So there have been no classes at Sciences Po all week long. We didn’t originally have a break scheduled for this week. Most students had a week and a half break around Toussaint (we only had November 1st off), but because we started school midway through October, it didn’t make sense to have two weeks off after three weeks of school.

As it is, I feel like I’ve done nothing so far in school this year. I’ve had three sessions of every class and what feels like more breaks than actual work. I have some work to do, but I sometimes feel like I’m just sitting around in France doing nothing. There’s no such thing as a midterm here, and we are never assigned papers to write. Instead I have about five days spread over the semester when I actually have things due, and between those days I have a lot of nothing.

There are things I could be doing with my time off, like preparing this week for future work, but instead I’ve done nothing. Well nothing school-related anyway. I spent a couple of days just getting chores done, like cleaning, grocery shopping, doing laundry, etc. I spent a couple days doing nothing but lazing around and watching movies. On Wednesday I went to buy my Pompidou Centre pass, which for 22 euro for a year is a really good deal.

The Pompidou Centre is a center for modern art in the city (which happens to have a surprisingly amazing view from its top floor), so in addition to the modern art museum, they have tons of movie screenings, dance performances and other things going on there. With the pass, I get in free to most things, and if not free, at a severely discounted price. If only they were somehow connected to the Théatre Mogador, so I could afford a ticket to see Swan Lake…all I need is one – I’m not even going to bother trying to convince someone else to fork out 60 euro for a ticket to the ballet.

After buying my pass I went upstairs to check out the Yves Klein exhibit (yeah, that guy). I still think the whole “developed a new color” thing is baloney, but after seeing the whole exhibit, I have a new respect for the guy. He’s pretty much nuts, but at the same time really cool. All of the paintings in the exhibit were completely monochromatic and either International Klein Blue (IKB), rose or gold – like with actual gold leaf. There are all these crazy quotes from him written on the walls, like (paraphrased due to poor memory) “Monochrome is the only way to paint truth,” and other such decrees.

This week I also had a date with a French boy – he’s from Sciences Po and smart and nice and perfect. The date was kind of perfect too – we walked along the Seine for two hours and waited in front of the Eiffel Tower at 23h to see it sparkling, and he gave me a rose and we spoke in French the whole time. After we parted ways though, and I was walking back across the river, I started crying. I just realized that I really miss home – especially the people at home, and I am in no way ready to start dating French boys.

Luckily, I didn’t feel homesick for long – as I was crossing rue Saint-Honoré, I inexplicably bumped into two middle-aged men in costume. One was dressed as an elf, in green tights, elfin boots and a hat. The other was a polar bear. They weren’t talking to each other or laughing or anything – just silently, seriously strolling up Pyramides in front of me. Needless to say, that put me in a much better mood.

Now I just need to figure out a way to communicate (in French) that I need to take a few steps back from both the boy who’s supposed to be coming over later tonight with a bottle of wine, and the other boy who wants to cook me a romantic French dinner tomorrow night. Maybe I’ll just tell them that I already have a man in my life – his name is Georges, he loves me, and he’d totally fight them if I needed him to. He’s a little outmatched for height, but he can deliver a mean bite to the thigh.

Today I woke up with a need for a pain au chocolat that could not be satisfied by any old boulangerie. This was a craving so strong that I apparently felt it was necessary to trek all the way up to Pigalle to the boulangerie that has the best pain au chocolat I’ve found so far in this city. (I walked to cancel out the pastry).

When I got there, however, I was distressed to see an empty tray sitting behind the sign that read “pain au chocolat – 90¢.” Luckily I made it there in time to purchase the last grand pain au chocolat left in the shop. It was massive – probably three times the size of a regular one, but I’d walked all the way to Pigalle for it and was not about to leave empty-handed.



With my monster pastry safely hanging from my arm in a plastic bag, I stepped into a corner of the tiny shop to wait for my sandwich (cheese, chicken and veggies on a 6-grain whole-wheat baguette. Yum…this boulangerie is awesome in so many ways). While I was waiting, I watched probably seven disappointed people come for a pain au chocolat and leave forlornly with nothing.

