Slowly but surely, I am captioning all of my winter break photos. Now up: Croatia, Switzerland, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg and Trier. Coming (relatively) soon: France (Paris, Rouen, Avignon, Nimes, Nice, Monaco, Marseilles, Chartres) and Spain. That'll catch you up on all of my Christmas break travels, but Christmas break ended a month ago, so what have I been up to since then you may well be wondering?
Here's an overview:
-I've hosted a lot of visitors in February: 5 kids from the Dublin program [my friend Kaitlyn and some new friends :) ], another friend Annapatrice (Dublin) and her friend Emily (Athens), and two friends from the Innsbruck program, Maria and Kate. Having all of them here has been awesome, but it's definitely made me feel like I'm still on vacation and not actually starting a new academic semester, which is a bit of a problem.
-Also contributing to the feeling that I'm still on vacation would be the fact that I've already taken another trip this semester. At the end of last week I went to Brussels with a few other students from my European Energy Policy course to attend the annual Energy Conference put on by a prominent French think tank, IFRI. The conference was awesome - they really pulled in a wide range of speakers: an economist from BP, a statistician from the IEA, a former Secretary General of OPEC, a representative of Deutsche Bank, and the chief US and Indian negotiators from the Copenhagen summit, to name a few. So I learned a lot, but also had a lot of fun with kids from my class. Here's a picture of all of us at the conference - we even got to sit at official tables with microphones and water glasses and translation headphones!
-I'm going to church regularly now at the American Church in Paris. I went one Sunday on a whim to check it out on my own. To my utter amazement, just after I sat down on a side pew because I was late (shocker), my phone started vibrating in my pocket. Now, I don't get very many Sunday morning text messages, so I was slightly perplexed to begin with, but was fairly dumbfounded when I actually opened the message and saw that it said "hey come sit in the back row". I scrolled down and saw that the message was from my friend from SciencesPo (originally UChicago). Weird study abroad coincidence #27 (approximately). Anyway, the rest is history - it's a pretty cool interdenominational protestant church and it's great to sing some hymns and hear a sermon in English. They also have free coffee after the service and that basically sealed the deal for me ;)
-DANI CASTELLI IS IN PARIS FOR THE SEMESTER! This merits all caps and an exclamation point because I really am that excited about it. Dani is one of my best friends from high school and it's amazing to get to spend a semester of college with her, and even more amazing that we're doing it in Paris. It's great to have a really close and old friend here to share Paris with me. We're also going to be doing some travelling together, which I'm sure will be nothing short of epic.
-I got a summer internship! I'll be interning with Notre Dame's Office of Sustainability and I couldn't be more excited. I'll be working in an area I'm interested in, getting paid (!), and living on campus. I've missed Notre Dame so much this year and I'm glad I get to "make up" a few of the months that I've been away by being there this summer.
-I'm running for Walsh Hall president. I'm equally excited about this - I definitely want to be involved in Student Government when I get back to campus and I LOVE WALSH, so what better combination? Campaigning from abroad is proving to be a little tricky, but I'm fairly confident that I'll be well represented by my VP candidates Antoinette Day and Heather Markel and my campaign manager Alexa Doyle :)
Well, I'm meeting Dani in the morning to go see Valentine's Day (in English - I really don't see the point of seeing American movies in French - more on movies in a later post), so I'm going to wrap this up here, but hopefully I'll be getting back into a groove of blogging as well as getting into a groove of academics.
