What Happened to Paris?

Yes, yes, we're all asking what I've been up to for the past....4 months I guess it has been. Well, short answer, I've been having a real settled life in Paris. As I mentioned earlier that these posts are for me, I can assure  myself that I've not forgotten the exciting events that have passed, I do indeed have another journal-esque creation that I keep apart from this blog, in private, but we may as well say a few words about life in Paris. Unlike Aix, life is not as wild and crazy and sleepless as the south of France proved to be. In Paris I go to school at Sciences Po, one of the top liberal arts universities of France (although the term liberal arts doesn't exist here), which means I actually have real work to do that takes up time and takes up ridiculous amounts of patience in the awful library trying to find resources and not get suspensions on my card for returning books late....but I'll save the complaining for another time. Suffice it to say that I will never take a real library for granted again. But so, Paris has classes, a lot of homework, long rides on the metro, and I live with a family, a woman and her 15 year old daughter in the 15th and we eat dinner together every evening. On top of this I busy myself with learning german on saturday mornings at Cité Universitaire, going to the Club Med gym around the corner everyday, going to yoga class in french, and exploring Paris! It's an awesome city once you get used to life here and get to know your way around- I end up spending a lot of time in the 6th and 7th arrondissements where my school is, and the 15th where I live. What gets me are the little, quirky things: the 50 centime used books that you can rifle through in front of Gibert Jeune or the other giant booksellers across from the Cluny medieval museum or the St Michel fountain, the little hut in Jardins du Luxembourg that sells the most colorful candy you've ever seen, bottles of cider, and cups of hot coffee, the band of ten native americans playing their wooden flutes and drums in the metro and singing at the top of their lungs, looking more like they're in concert than really asking for money, the millions of Jean ValJean's that get on the metro car and rationally, calmly tell their story of living on 37 euros a month and needing just a few centimes for bread until their cases get through social security, pulling at the heartstrings and adding how they know we're all good people with hearts who would help a friend in need. I can tell you the exact time the metro starts and stops everyday of the week- miss the metro once when you're way far from your house and you won't miss it again, and I can tell you where to transfer from the red to the yellow line and that the 14 is my least favorite line because it's so far underground that all of the stops have this fishy, sulfury smell that everyone turns their head from left to right to see if it's just them who has noticed. You can go to a different café or brasserie everyday for months and never hit them all, and they all have different specialties- from the places that give you the cream and the coffee or chocolate base in two separate cups and let you mix them together in your personally desired proportions to the places with diablo menthe (lemonade and mint syrup) to the places with the best chocolate cake ever invented. The little café right across from school, for example, is reasonably priced and reminds me of a 1950s american soda shop, the glasses they give you are just like you order milkshakes in back home, with the long spoon included. Apart from this there's the millions of bakeries with pastries and bread that seriously beat anything you've ever had-hands down, LaDurée's macarons in all of the colors of the rainbow, and the little crepe stands right as you come off the metro that fill the air with smells of nutella and lemon and sugary delight. And after living there for a month, I went from exploring all of the known monuments to the lesser known museums to the little spots that are in the back of the guidebooks, the parks and the cemeteries and the winding streets behind Montmartre and Montparnasse. We've been to concerts and dance parties and eclectic bars and soccer matchs at Stade de France and old black and white films in the little hole in the wall theaters of the Latin Quater and had fondue parties and bought skinny jeans in the vintage shops and flea markets and had espressos where Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and picnics in front of the Medici fountain in Jardins du Luxeumbourg under the sunshine. Sometimes you arrive at the metro only to find a sign that the stations in the area are on strike but no worries, it will be over in a few hours and it will still make front page headlines-strike showed breakthroughs, how about another one same time next week? Students and the Sorbonne created a new sorbonne 14 (there are 13 of them really) and held classes in the metro to protest rising costs of school, professors gave lectures in one of the main squares so everyone could learn, Sorbonne students literally took over my school and hung banners from the second floor and threatened school property-it's as close to 1968 as this generation will arguably ever come. I've tried the French school of philosophy and attended a philosopher's night at the café that all the greats sat around at, and for only 5 euros I got to hear that "erotic imperatives' are still a hot topic for minds above the age of 25, in France just as well as in America. I've rode the metro far and long enough to know that even at 5:50 am, only twenty minutes after service starts, every French woman who hops on will still be fully make-uped, dark thick eyeliner and all, sporting three inch heels, black tights, a chunky sweater over at least two other black, white , or grey underlayers, and have the hair "done" in that messy chic way that boggles the minds- is it from the wind or is it set in place like that? And that rule from middle school- don't stare at the french guys because three seconds eye-to-eye and he'll think you're down for a night in his bed, has no truth to it even if you wish it did, and you would wish it if you saw the crazy amount of well put together and well dressed men walking around the streets of Paris. Speaking of which, PDA is even worse in the city of love than it was in the south of France. Hmm, what else? It's hard to sum up such a long period of time. That's pretty much it-I have a "tandem" partner and we meet up for coffee every Friday to speak in French/English and share stories of our respective lives, I have a list of day trips from Paris that I've started to tackle- first up was Vaux-le-Vicomte castle, masterpiece of Le vau, Le Brun, and Le Nôtre, and it was gorgeous, next on the list is Chartres where the veil that Mary swaddled baby Jesus in is held and glorified to this day (its still on the the most visited pilgrammage cities), the metro is still the best place to know "what's going on" with all the advertisements that change nearly everyday, I'll never ever be sick of crepes, I'm currently obsessed with Sucre-Citron, we went to a bar that served us drinks in baby bottles which was so weird that it was cool, we still get to rock out to 70s American tunes in the grocery stores and see the newest art collections for free on special days, learn from experts in their fields-journalists, ministers of state, members of the Assemblée Nationale, and say s'il vous plaît and merci hundreds of times of day. There's always exploring to do in Paris, and it's always a good time.