A Paris

Bonjour!

I arrived in Paris on Tuesday morning with two other girls on my program after a relatively nice flight. It was really empty so we each had an entire row to ourselves to sleep in and we had our own on demand TVs! We took a shuttle bus from the airport to our apartments.

Cathy and I (who flew together) are living in the same apartment and Jen (who also flew with us), lives a couple metro stops away. When we got to our apartment, we had some trouble figuring out how to get in, but luckily someone came out and then our landlord type guy came down to bring us up to the apartment. I'm on the 5th floor (6th floor in the US) and have to walk up because the elevator's super tiny. Guess I'll get a good work out!

The apartment's a lot larger than I expected. There will be four of us living here, so we have four bedrooms, a huge living/dining room, a really big kitchen, a bathroom, a WC (with a toilet and sink) and a little sitting area by one of the bedrooms. I'm still in the process of getting unpacked, but I'll post pictures of it when I can. The windows in the front of the apartment have little balconies and all of them have railings so we can have window boxes in the spring time. All the buildings on the street are very typically Parisian and the neighborhood is full of cafes.

There's no food in the apartment, so we've been eating out for most of our meals. Tuesday we had mostly sandwiches, and didn't eat lunch until 3, so we were starving. Then we went to Sciences-Po to look around and use the internet because it didn't work in our apartment yet. It's still on and off in the bedrooms, but in the living room it works well. Yesterday, we cleaned our apartment because it was really dusty. We found a great little Italian restaurant around the corner from apartment and it cost 4E each for a bottle of coke!! That's like $6! We found a supermarket though, so we'll hopefully get food today.

Then last night a bunch of us on the program met up for dinner. We went to a restaurant that I think served food from Southern France. It was definitely interesting. None of us could understand the menu very well and ordered some bizarre dishes, only to find out at the end of our meal that they had steak-frites (steak and french fries). Since we were in our neighborhood, we all came back to our apartment to drink wine and hang out.

I'm still all screwed up with the time zone so I didn't fall asleep until 3 or 4 Parisian time, which is 6 hours ahead of the Boston. We had to wake up early to wait for our other two roommates, Nicole and Noelle, who should be arriving any minute now. Hopefully after they get here, hopefully we'll be able to go get bank accounts and finally cell phones! It's so weird to be without one.

Congratulations if you made it all the way to the end! I'll be sure to update more as my life gets more exciting.