Today is registration day (partie deux)

Registration for last semester's classes was so stressful, and this semester wasn't much different, except for the fact that I got all the classes I wanted! Right now I'm signed up for 5 classes, (3 in French and 2 in English), and 3 of those classes transfer to Georgia Tech as core classes for my major, which is really really good for me!
I'm excited about 2 classes in particular that involve some pretty amazing field trips. First off, I'm taking a class about opera (it's history and so forth), and for that I get to go to the Opéra Garnier (I've posted pictures of this one before) and the Opéra Bastille! And secondly, I'm taking a course about the European justice system and I get to go to Luxembourg to see the European Court of Justice!!!!!!! I am soooooo excited about this! :D

So this semester's registration was definitely a lot smoother than the last. Now I just have to focus on finishing some things before my flight home on Saturday. I'll be spending my 2-week Christmas break with my family and then returning to Paris on January 5th for classes that week. I'm so ready to be home where it's warm and cozy and to see everyone. But for now, it's back to work...

Bisous XOXO

Happy Birthday to me!

You only turn 21 once, but who gets to say they turned 21 in Paris?? I know the whole 'becoming legal' thing isn't a big deal here, but last night I decided to make the best of it and celebrated my very American coming-of-age with some nice French benefits.


Benefit #1: You can drink some pretty good champagne for relatively cheap. And you do it in style because you have to be stylish in Paris. It's like, the law.

Here's Emily popping open the champagne. She and Ashley actually went to the region of France called Champagne (where they make...champagne) and learned how to open it the right way. Check it out:



In case you couldn't tell from the video, the 'pop' from the bottle kind of freaks me out.

Pouring glasses for the guests! Yesterday was Ashley's birthday too, so there was a big group of us celebrating at Ashley and Emily's apartment (remember that Thanksgiving dinner I went to? Same place.).



Benefit #2: You get to clink glasses in several languages.
French - Santé! (to health)
Spanish - Salud! (same as French)
English - Cheers! (yay let's drink)

The delicious birthday cake Emily baked for me and Ashley.

Here's my plate! It was a little crumbly.
Benefit #3: You get birthday cake that has funny names (like 'mama cake', loosely translated). Don't ask me why.




Here I am in the middle of the street! I was definitely having a nice time by then.
Benefit #4: When you're on your way to the bar, or on your way back home from it, you get to walk through Paris!

After celebrating a bit at Ashley and Emily's apartment, we went to this pub called The Frog and Princess which served American food and had a student special running all night for drinks. The atmosphere was nice and we definitely had a blast all night. The best part is that I had some really cool friends there taking care of me. But I still cant wait to test out my newly legal ID.

Bisous XOXO

School school school and authentic French dinner

Bonjour!

Lately, it's been all about the school work. I have 2 papers due this week and I have a presentation due the very first day back after the break in January, so my plan is to finish that before my flight to Atlanta, too. The work has been keeping me indoors, but so has the weather, because it is literally FREEZING outside. It's snowed a few times already, but I can mostly feel it in my toes after about 5 minutes of walking around outside.


Here's some proof! After Monica and I went to the Bastille Market on Saturday morning, we had to thaw our toes on the heater in my apartment.


This past Friday I was very luckily invited to dinner by Monica's landlord and his wife (I say luckily because I just happened to be there when he invited Monica and her roommate for dinner). Now, I already like French food, but home-made French food is AMAZING!! The landlord cooked the actual dinner and his wife made the dessert, and let me just walk you through how cool that evening was:

When we first got there, both the landlord and his wife were very welcoming- they took our coats and purses and told us to go sit in the living room where we all had some appetizers and drank champagne and pretty much introduced ourselves. They made this loaf of bread that had all these amazing spices in it- I have no idea what it was, but it resembled meatloaf with the mix of stuff inside. There were almonds and pistachios and the champagne was very good too. We talked about where everyone was from and finished the champagne among the 5 of us.

After that, we moved into the dining room for the dinner. They had put up a Christmas tree and had 2 candelabras lit on the table. The entrée and the main course were very French according to our hosts (they were meticulous about that because they knew we would appreciate it). We first had a vegetable dish that was served cold and was soooo delicious, and the main course was meat roasted with carrots that was so tender and juicy... it's making my mouth water all over again. With our meal, we drank a bottle of red wine from the south-eastern part of France.

