When in Paris

Salut mes amis!

It feels like I have been here for a month already. It has been 3 days and I don't know if I have sat down once. I will give you the overall run down, I don't have time for all the details, and you don't need all of them.

The first day I met my roommates and we shared a celebratory glass of champagne that was so good and so expensive- but it's the first day, we had to celebrate. We ate pizza in the Latin Quarter and wandered through the Luxembourg gardens. And can I just say, it is so not fair. The people of Paris have gardens that look like they come straight out of a Jane Austen novel and they can just go chill and do homework and hang out. I will never look at Boston Commons the same way again. It is a impostor.

The second day was orientation, which was awful. If you take College Orientation and subtract the fun activities, then add the common sense-ness of rules at a summer camp, you get the 6 hours of lecture that we had on day 2. But finally, we were let free. We got dinner at a cute little cafe and I received an entire chicken, whoever said French portions were smaller had never been to this restaurant. Then that night my friends and I hit up the Gay Arondissment (aka La Marais) and had a fun night. We met a nice French guy named Emile who ended up hanging out with us and he was ridiculous. A nineteen year old French Canadian who was taking some time off college to work in design at Louis Vuitton. Ok. Whatever. No big deal.

Day three started pretty late because of the fun we had the night before. After grocery shopping (because I really had to stop eating out, entire chickens at cafes are expensive), we walked to the Seine and brought a baguette and a bottle of rosé and watched the tourist boats drift lazily by. Lily, my suitemate, got stung by a bee and had a panic attack because she thought that her dad was deathly allergic and that she was going to die. She didn't die. Turns out her dad isn't allergic to bees. After that we met with some other people in our program and brought some snacks to the lawn of the Eiffel Tower and watched the sun set over the gray lady herself. I remember before I came to Paris, so many years ago, I wondered whether the Eiffel Tower was just an over-hyped pile of metal swarming with tourists. I soon learned on that trip that she was anything but, and she keeps proving that to me. There is something so magical about walking the streets of Paris and turning a corner and seeing her in the distance, not quite looming, more like guarding over the city. At every moment of the day and night she is a different kind of beautiful, and I don't think I will ever get used to the sight of her.

Classes start tomorrow, and let's be honest, I'm terrified. Learning French at La Sorbonne in a class where even muttering a word of English could be detrimental is frikin nerve-racking. I have been speaking a good amount of French so far, but it usually comes with at least one confused look when I mess up a word, or a rushed "Désolé" when I respond to a "Comment allez-vous?" with a "Bien, et tu?" I'm so excited to get better through these classes, I just don't want my professor to eviscerate me. Pray for me. If I don't make it through my first day, tell Sebastian Stan I love him.

À bientôt! (Peut-être)