The Champs Elysees, from Beginning (L'Arc Triompe in the distance) to end (Place de la Concorde, the big obelisk)Ok, so writing an entry a day might not pan out too well; every couple days isn’t too terrible, right? But, we’ll see how this goes once classes start, which is not until next Monday. We have a week long intensive French review, called poupédectique, which starts tomorrow, on Monday. Yesterday we took a French placement test, which they will use to place us in both the poupédectique as well as in the French class for the semester. It seemed ok to me, but I’ll see where I end up. The second half of this past week has all been orientation stuff, meetings about how to be a good hostee, how the metro and bus systems work, safety in Paris (the same as any large city), the rules of IES, stuff like that.
We’ve gotten all the afternoon/evenings off, and I’ve been using them to explore Paris some, mostly by foot, with some other people from IES. As a result, I’ve been doing a lot of walking these past couple of days. The first afternoon, we walked from Montparnasse (where the IES center is) to des Jardins de Louxembourg to the Le Panthéon to La Notre Dame de Paris. The next day we went to La Louvre for the first time, and spent about an hour and a half in there (I spent it in the Richelieu wing looking at French sculpture). IES gave all of us a pass to La Louvre, called La Carte Louvre jaunes, which lets us in for free as many times as we want while we’re there, as well as bringing one guest with us, so I’ll be taking my time exploring all of the museum. After La Louvre, we walked around the area for a while before getting dinner to go from a boulangerie (I had a ham quiche, a raspberry tart, and a diet coke) and heading home around 9pm.
Saturday we had the placement test in the morning at the FIAP (a conference center that we’ll have our poupédectique at all next week), had a meeting about academic information, then they served us lunch there (it was quite good), and then we went to the Eiffel tour in groups. We didn’t actually go up the tour, but it was the meeting place of touring buses. IES provided us with tickets to ride, because it’s a good way to get a sense of the city, at least through a tourist’s perspective. I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything that touristy in my life and my friend Marielle and I got off in about 20 minutes, we wanted to walk around instead of be driven. So then we headed to the Panthéon to meet up with Kate, Eddie, Maggie, and Polina, because it had a free admission this weekend. The whole ceremony with Jacque Chirac turned out to be the kick off of an exhibition dedicated to Les Justes, the French people who helped hide Jews during WWII, which was taking place there. The inside of Le Panthéon is really cool, and we down to the crypt, where we was the graves of Rousseau, Voltaire, and several other famous French people. After Le Panthéon we decided to walk to Montmartre…but didn’t make it, we got tired before then.
Instead we saw Place de Bastille (quite anticlimactic, but an attraction to check off the list; we did check out what would be playing at the Bastille Opera House, some of which looked cool), Place de Vosges (about as european as a square could be), and then found some dinner in the Marais district (the gay district, also the very chic and expensive shopping district.)That’s mostly what I’ve been up to here…if you can’t tell, I’ve decided to see all of the touristy things before I actually settle in, and feel less like a tourist, more like someone who lives here. Alright, I’m outta here, love you all!
Salut!
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