Apparently I’m not the only one to have discovered this tasty endroit. I was glad to find out that my sense of taste is still leading me true, and I haven’t been swept up in some kind of puppy love with French pastries. After about a week of living here, you discover the startling difference between a boulangerie and a good boulangerie, so I was happy to note that my favorite is also the favorite of quite a few legitimately French people.

When I exited with my sandwich at about 15h, I left a crowd of three young guys who’d ridden up on mopeds and sworn to wait (still in their helmets) until 16h for the new batch of pastries to come out of the ovens.

I think maybe 70 percent of my affection for this place comes from the quality of their truly superior baked goods, and the rest is from just how darn homey this place is. They actually decorated cookies and treats for Halloween, and now the windows are filled with fall-colored leaves and autumn squashes. It helps that the mom-aged woman who runs it is always sporting glasses and an apron tied over a pastel-colored polar fleece jacket. I walk through the door and feel like I’m coming home from school for my afternoon snack. I want to give her a hug when I leave.

Instead I eat my sandwich as I walk, and save my treat to eat with tea back in the kitchen of my apartment. My original intent was to unwrap the pastry and cut it in three parts, to save and enjoy later. I got as far as cutting it into three…but I definitely ate the whole thing. It was so worth the stomach ache.

Add five more berets to the official tally. White seems to be the most popular color, but in the 11 that I’ve counted in the past two days, I’ve observed a wide range of colors. Once I get my camera back, I’ll do some serious beret-stalking.

Picture credit to Luc Viatour.

Living alone is a way different experience from any living arrangement I’ve had before. I love it, but every once in a while I have an odd moment when I realize that living alone really is living toute seule.

Today, for example, I realized that it is not at all difficult to go a day without speaking to anyone. This morning I woke up and went for a run, then after a shower and bundling up into some warm clothes (it’s hovering around freezing here in the mornings and at night) I walked down to Sciences Po to print out a paper and take care of a few errands. Then I went grocery shopping, and it was paying for my groceries at Monoprix that I realized I hadn’t spoken a word all day.

I smiled at the checker when she greeted me, but I didn’t actually speak a word out loud until I went to nanny at 17h. I was surrounded by people all day long, in the streets, at Sciences Po, at the grocery store, and I managed to not have spoken to any of them.

In my silence I was able to observe that Parisians actually do wear berets. I was quite shocked to spot my first one (forest green) on a middle-aged woman today. Until now, I’d only seen them on men in army gear holding automatic weapons. Now that it’s cold though, with frost on the street in the mornings and an icy smell to the air, I guess it’s beret weather. I was honestly really surprised – the image of a French person in a beret seemed so incredibly clichéd that I couldn’t imagine that they’d actually make an appearance in Paris.

I saw five people in berets on my walk to and from Sciences Po – three on women mom-aged and older, one on a chic dark-haired girl about my age, and one on an older man. I’ve started a mental tally. Who knows, maybe I will end up coming home with a pile of flat wool hats after all. They probably won’t say “Paris” in rhinestones, though, like most of the styles available in the souvenir shops lining rue de Rivoli.

It feels like I left for Barcelona when it was fall in Paris, and now that I’m back it’s very suddenly winter. The temperature took a sudden plunge last Wednesday – when I left for the airport on Thursday morning it was – 4 degrees Celsius, and it hasn’t gotten much warmer. I turned on the heater in my apartment for the first time last week and accidentally blew out the power in my apartment, but Amelia (who was over for dinner) and I found the fuse box relatively quickly and got the lights back on after a few minutes.

Since I left Paris the day after Toussaint, I also returned to find the city dressed up for the Christmas holidays. I found this kind of odd until Christina realized that with no Thanksgiving to celebrate, Christmas is the next big holiday after Toussaint. Still it feels odd to be seeing Christmas lights and Christmas tree ornaments already covering the city. I guess it’s probably the same in the U.S. It always seems like Costco has decorations for sale beginning midway through September, and I’m sure stores like Target and K-Mart are gearing up for this long commercial season.