For dessert, we had spiced cake with fruit compote and vanilla ice cream. The best part was the wine though: it was specifically a dessert wine because it was very sweet.

If our hosts were being perfectly true to French custom, then I assume that French dinners in general are extremely delicious and you get to drink a LOT of good wine! We spoke French for the full 2 or 3 hours we were there, and I noticed my French getting better and better as the night wore on (but honestly I think the wine helped a lot, ha ha!!). As far as the topics of conversation went, it wasn't much different than what you could expect from any dinner party back home. I think the weirdest question of the night was: "Have any of you had any French lovers yet?", but that's about all (only one of us said "yes", and it most definitely was not me because I have an amazing boyfriend back home!!). We complimented the hosts on the cooking several times that night, made several toasts in several languages, and thanked them profusely at the end of the night. I'm hoping for another invitation before my year in Paris is over!!


After the dinner, Monica and I decided to walk around St. Michel a bit and we found this! No, it's not a second Halloween in Paris. It was a bachelor party! Apparently, bachelor parties here mean wearing ridiculous costumes and drinking. I'm guessing the pig was the bachelor.



On a not-so-light note, I know some of you have heard about the potentially bad situation yesterday (Dec. 16th) at a shopping center here in Paris. The police found 5 sticks of dynamite in Printemps, which is a big store close to the Galeries Lafayette that I talked about before. From what I heard, nothing actually exploded, it was just a threat, and everyone is safe. I was nowhere near Printemps yesterday, so no need to worry. And just to make Mom sleep easier, I promise to stay away from major shopping centers for the moment.
Here are some links to news articles if you want to know more:

Article from guardian.co.uk

Article from The Connexion

Article from the Washington Times

Bisous XOXO

More lights and requested pictures

Hi everyone! First of all, I wanted to show you some more of the views I see every day...

Here's the view from my apartment on a clear day. Sometimes you can see into the neighbor's windows at night, but I haven't seen anything juicy yet.

Here's a view from Monica's apartment. She lives on the 2nd floor with another girl from Canada.

(Side note: 2nd floor in France = 3rd floor in the U.S. The French call the bottom floor the 'rez-de-chaussée' and the next floor up starts the count at 1. I'm used to the system now, but when I first got here, I couldn't keep track of all the times I'd been surprised and disappointed that whatever floor I was trying to get to was always one more flight of stairs up.)

Another view from Monica's apartment.

More Christmas lights! They put these up on a street near my apartment.

More lights in the square close to my place. The building lit up in the background is the Mairie of the 11th arrondissement (it's kind of like the mayor's office for that section of Paris).

Here's the same picture but not as blurry.

And now for some pictures that have been requested in the past:


This first set is for my Great Aunt Lou, who asked to see pictures of outdoor markets. This one is the Bastille market and it's open on Saturday mornings until around 1pm. They sell mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, and there's a stand towards the front that sells seafood too (but it's really expensive). I went this past Saturday with Monica and we bought about 6 kilos of food for about 6 or 7 euros! Pretty good for a student budget. :)

Bastille market!

Mmm potatoes! I bought some red ones.

Very busy.

This next set of pictures is for Kelly, who asked to see a really cool hair salon if I saw one. Well since it took me so long to put some pictures up, I decided to show a series instead of just one or two pictures:

So the 3 major things I've noticed about hair salons here versus the ones in the U.S. is that...
1) people get different hair cuts, sometimes a bit more fashion-forward,
2) they stay open later during the night. I've seen people getting ther hair cut at 8 or 9pm before, and
3) the salons are usually named after people, like the one I found below.

This one I found close by my apartment. I swear I've seen another salon with the same name somewhere else in Paris, so maybe this is like the French version of Great Clips or something...

Another salon named after a person.

Here's the inside of that salon from above. It's not much different from what I'm used to seeing back home. By the way, I think I might have looked a little odd taking this picture because when I was done, the lady cutting that guy's hair turned around and stared at me like I was insane (ha ha). :D

Here's a salon in the rich area near the Élysée Palace (where the president lives). The word that's cut off on the left of the picture says 'coiffure' and that means 'hairdresser' in English.

