Bienvenue à Paris

Bonjour!

After a brief shopping trip in Chicago during our seven hour layover, we made it to Paris on Tuesday morning. After what was quite possibly the worst metro ride in the world (due to dragging all of our luggage up and down flights and flights of stairs), we arrived at our homestay in the 11th arr. Our homestay mom, Madame Beillet, is very very nice. She seems to be much more relaxed than many other homestay parents. She makes us dinner every night and gives us bread and jam for breakfast :)

After getting our luggage up to our new home, we went to our orientation where we received our student IDs and métro navigo passes (no little billets for us!). After going to change some money, we went to a welcome dinner for all the summer students. On our way we found a lovely used bookstore (in english). By this time, we were so tired that (trisha) literally fell asleep sitting up. We were a little bit pathetic, but it had been about 40 hours since we had slept, so give us a break.

waiting for the El in Chicago

View from my terrace

My room

On our second day, we slept in and unpacked. Then we met our friends George and Victoria for a little walk around Paris. George showed us around a bit. It was funny (but nice) to see our EU friends in Paris! We were pretty jet lagged, but we did our best to make our way through the city and start checking things off our "to see" list. We walked from Notre Dame to our school and through the Luxembourg Garden, which is just minutes away from our school (L'institut Catholique de Paris ...or CATHO). We anticipate eating many lunches in the beautiful gardens! We walked around Montmartre and saw the market from Amélie, one of our favorite movies. Then we just enjoyed a nice dinner with Annick (our hs mom) and talked to our families. It was a good day.

our school

the market from Amélie

in the Luxembourg Garden

On Thursday (almost done, just in case you are bored and wondering when this will end), we slept in again and went to a meeting about living in Paris at the CATHO. We learned some valuable information: the Louvre is free on Friday nights, every first Sunday the other museums are free, where all the good shopping is, good movie theaters, ect. We also met some other students (yay for new friends) who are staying for the whole summer as opposed to the five weeks that most of the other students are staying. It rained absolutely the entire day, so we made our first museum stop: Musée de Cluny (all from the middle ages). We got in free, which was wonderful. In this museum we saw some very nice tapestries--The Lady and the Unicorn, which by the way hang in the Gryffindor Common Room (yep we like Harry Potter). We also saw some beautiful stained glass and medieval jewely. We made our first stop into a french bookstore and bought some bilingual books, French on one page and English on the other. Very exciting! We were worn out and tired of the rain, so we spent the rest of the evening at home with Annick. She gave Nicole a super fast French lesson and made us dinner (chicken curry...yum). Another good (but rainy) day.

And finally...today. Today was beautiful and sunny and full of fun things! Annick took us on a walk around our neighborhood: we learned all the good supermarkets, got notebooks for school, saw the best bakeries, and much more...not to mention the twenty minute trip to the pharmacy (Annick wanted only the best to help Nicole with her blisters on her feet!). We needed more Euros, so on our way there we stopped by the Sorbonne, the Panthéon, and the Luxembourg Garden. Today we were officially tourists; all we did was take pictures of pretty things and of ourselves in front of the pretty things! After that we did a little shopping (I, of course, forgot to bring a jacket to France) and spent the afternoon in Montmartre. We love it there. We finished up our little Amélie tour by seeing her métro stop and eating at Les 2 Moulins (the diner where she works). We had cappuccino and crème brulée (our first in France). We walked up to Sacré Coeur and saw the carousel in front of it as well. After pushing through the heavy tourist traffic to buy postcards, we saw one of the old windmills and made our way back to the métro.

the Panthéon

in the Luxembourg Garden
from the l'Orangerie exhibit
Sacré Coeur
the Carousel
the café from Amélie

Since it is Friday, we decided we had better not waste one Friday night of free admission to the Louvre. We decided to tackle the Collection of Decorative Arts and made it about 2/3 of the way through. Not too bad for our first night there! The art is as incredible as the building in which it lives.

at the Louvre

We are off to Normandy & Mont Saint Michel for the weekend! I'm sure we'll have pictures and an update within a few days of our return!

Au Revoir,

trisha and nicole

Niangua today and Paris tomorrow!

Well tomorrow is the day. We leave Springfield between 7-8 AM and leave Chicago at 5:30 PM. I'll be reading a book, reading postmodernism assignments, and trying my best to fall asleep on the flight to Paris. That never works well for me, so I'm sure I'll be more than tired on our first day in Paris.

I'm pretty much all packed and ready. I've been spending the day trying to think of anything that I may have forgotten as well as trying to weed out some of the things that I can probably get while I'm there. I have to say, Nicole is packing much more efficiently (apparently), but I'm doing my best!

I'm super excited to see my friends, George and Anna, when I get to Paris. George has been there all semester, and Anna will be stopping by as she backpacks across Europe with some of her other friends.

Despite all my anticipation, I'm having a lovely day in Niangua sitting on the porch with my parents and spending time with the rest of my family. 10 weeks will go by quickly, I'm sure! More updates once we land in Paris!

Au revoir,

Trisha

10 days to go!

Bonjour! This is the first of our (mine and Nicole's) many updates about our upcoming adventure in France. We leave in ten days! These ten days promise to be quite busy with packing, mcat-ing (for me), and saying our goodbyes. We will be staying in Paris for a little more than ten weeks this summer, taking French classes at l'Institut Catholique de Paris (CATHO). We also just found out who we will be living with this summer--a 60 year old woman named Mme Beillet, near the Bastille area of Paris.

We recently made reservations at all the ho(s)tels we will be staying in with our friend, Matty, on our ten day trip through Switzerland and France later in the summer, so it has definitely been an exciting week. Now, we must decide which books and how many to take with us :)

Niether Nicole nor I blog much, but we think this adventure is worth documenting. It seems like a good way for our friends and family to keep track of where we are, what we are seeing, and how we are doing. We'll try to post pictures and summaries of all our excursions in and out of Paris! We'll never live up to the standard Mr. George Flattery has set with his Paris blogging, but we will do our best :)

Au revoir,

trisha and nicole