The nanny kids were so tickled by this picture – they thought it was so cool that we can go cut down our own Christmas tree every year.


I still can’t believe it’s November already. I’m trying to forget about Thanksgiving – I think I’ll feel more homesick with some kind of sad French imposter holiday than if I don’t pay it any attention at all. I kind of felt that way about Halloween – it was fun to get dressed up, but it was so different from Halloween at home that celebrating it Paris-style just felt kind of sad. Even without Thanksgiving, I’ll be 21 in a little over a month. A week after my birthday my aunt Penny will be in Paris, and a few days later Christina will be staying with me again while she prepares to fly home out of Charles de Gaulle. I’m not completely sure what happened to 2006.

Shout-out to Thanksgiving!


Right now I’m sitting in the lobby of the Académie Américaine de Danse de Paris waiting for Ella to finish with her jazz class. Her mom thought it would be a big pain for us to have to take a bus or metro in the cold and dark at 19h, so we take a taxi to the 6ème every Monday. I am not complaining – it’s cold out there!

Anyway, my inadvertent vow of silence only did end up lasting until I went downstairs to nanny. I think I might be a little lonely living all alone in a strange city if I didn’t have a pseudo-family to welcome me home, to worry if I’m not around, to say goodnight to before I go to bed.

I’m used to coming home from trips to be greeted at the airport by someone from my family – it was weird landing at Beauvais with Christina and finding our own solitary way home before collapsing into bed.

Today though, I went downstairs and got the longest knee-hug of my life from Georges before being swarmed by Ella, Zoë and Paul, all clamoring to tell me all the news of their week. Paul tried a new flavor of Hubba Bubba yesterday (lemon), Zoë wants to get a pet gerbil, and Ella can’t wait for the February break when the whole family is jetting down to the Seychelle Islands to escape the frigid Paris winter.

Even Cassie had to compete with the chattering kids to tell me that she almost had a heart attack when she read Georges the book Chicka Chicka ABC and he started pointing to letters saying “G – Georges!” “H – Ollllie!” “Z – ZahZah” (Zoë). I started teaching him the letters in the book the week before break, and C (who didn’t know about it) was pretty shocked and excited that he’d remembered what I taught him. A told B and B told C…Meet me at the top of the coconut tree! Chicka chicka boom boom, will there be enough room?

It made me feel a lot more at home in my single-girl apartment to be welcomed back by people who missed me.

As little of the Spanish language that I know and can understand, I can follow even less Catalan. Before heading to Barcelona Thursday morning, I thought Catalan was just a slightly different dialect of Spanish.

Barcelona has palm trees!


I had no clue that it was officially its own language. I wasn’t worried about the language barrier at all before heading to Spain (or at least, I was a lot less apprehensive about it than when I went to Munich) because so many words are so similar to the French language. There are a lot of Spanish-speakers at Sciences Po and living in France (and the U.S., of course), and I’ve heard enough Spanish in my life that I can usually figure out what’s going on when people are speaking to me, even if I can’t communicate much.

Last Monday I stopped by Bretano’s Franco-Anglophone bookstore (just across l’avenue de l’Opera from me) to buy a little Barcelona guidebook so I’d have a few maps, some key phrases and an idea of what Christina and I should do while there. I was browsing the guidebooks looking at English versions, but I somehow ended up buying one in French. The funny thing is that I didn’t even realize anything was amiss until halfway through the page on the Sagrada Familia – I guess I’m so used to having to read French that it didn’t seem weird to me to be reading about Barcelona in French.

Sagrada Familia


I didn’t bother to exchange it because I understood it just fine, and it actually wasn’t at all confusing going from English to French to Catalan in the phrasebook section. At Sciences Po you have the option of taking a second language instead of an elective (my art history class), and while I’d considered starting Spanish, I opted against it because I thought it would be too confusing going through French as an intermediary language. After this weekend though, I really don’t think it would have been that bad, so I think I’m going to start taking Spanish during spring semester.