Not every salon is named after a person. Here's one I found by Monica's apartment.

This was probably the coolest looking salon I've found so far. It's also close to Monica's apartment.

Like I said before, the haircuts tend to be a little more fashion forward here. I've seen people all over Paris sporting styles like the ones you see in the picture.

People gettin' they hair did! :D

Like I also said before, they stay open pretty late. I took this picture around 7pm and they were still busy.

It's been really cold here for at least a month now, but yesterday it finally snowed! It wasn't that much snow at all, but still worth mentioning. Here's my attempt to capture the event:

Bisous XOXO

Disneyland Paris

Ta da! I'm at Disneyland!

Yesterday I went to Disneyland Paris! Right now they're having a special promotion for Christmas so if you go during the week you can get a really nice discount. We got the pass that lasts for one day and gets you into both parks (Disneyland Park and Walt Disney Studios). I went with Monica, Ashley, Emily, and Shannon, and it was freezing cold the whole day but it was still so much fun. Here's their version of the Cinderella castle! I was surprised to see that a lot of Disneyland Paris resembles the Disneyland in Orlando, Florida. The major difference was that there were only 2 parks instead of the 4 in Orlando, and everything was written in about 2 or 3 languages, but even so, a lot of things were in English and even modeled after American favorite past times (for example, we ate lunch at a restaurant in the park called 'Casey's Corner' that sold hot dogs and hamburgers and looked like a Bennigan's on the inside and had baseball memorabilia all over the walls). If I didn't know any better, I'd think I was back in the U.S.!

Another good example (ha ha)!

They had Christmas decorations all over the park and we heard Christmas carols all day. They also had this huge tree sitting close to the entrance. It was all so cute! But it got even better at night when they turned all the Christmas lights on:

Here's a picture of that same tree from farther away.






And here's the entrance to the park all lit up!

They had a Space Mountain too! The picture is a little blurry, but you can see the smoke from the tunnel where the roller coaster shoots up. Remember how I said this park was similar to the park in Orlando? That goes for the rides too. While I was there, I rode the Aerosmith Rockin' Rollercoaster and the Tower of Terror (both exact replicas of what's in Orlando). By the way, the Tower of Terror ride was my favorite! :D

Here's 'Main Street' all lit up!

And here's Cinderella's castle again! It looked so cute- like there was sparkly frosting all over it! The '15' is there to celebrate the park's 15th anniversary.

Here I am standing in front of the castle.

As the park was closing, they did a sort of light show on the castle and had a parade leaving the park. I took some videos of what I saw. Enjoy!

Bisous XOXO

Christmas lights!

It's officially December now, and there are Christmas lights all over Paris! They even put some up on the main street near my apartment, so it's a nice little treat to see them when I go buy a baguette from the bakery.


Here are some I found on a street near Sciences-Po.





Like I said before, most of the decorations come from stores doing holiday promotional sales (not far off from the US!).


This weekend, Monica and I went to the Galeries Lafayette for some indoor window shopping. The Galeries is kind of like a really big mall that only sells designer brands. It's so big, there's a full-on sushi restaurant inside in case you get hungry while shopping. And there's a café and McDonald's too, of course. I'm used to the food courts in American malls, but I didn't expect to see them here.
Here's Monica standing in the atrium, looking cute as always!






This is the center of the Galeries, where they had this enormous Christmas tree hovering above all the perfume counters.





And at the top, they hung really big Christmas tree ornaments!





Another view of the giant Christmas tree.





This is the outside of the Galeries. Imagine the lights continuing on like this down the street for another block, and that's about how it looks in real life. The design on the front reminds me of the rose window at Notre Dame.

They also do a sort of light show too! Here's a video:




Now back to doing homework.... :(

Bisous XOXO

Plat du jour: Turkey! Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The French don't do Thanksgiving, which isn't that big of a deal since Thanksgiving is a family and close friends event- not like a huge festival really. But me and my American buddies felt like the tradition shouldn't be thrown out just because we're not in the US. So we decided to bring our traditions to Paris and have Thanksgiving dinner at my friends Emily and Ashley's place!

