La Première Semaine - et tout va bien!

A brief look at a few highlights of this (exciting!) week. Pictures of everything are forthcoming, I promise!

On Monday, I reported to CUPA (my program) for the first day of orientation. Its offices are located in another of the best neighborhoods in Paris, in view of the Luxembourg gardens. The program staff are wonderful and they insist we speak 100% percent French on the premises. The other American students in the program (~35, 5 including myself from Princeton) are also extremely smart and friendly. After our first day of orientation, which included, right off the bat, an hour-long placement test, I managed to navigate the process of buying a cell phone in French and returned for the next of many mouth-watering two-hour dinners. The cheese cart, I see, is an everyday thing. While there are many small differences to grow accustomed to -- the mobile shower hose, the toilet being on the other side of the apartment from the bathroom, socks being inappropriate garb for dinner, etc. -- the nightly cheese cart is something I have come to love very quickly.

Tuesday brought more orientation sessions. On our lunch break, we bought paninis and Fanta from the outdoor booth adjacent to one of the cafes/brasseries in the CUPA neighborhood and ate them sitting on a bench in the Jardins du Luxembourg. In the afternoon, I went for a stroll with two other students, Allison and Nathaniel, around the Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower. We didn't go up because it was too overcast. I can't say the weather has been beautiful here this past week, but it's neither frigid nor snowy. Afterward, I headed on my own to the Printemps flagship store at the end of my own street. Although rue de Caumartin itself is calm and quiet, it runs between the bustling Boulevard de la Madeleine on one side and Boulevard Haussmann, home to the grands magasins on the other. Thus, it's just a 5-minute jaunt to Printemps, Galeries Lafayette, etc. This month, stores all around Paris are having their huge seasonal sales, so everything is marked down up to 70%!

On Wednesday, I went to BNP Paribas to open my French bank account, which CUPA requires. Then we began our orientation courses, which will just last until we start our real classes at the French universities in mid-February. We have a language course, a French methodology course, and a youth slang class. For the language class, we focused this week on the question of l'esprit francais - whether one exists - by reading articles from a philosophy magazine and doing oral presentations. The methodology course is taught by Michel, a fabulous Lebanese guy who is teaching us the French way of writing papers, doing presentations, and so on. And finally, our class with the two college-age interns is designed to shed light on what our classmates are saying when we finally start real classes. A lot of what we are learning is verlan, saying words backwards (for example, cimer instead of merci). It's pretty impossible to understand when we're still just trying to learn standard French!

After class, several us decided to spend our evening at the Louvre. Included in our tuition is a student pass that gives us FREE, unlimited access to the Louvre, including temporary exhibitions, concerts, etc. So, we checked out an exhibit of 18th century works called L'antiquité rêvée, the subject being the transition from rococo to neoclassicism but while examining specifically the attempts at artistic innovation and the artistic responses it provoked during that period. The most famous works included were David's Sabine Women and Fuseli's Nightmare. I dined on ham and cheese at the Louvre and then, later, went to meet my friend Charlotte (from Princeton, her family lives in Paris) for a night on the town. We were talking for hours only to realize that the metro was closing for the night in 15 minutes (12:45)! We barely caught the last train home and saw a mouse.

View from the Apartments of Napoleon III at the Louvre

Moving on to Thursday... I had my first academic advising meeting with the director of the program, MaryAnn, in the morning, and then decided to explore the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts. I think it's not particularly well-known, but it was a great find! I saw everything from translations-in-progress of Egyptian hieroglyphics & letters written by Champollion to Napoleon's love letters to Josephine to one of the last desperate letters written by Louis XVI. I love glimpsing the private personalities of the famous through their cross-outs, their handwriting, their signatures. Thursday's other highlight (sensing a pattern here) was dinner. The appetizer was toasted croissants with melted Camembert. Dessert was pineapple with honey. Meals here are so good I want to cry when I think about them. And, in my totally subjective opinion, people seem to get significantly more pleasure from eating in general...

We certainly derived a lot of pleasure on Friday from our splendid buckwheat crêpes at the Crêperie du Vieux Journal near CUPA: the restaurant was decorated floor to ceiling with old French newspapers. Not to pass from one meal to the next, but... at dinner, my host dad kept telling me his guilty pleasure was le catch américain. I really had no idea what that meant, but when we finished eating, he ran into the living room shouting merde! merde!. I peeked in to see what was the matter, and sure enough, it was WWE wrestling, America's finest. What's wonderful about mealtimes chez les d'Hauteville is that we can be discussing Sartre one minute, wrestling the next; American architecture one minute (they love Chicago), and methods for trapping and disposing of omnipresent Parisian mice (yes, I saw that box of Souricide in the bathroom and I'm prepared). Friday night, I met several CUPA friends and Nathaniel's French host brother at a café around Montparnasse, though thus far I haven't met too many jeunes français. The streets are hopping here even in the winter because of the hanging heaters that cafés and brasseries put outside to warm customers who will not be deterred from people-watching. I have no idea why we don't do this in America?!

Finally, Saturday began with... a fabulous meal! One of my host family's sons, Maxime, came with his wife and two adorable children (the same ones I met when I arrived in Paris). Lunch was a serious matter, with even little stands for resting one's knife. The appetizer was something words can barely begin to describe: it involved strips of smoked duck and apple cooked into a work of art in a little bowl. It's a little hard for me to follow all the conversation, but I'm working on it. At least my weird faces spoke to the baby and my limited vocabulary to 4-yr-old Victor. After lunch, I went to meet a few of the CUPA crowd for a walk with Michel around part of the Ve arrondissement. He brought us first to the Arènes de Lutèce, a Gallo-Roman amphitheater constructed in the 1st century AD. It was unearthed in the 19th century during Baron Haussmann's reinvention of Paris and saved from demolition by Victor Hugo. Because there is a whole piping system linking the arena to the Seine, some surmise that mock naval battles like those known to have taken place at the Coliseum were also staged in Paris. It is the only major Roman site remaining in Paris, and is totally open to the public as a current, usable place, not as a museum... when we arrived, there was a group of old men playing pétanque, a common game that involves rolling wooden balls. Michel then led us to the Institut du Monde Arabe (Institute of the Arab World) - right up my alley! - to discuss its architecture, etc. It is sandwiched between the '70s monstrosity of University of Paris VI (Pierre et Marie Curie) and the Seine, with views (facing the right bank) of some of the most beautiful and historic buildings in the world. The design of the institute is meant to speak to both. Meanwhile, a round tower inside the glass and aluminum exterior is meant to evoke a minaret and the aluminum panels are punctuated with geometric openings resembling typical Arab designs. From the top floor, we could see all across the city, from La Défense on one side to the Bibliothèque François Mitterand on the other. We finished up our tour with tea at the Great Mosque of Paris, built in the 1920s to thank the North Africans who fought for France in World War I. Michel said that the climate between the French government & populace and Arabs is so tense today that there is no way something like the Mosque could be built now. The exotic tea room brought back sweet memories of Morocco, including even the same mint tea I drank 20 times a day in al-maghreb.

L'Institut du Monde Arabe

After tea, Allison, Rachel and I hopped over to the Right Bank for a stroll along the Rue de Rivoli and a stop at the boulangerie/patisserie Paul for my first, perfectly flaky pain au chocolat of the semester. We ended up eating at Chez Hanna, a tasty falafel restaurant in the Marais (more on the Marais later). I intended to go to a concert at the Institut du Monde Arabe afterward but mixed up the concert's location and ended up instead sampling cheese at girls' night at the apartment of another friend (who is living alone), Allegra.