Anyway, once in Spain, I turned out to have a lot more Spanish saved up in my mind than I’d thought – I was formulating some simple and terribly constructed (but apparently comprehensible) sentences and remembered all the basics like please, thank-you, good bye, where are the bathrooms, etc. I’d expected to be able to understand okay, but not know how to say anything. It turned out to be completely opposite. Even if Catalan is a different language, most people from Catalonia understand regular Spanish too – for someone who’s only ever heard the Spanish that has crept up the West Coast from Mexico, though, Catalan was like nothing I’d ever heard.

All the menus, street signs, directions and brochures had everything written in both Catalan and Spanish, and it was eye-opening comparing the two. Christina and I spent most of Saturday afternoon at the Museu Picasso, and all of the cards next to the paintings (with the year, template, who donated, etc.) were in both languages. I mostly understood the Spanish half – I mean, niño is pretty easy to remember – but in Catalan, it turns into nen. Kind of similar, but to someone who has never actually studied either language, it was really confusing. Instead of “por favor” for please, it was “si us plau.” Christina and I realized pretty quickly that we were going to have no idea what was going on, so we figured out a few key phrases – “I don’t speak Spanish,” and “Do you speak English or French?” in particular.

Most people we asked for help in our butchered Cata-Spanish assumed we were French which kind of tickled us – until we remembered that France borders Catalonia, and it was probably just because a huge number of foreigners in Barcelona are from France. Also because of the proximity, more people spoke and understood French than English, so we ended up just telling a lot of people that we were French and going from there.

When we found someone who didn’t speak French or English, we used our limited Spanish vocabulary and some really wild charades. Outside the Museu Picasso we were trying to find an atm so we pulled out bank cards and cash and were pretending to get money out of an invisible machine. Pointing and grimacing works well too.

Since my flight to Barcelona left from Paris Beauvais airport an hour and a half outside of Paris on Thursday morning, and with transportation to the bus station I would have had to wake up at 4am anyway, I ended up staying up all night Wednesday. This wasn’t my original intention, but I had an art history paper to complete and ran out of time for sleeping. I met Christina at the Barcelona airport, where we took a bus and a metro to our hostel. Thanks to this website, we ended up with a really big clean hostel right in the center of the Barri Gotic.

The hostel was part of a group of 4 hostels throughout Barcelona, and because there was such a large staff and they have so many people staying there, there were organized activities and outings every day. That’s how we ended up on an English walking tour of the architecture of the city, which was really cool. We also spent quite a lot of time wandering the city on our own, which I always think is the best way to see a place. It was cool to have Christina as a travel buddy because our styles are really similar and we were both happy to walk for hours and see everything we could, even on no sleep and sore feet.

A few angles of Gaudí (First Casa Batlló, then La Perdrera):



Apparently Barcelona was the port of entry for the first chocolate that ever came to Europe, so there’s a big chocolate museum attached to this cooking school for patisseries and bombons (nope, that’s not spelled wrong, it’s Catalan for bon-bon). Needless to say, we consumed a lot of chocolate in Catalonia! We also had our share of sangria, tapas and paella, which are all specialties of the region. We had a disturbing encounter with some anchovy-stuffed olives, but other than that, everything we tried was delicious.

On Saturday we walked past a reasonably-priced Mexican restaurant, and it sounded so good that we went back for dinner. We felt a little ridiculous being Americans eating in a Mexican restaurant in Spain – we were afraid people would think we were confused and thought Spain and Mexico were one and the same. We got over our feelings of awkwardness when our food arrived – it was delicious. We ate at a Parisian Mexican restaurant with Amelia for her birthday last weekend, which was okay, but nothing compared to this. Oh it was so delicious – Europeans generally do not enjoy spicy foods, and it’s really hard to find anything spicy here. At the chocolate museum there’s a whole display about how chocolate had to be modified from the spicy energy drink of the Aztecs to a sweet and perfumed beverage for Europeans, who couldn’t handle the spice in the original version.