Setting up for dinner!




In case I haven't talked about it before, this is Ashley and Emily's apartment. We had Thanksgiving here since they had the table for it, but we had to start dinner early because when they originally signed their lease they agreed to be quiet from 9pm onward because the tenants above and below them have babies that have to sleep. This wasn't a problem for us though since most of our families start Thanksgiving in the early afternoon anyway (I know my family does more of a Thanksgiving lunch). But in the French culture you eat dinner anywhere from 8pm at the earliest to 10pm, so the timing was a little bizarre to the French people we invited to experience our holiday.





Here are some of the guests! From the left: Ashley, Shannon, Kitsy (another American who's on exchange from Boston), William (from Tech), Dorian, and I forgot the last guy's name (these were the French people, and I just met them at the dinner). I hope the last guy doesn't know about my blog! (ha ha)





Here we are having some champagne before dinner.




Emily cuts the turkey!





I know they sell whole turkeys here in Paris because I've seen them in the butcher shops, but they're really really expensive (maybe because they don't do Thanksgiving?). But they found this kind of turkey, which I think came pre-seasoned with pork fat or something wrapped around it. It was really good! Nice way to improvise too.






Emily baked her grandma's apple pie for dessert. We also had pumpkin pie, ice cream, and Shannon and I brought petit fours too.





Thanksgiving plate! Mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce (that's right, we found it in a can here!), green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, fruit salad.... I'm getting hungry again. I ate way too much that night.






Everyone ready to eat! We all went around the table and said something we're thankful for, and most of us Americans said we were thankful for being in Paris. The French guys said they were thankful for being invited to experience this (I think they secretly loved Thanksgiving).

After we were all sufficiently stuffed, we thought it would be a good idea to get some exercise by walking around Paris to see some of the Christmas decoratons.

I was a little tired from the turkey, but I guess I was the only one.






We started at the Place de la Concorde and walked down the Champs-Élysées towards the Arc de Triomphe. Remember when I talked about the ferris wheel that was set up at the Place de la Concorde? It's working now and it costs 9 euros for a ride. We didn't ride it that night, but it's a possibility later on.







We did a jump shot!





Avenue des Champs-Élysées decked out in Christmas lights! You can see the ferris wheel down the street.





Shannon, Ashley and Kitsy posing in front of the lights.





Arc de Triomphe!






The Champs-Élysées was like a mini-Christmas carnival; they had a carrousel and those little white houses that I mentioned seeing before were open too! Here's William petting a tiny horse that was pulling Santa's sleigh!!! Santa (I think they call him Père Noël here) was sitting in the sleigh greeting little kids.






Little white houses! These were so cute- most of them had things to sell inside like Paris souvenirs or crafts, and some others sold crêpes and waffles and hot chocolate. Some had games for little kids, like fishing for prizes in a mini river.





Here's the inside of one of the white houses that sold food. You can see the lady making crêpes on the left. I liked the polar bears on top- they were robotic so they moved their heads around!
(Side note: gaufres = waffles)






This white house sold cookies and gingerbread!






It looks like this one was selling little cakes, but they were actually hand towels! The vendor just wrapped them up to look like cakes. Everyone who saw it had the same reaction: first we all salivated over the fake towel cakes, then we realized slowly that they weren't edible, then came the confusion over what it was, then disappointment that they weren't cakes. There was a rollercoaster of emotions going on- I felt it too.






This white house sold Christmas ornaments and Santa hats.





Another view of the Champs-Élysées facing the Arc de triomphe.





View of the Eiffel Tower from where we were on the Champs-Élysées.

In all, it was a very successful Thanksgiving, because we spent it with good friends and lots of food (I was surprised we found all the ingredients here for the American recipes), and we mixed it with some Parisian culture by walking around the Champs-Élysées afterwards.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I wanted to say how thankful I am for everyone back home who is keeping up with my blog and giving me tons of support. Even the smallest encouraging comment makes me feel so loved!

So to all my family and friends back home: thank you and I love you all!!

Bisous XOXO