I would be prepared for their cleaning schedule.

Imagine my surprise this morning then, to hear a knock on my door as I was groggily checking my email in my pajamas. And who was there to greet me but a rather surly "femme de chambre"... My French came surprisingly easily for my just-awoken self and I managed to ask if it was possible for her to return later. She made it quite clear that this was not possible - it was now or never, but she would give me a few minutes while she cleaned the room across the hall. So I scurried around my room to get dressed, grab some food to go, pick everything up off my floor and get the heck out of there before she came back. I made it, but didn't really have anywhere to go, because I still needed to shower and check my email before I started doing the things I had planned for the day. So I ended up just down the hall in my floor's kitchen, eating breakfast (bread and nutella, apple sauce, orange juice) and starting to write this blog entry. I'm pretty sure she saw me sitting down there and kiind of glared in my general direction... Hopefully this won't be a repeat occurance, but if cleaning day is always Tuesday, it may be because I don't have class on Tuesday and will probably want to sleep in.

Fortunately, my self confidence is already recovering after taking the serious blow of this mistranslation - a woman in the Administrative office expressed surprise when she saw on my form that I was an exchange student! And that was even after I had spoken several sentances of French!! whoo!

The moment you've all been waiting for

Here it is, another epically long post catching you up on roughly the past week of my Parisian life:

Let's start with last Tuesday, which was a day of major changes. First, Tuesday had the distinction of being the day that we could register for classes. All day Monday we had orientation sessions that were supposed to prepare us for that fateful moment, but turned out to do nothing of the sort. We spent six hours in a giant lecture hall with 700 other international students listening to presentations in English and French (sometimes the same presentation given in one language and then the other, which was rough for those of us who understand both langauges...). Also, this lecture hall was probably built in about 1940 and was therefore not comfortable at all. At any rate, we went into the registration process a little confused, but mostly feeling like we knew what was going on. How foolish that seems now....

So we all have extensive lists of courses we are willing to take because they told us to be prepared with multiple back ups, but it's a nightmare to coordinate the times of your back ups with your first choices and with each other, so we were all really just hoping we'd be able to get on and register for everything we wanted. That was not to be. We struggled with the online registration process, continually getting error messages for about 45 minutes without figuring out what we were doing wrong. Jim was on hold for at least 30 of those minutes trying to talk to tech support. We finally got it worked out (we hadn't selected something that they never told us we had to select if that makes any sense). So by the time we could actually sign up for classes, almost all of the electives were full and the timing of discussion sections was getting worse by the minute (we're talking 5:00pm Friday, here people - or actually, 17:00).

However, by some miracle, I've actually ended up with a decent course schedule! All of my classes are in French (I'm now wishing I were taking an English elective, but we'll see how this works out...). I have two large lecture courses (cours magistraux). Each one of those has a discussion section associated with it (a conférence) with about 20 students in it. Then I have two elective courses (which are both small, under 25 students, I think) and one French language course.

My cours magistraux are (translated to English): Contemporary French Political Life and the other one is literally called Global Space. I'm struggling to come up with a better translation of this course title, but basically it's a multidisciplinary approach to globalization - through history, economics, political science, geography, and athropology. It's the largest course offered at Sciences Po, and it's also an "e Cours" which means I can watch lectures online and such, but I'll tell you more about that once I'm actually using those features.

My electives are a little more fun because they're more specific. First, I'm taking a course called Architecture and Urbanism. I'm hoping to have it count for my Fine Art requirement at ND, but that's by no means a sure thing. At the very least, I'll having things to talk about with my ND Architecture friends when I see them in Rome!!

And finally, the class I'm most excited for : History of the Environment from the 17th to the 20th Century. I have high hopes for this class. :)

Of all of these courses only that last one was in my "ideal schedule" but the others all made my list of possibilities, so I didn't do too badly. I also didn't do too badly on the timing of my courses - I have no classes on Tuesday and no classes on Friday!! I only have one on Thursday, and it's from 8:00-10:00AM, which will be a struggle for me to make it to, but that means I can leave for weekend trips by about noon on Thursday, which will really make the travel costs of a weekend trip seem much more worthwhile.

That's all I have in me for now- I need to sleep and try to figure out some issue with my orientation class schedule, so information on the Welcome Program will have to wait.

À très bien tôt !

"United States: they bury their dead in the garden p.14"

This headline appears at the bottom of my Directmatin newspaper (one of the free papers offered in the metro every morning, the other popular one is :20, so named because you are supposed to be able to read it in twenty minutes, I believe). Another headline reads "Basketball: LeBron James welcomed as an idol at the Grand Palais." Meanwhile, my Directsoir features a picture of Whitney Houston with the title "Whitney Houston, The Return of a Giant." All of these headlines are in French, but even so, American news and culture is everywhere.

Speaking of seeing familiar things - this is a sign posted in the student union at Sciences Po:

And speaking of Notre Dame, I wandered down to Ile de la Cite today, and look what I found:

Well, I have much more to tell you all - I registered for classes, moved into a new building, and started orientation classes all in the past three days! Unfortunately for you, I still have homework to do tonight for my methodology and language classes (well really, who am I kidding, that's unfortunate for me too...). At any rate, a detailed update will have to wait until tomorrow afternoon, by which time, with any luck, I will have a cell phone and maybe even my student ID!!

A Post in Pictures

Here's 10,000 words worth of pictures! I'm working on putting together an album to email to you all, but for now these will have to do.

First: My with all of my worldly possessions for the next year! And to think that I had been considering transporting all of that via metro... that cab might have been the best 30euro I've spent so far.

Here are a few pictures of my first room (the one I was describing in the last post - see next post for explanation of why it was my first room). The closets and bathroom are in the wall on the right. On the left you can see part of the desk and the bed is behind the door.

This is the view from my window, complete with hanging ivy :)

Here is the unreasonably small bathroom. Shower, sink, toilet - all right there in 10 square feet. An engineering marvel, really.

This was in the Tuileries Garden by the Louvre:

Here's the fondue restaurant:

Tour Eiffel!!

Along the Seine at night:

Today was a really eventful day (class registration and moving to my new and permanent home), but I have the whole afternoon off tomorrow, so the post may wait until then.