We also checked out the Museu Picasso which came highly recommended, and we were not disappointed. Pablo Picasso actually lived in Barcelona for quite a few years, so most of the art in the museum was personally donated by him and his widow. There was an entire room full of erotic sketches drawn by Picasso when he was in his early twenties. Christina and I were very surprised to stumble into this room as these are generally not the things you think of when you picture the art of Pablo Ruiz Picasso. The museum was just really really cool because it charted all the different stages of his art through all the stages of his life – it was really informative in addition to having cool art to look at.

Sunday morning we had to catch a bus back to the Girona Barcelona airport at 4am, so we decided to just stay up the entire night again. We decided to be economical (trashy) and bought litros of boxed wine (for 1,5 each!) at a convenience store, and drank them while walking down to the waterfront. It was actually kind of a scary experience, because for some reason strange people on the street are very attracted to girls holding boxes of wine.



We were nearly attacked by a blistery-lipped old woman who was following us crying “Vino! Vino!” She really wanted a drink, and we really did not want to share, and we ended up having to run into a restaurant to hide from her. After her we had not one but two more guys stop us and ask for a drink! As Christina said, “If they had their own cups, I would be happy to share, but I didn’t come to Barcelona to get foreign diseases!”

Once at the waterfront, we walked out along this dock to a really large and fancy shopping mall. It’s a typical mall, except that the roof is covered with an assortment of bars and discotheques that are closed during the day. We walked up to the second floor of the deserted mall and to the foot of the staircase leading to the roof where security guards were taking a single cover charge for all the clubs on the roof (we’re girls though, we didn’t have to pay). Once on the roof, you have probably nine different bars and clubs to choose from, and as fun as it was, we couldn’t forget that we were in a mall.

We left the club at 2:30, walked back to our hostel to check out, and began the hike to the bus station still in our heels and going out make-up. After many long hours of bus-airplane-bus-metro, we made it back to my apartment in freezing cold Paris. After hot showers and warm soup, we pretty much just passed out for the rest of the day.

Barcelona was a drastic culture change from Paris – it’s a lot more like the West Coast of the U.S. – it’s warm and on the Mediterranean and the people are warm, friendly, relaxed and are the most granola of any I’ve encountered so far in Europe. It was like Seattle – or Berkeley, maybe. I felt at home among the dreadlocks, hemp and clouds of pot smoke in the parks.

All in all, Barcelona was awesome – the whole time though, I just kept thinking “enjoy this now.” This was the kind of traveling that is really only for the young and extremely energetic – going on a few hours of sleep for an entire weekend, sleeping in a 14-bed dormitory in a youth hostel, drinking wine from boxes, walking all day long for three days in a row, being afraid to touch any surfaces in the bathroom – it was exhausting. It’s only been four days but it kind of felt like we were returning from war when we stumbled through the door of my studio. It’s thrilling no doubt, but I’m pretty sure this is the only time in my life when my body is still spry enough to forgive me for what I’ve been putting it through.



•• By the way, Ryan Air has the worst security I've ever been checked by. I made it onto the airplane with my pepper spray (it was an accident, I forgot to take it out of my purse) and no questions asked.

Halloween in Paris was a truly odd experience. For weeks I’ve been told that Halloween is out of style here, that nobody dresses up, that it’s really an American holiday. At the same time though, store windows were filling up with pumpkins and witches, and all the ads for EuroDisney have featured kids in skeleton costumes riding roller coasters. I was getting two conflicting impressions and even now, after seeing EuroHalloween with my own eyes, I’m not quite sure how to classify it.

Trick-or-treating doesn’t exist here, so Cassie stages a candy hunt for her kids every year. They dress up in costumes and search through the garden of their “house in the South” while she bakes a pumpkin pie and they attempt to recreate American Halloween. C hates it though – all through dinner yesterday she was telling me how much she hates Halloween here. “Halloween is not French,” she kept repeating. She thinks the spirit of the holiday is what can’t be exported, so the sad attempts to achieve it are entirely commercial.

That explains the store windows. The Disney Store on the Champs Elysées has been decorated for weeks, and is the only place I ever saw selling anything like a costume – though I somehow couldn’t bring myself to attempt to squeeze into an overpriced, pre-made “Halloween Stitch” outfit. I haven’t missed dressing up for Halloween in…well ever, and I wasn’t about to break the tradition this year just because I’m not in the U.S.

I have very limited costume-assembling supplies here though, and the only thing I could come up with was a pirate costume again (a repeat from freshman year) – pirates are easy, you just need a scarf, fluffy layers and a lot of weird jewelry. All I wanted to buy was an eyepatch, but it proved to be impossible to find. I finally thought I’d be clever and go to a pharmacy – where I managed to secure one. Sadly, when I opened up the package to put it on, I discovered a massive clear plastic cup with holes and an adjustable white band that covered nearly half my face. Not pirate-y.



Luckily I had my sparkly scull scarf, because otherwise I would have just looked like a hobo. At home you can’t go anywhere at anytime on Halloween without seeing a dozen costumed people – the whole day is festive. Here, it was just another day.

I at least expected to see a few costumes at night because come one, who doesn’t love a themed party or club night? I had to babysit until 23h, so once I was off I threw together my pirate ensemble and ran down to La Scala, the site of the Sciences Po Halloween party. There were quite a few people in the street on the way there, but in completely normal clothes – I got a lot of weird looks sprinting down Pyramides dressed as a pirate. Handily for me, La Scala is a 5 minute walk from my apartment. Straight down Pyramides and left at Rivoli, then bam, there it was.



There was a huge line waiting to get into the party, and out of the maybe 70 people in it, there were about 15 of us in costume. When I say “in costume” though, I’m being generous – most of the costumes were regular clothes with a pair of bunny ears or devil horns. The four of us, a pirate, a 20s girl, a yoga teacher and a jazzercise teacher were some of the most dressed up people. My 10-minute costume was the most elaborate I saw all night.

It's like Where's Waldo...but with Where's the Halloween Spirit?



The whole thing was just really odd. The club was decorated because it was a themed party, and people in costume got a free drink at the bar – I would have thought a free cocktail would have been enough to motivate people to do something festive, but no. Anyone in anything beyond an antennae headband was clearly American, and we stuck out like crazy people.

Aha! There's ONE!


It was still crazy fun, and I always love to dress up, but the night made me really miss Halloween at home! I love holidays and this October 31st just didn’t really satisfy my cravings for festivity.

A sea of people...and none in costume!


Anyway, now it’s November in Paris, and the entire city is celebrating Toussaint. Well not celebrating – observing. Yep, All Saint’s Day is a national holiday here (France is still very influenced by its Catholic upbringing), and Paris is dead quiet. This day of rest would seem a little more apt if Halloween had been wild in the slightest. Oh well. I got to wear a costume, eat some pumpkin pie and watch the Halloween episode of Spongebob Squarepants with Paul, so I got to do a little celebrating at least.

This is how Halloween should be:


I’m flying to Barcelona early tomorrow morning to meet Christina, so I’ll be nonexistent until at least Sunday. Happy Toussaint.

Well it's Halloween in France (and everywhere else too, I guess) and I'm eating pumpkin pie for breakfast. It feels like the day after Thanksgiving – wake up, ignore the cereal and head straight for the desserts.

I found out yesterday in class that Sciences Po had cancelled all classes for today. Tomorrow they're cancelled because it's Toussaint and a national (religious) holiday, but today I'm not sure. I think there was something political going on, but I didn't pay that great of attention.

