I've been in Paris for a little over a week now, and (surprise, surprise) I am absolutely LOVING it. The city is gorgeous (duh), my apartment could not be in a better location, my roommates are incredibly cool and laid-back, and we're actually making Parisian friends! A slight recap of the past eight days:
I arrived in Paris last Saturday and cabbed it to mon petit appartement in the Latin Quarter. I was jet-lagged and tired, so I ended up sleeping most of the day, but not before meeting our slightly eccentric landlady Madame Meyer, who brought us our lease to sign and talked up her three very very successful sons. (I think she was angling to set us up with the younger two...hahaaa.)
On Sunday, my roommates Kaitlin & Nikki and I got out to explore the neighborhood. We walked up to the Seine, crossed the river to Île-de-la-Cité, and followed a stream of tourists into Notre Dame. They were right in a middle of a service, so we wandered around and took photos while a fat lady in robe sang operatic hymns.
We left the cathedral and walked down to the park by Pont Neuf, one of my favorite places in Paris. I can't wait until spring, when we can walk down there and picnic..! Later that night I met up with my friend Samira by Place de la Concorde. We walked around the second arrondissement and grabbed a café. (How Parisian.)
The rest of my week has been split between attending orientation classes at Sciences Po, and scoping out bars and cafés near my apartment. We found an amazing dive bar right up the street, where we made friends with some Parisian guys who taught us some French drinking games and incredibly vulgar bar songs. This whole area is overrun with students, so there's no lack of bars or drunk French dudes stumbling around at night.
Yesterday Kaitlin and I ventured to the 12th to meet up with some other USC kids in our program. We ate at a really pretty restaurant built into Viaducs des Arts, an old elevated railway track that's been converted into gallery spaces with a parkway above it. It was nice to see a different area of Paris -- the further out of the city centre you go, the more modern/urban it gets. I'm really happy to be living in the 5th though. No other area is quite so quintessentially Parisian.
Feel free to check out the rest of my photos on Flickr. À bientôt,
Emily.
