The First Days

After a summer of work and a quick trip to Champaign, I got ready for the big day to leave for France. I don't remember much before getting to the gate. There we were all the other students and their families and myself with my parents. My mind was really focused on the trip, so I really wasn't thinking about what I would be missing for the next months. I said goodbye to my parents and boarded the plane.

I remember an energy in the plane. Kinda like a bunch of kids going on a field trip. I was not mentally prepared to go a place where they spoke another language. Although I had spent months half-heartedly learning French, I still giggled when the flight attendant said Bonjour. I was like, OK, Bon joor.

We arrived in Paris early the next morning. We were herded onto a bus and given a tour of Paris. Of course I remember little of it. It is one of the worst ways to visit a city. We were dropped off at a youth hostel for the night. People started grouping up and I gravitated toward a couple of the other students, Tim & Robin. Robin I had met the year before. A group of us ventured out of the hotel. We hit a tabac and bought postcards and stamps. I quickly learned my French was horrible. Others had to help me through it. I think we wandered around a bit, but headed back to the hotel since we would be here a while. Plus we were exhausted.

Then next morning we were herded back onto the bus and off to Versailles. I don't remember much about what happened once in Versailles except we were told we needed to group up for our housing assignments. There were accomodations of different numbers (6, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2,...) and you had to match up your group with the accomodations. I was completely caught off guard. I hadn't thought at all about this and people had already paired off, or were frantically doing the same. I grabbed the one person I knew and didn't have any aversion to. Robin was eccentric and quite interesting to talk to. It turned out to be a great choice as I will go into more later. So almost as soon as we put our names down, we were wisked off to our residence by the landlord Madame Villiers.

The division of residences was almost purely by chance. Almost no one knew anything about what kind of residence pertained to which number of people. The one exception was the legendary house of six. Which past students told future students about. I totally missed out on that and came into the program without any advice. That's why I was caught off guard about the housing thing and had no inside info on Paris. Though eventually I would learn about it from the others.

As I said I was blind about Paris. So I was afraid to venture there on my own. I was probably one of the last people to venture into Paris and it was with the comfort of three other people. It seemed like it was a month into the program, but it was probably only a few days into it. We took the grand tour. Place St. Michel, Notre Dame, Le Louvre, Place de la Concorde, Champs Elysee, Arc du Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower. It was a fascinating tour of new and interesting things. I took every visitor on the same route on their first venture into the city. Interestingly, every trip to a new place after this has been thoroughly researched and planned out. Plus half way through the program, I was taking most trips by myself.