So it's Halloween and there are no classes officially until Thursday (although I never have Thursday classes). The Association Sportive of Sciences Po is throwing a huge Halloween party at a club on Rivoli tonight, which I think is a combination of a shout-out to all the international students and just a really good excuse to have a party. The sports association kind of reminds me of ASUW, if the officers were allowed to spike every function.

Partly because of Halloween this week is feeling more and more like a shout-out to America. For one, Christina is on a week-long Toussaint vacation (no such thing for us Sciences Po students) from the University of Nantes, so she's been chilling here since Friday. She left this morning for two nights in Brussels with another friend from UW (I thought I had classes to attend today and tomorrow) and the two of us are meeting in the Barcelona airport Thursday morning.

Saturday was Amelia's 21st birthday – so anticlimatic in France where you can drink when you're 16 and buy alcohol at 18 – officially. There are the same-old "don't serve alcohol to minors" signs up in all the bars, but it's not like anyone's going to stop you here if you're underage. You can drink your illegal alcohol strolling down the street if you want, and nobody's going to say anything.

So Amelia's official birthday was Saturday – the three of us decided to forget the fact that we all could have legally gone out on Friday too, and went for a Seattle-style 21 run. Well as "Seattle" as a 21-run can be that takes you through the Marais and around Place de la Bastille. We've all been craving good Mexican food basically since we've been here, so we combed a few guidebooks and found a restaurant that was actually recommended. It wasn't bad, but nothing like what you could get in the States. It's funny because I never thought I would miss food from the U.S. while living in France. It's not like I miss the Red Robins and the Oreos, but I miss the (inexpensive!) diversity of food available. If you live here, you'd better damn well like steak and croissants.

Au bar sans nom.


Sunday the three of us spent the day wandering Paris, eventually ending at the top of the Arc de Triomphe to look at the lights of the city. It was really beautiful, and so funny yet perfect to be seeing it with two of my best friends from Seattle (in the midst of the 15 groping couples). Most of the time I feel adjusted to the fact that I live in Paris, but it felt a little weird to be at the top of l'Arc de Triomphe saying, okay "See the statues on top of l'Opéra? Now look right, that's where I live." I feel like I shouldn't be able to look for my home from the top of the Arc.

You can kind of see the ghost of the Eiffel Tower behind us...it was a lot more spectacular not through a camera.


Afterward Christina and I found this store remarkably like a Sweet Factory (bad decision!) and made ourselves sick eating stale candy in the movie theatre where we'd gone to see "Last Kiss," Zach Braff's second movie. It wasn't bad – the relationships seemed pretty authentic, but I think he needs more practice to hone his talents.

Yesterday I had class all day, but in my free hour I went to seek out "The Real McCoy," the American import grocery store near the Eiffel Tower. The products featured included 8 euro boxes of Pop Tarts, 7.5 bags of Ghiradelli chocolate chips, 2.5 can of real Diet Coke (I'm pretty sure I'm going to cave and go back for one), 6 euro jars of Skippy Peanut Butter and 5 euro cans of pumpkin pie filling. After spending 9 euro on 15 oz. of pumpkin and 12 oz. of condensed milk, C, A and I were ready to recreate the U.S.A.

Yeah, this condensed milk? Five euro. So worth it.


We only encountered a few problems – for one, you can't buy U.S. style pie dough – they have dough for tartes, but it's really light and kind of turns into a croissent when baked. There are no ground cloves available here, so we had to grind our own with my mortar and pestle – it worked okay, but eating clove chunks in your pie is not incredibly appetizing. I also don't own a pie plate, but we made do with an oval casserole dish and the croissent-y crust. The combination of these factors made us a little apprehensive about the quality of our finished pie, but it turned out amazingly delicious.

Somehow the casserole dish and my tiny oven that sits on the counter worked together to create evenly-baked magic. The crust was not quite pie crust, but still delicious. It was the best pumpkin pie Paris could have given us. It's actually probably better that we couldn't create a completely American pumpkin pie in Paris – if it was too authentic it would have made us too homesick. