blogging and all that jazz

salut tous

So I've decided to share a bit of my trip to France through this medium. After enjoying my cousin Annette's blog so much I realized that it's a great way to involve people with your life while abroad. so that aside...

I arrived a week ago in Paris and since then I've been having a blast. My Uncle Alain graciously asked his brother if I could come rest at his house for a bit before my cousin Raphael could meet me. This saved me. I had no idea how tired I would be and how confusing this city could be at first. The metro is a great system, however very confusing at first... I have the hang of it now, but let's just say that morning I repeatedly tried to exit through the enter. My backpack was much more heavy than I remembered it being when I weighed it at home.

As for my cousins, it's been really cool to get to know them more, and to have them help me with my everyday french. Raphael is working on his nursing degree, and for the past few weeks he's been working at a psychiatric hospital. He had to get up at 5 a.m. each morning, but we were able to get dinner in the evenings and watch the game between spain and germany together. I'm trying to speak only in French with people, and I'll usually ask someone who can speak both english and french to speak in French with me. It's what I'm here for. Occasionally with Raph I'd speak english and he would speak French, because we could understand each other well enough, but I'm sure it was funny to listen to. On Friday night, Raph took me to a birthday party which was right off the Seine in a beautiful old apartment building. It was really cool to chat with his friends and just have people my age to talk to after the long days of walking around Paris by myself. They're showing me just how much I have to learn; it's very different to speak the language with 20 year olds. After a couple hours we walked down to the Seine and hung out down there for a while where I saw (for the first time) the sparkling Eiffel Tower. I didn't know about it until I saw all the lights going off and on like flashes on thousands of cameras all concentrated on the tower. Wowoweewow.

Charles is an engineering project manager from my understanding, and he works in a region of Paris called La Défense. You can see it from a lot of places in Paris because it's the region where all of sudden, you have all these buildings shooting into the sky. I really like that about Paris actually, they keep most of the huge office buildings to this one area, which is completely different than most of the big cities I've been to in my life. He has a nice place in an area close to La Bastille. He took me out to the Centre Pompidou Saturday afternoon, which was interesting to say the least. The modern art there is very... modern. It definitely made me think about how little I know about the art world, and how someone can be called an artist today. Afterwards we took bikes to a bar to watch the Germany Uruguay game, which was super exciting for those of you who missed it. Paris has a public bike system called velib with stations all over the city. You can take a bike and then return it to a different station for free if you do it within 30 minutes, and if you don't it's around 1 euro for the day. I was seriously impressed with this idea for a public bike system. My roommate Danny proposed something like this for city planning class project, so it was really cool to see it in action after hearing about something like it from him.

I've done most of the big touristy stuff so far: walking on the Champs Elysées, the Eiffel tower, visiting the Latin quarter, touring some gardens. My friend Maxime Chevée told me his cousin could show me around Paris a bit, so we went to the Louvre, which was AWESOME. It was the first day I had someone to walk around with, but more importantly he was full of information on art history and Paris (in general). If I understood correctly (he spoke very quickly in French, but I needed some mental exercise), his mom teaches art history privately, so he kind of grew up with the artists and painting in the Grand Salon. It was a fantastic way to experience the Louvre.

ok enough for now. I really have to study some grammar so I can know where I'm making mistakes instead of feeling around blindly like a child. Although that hasn't been such a bad strategy so far...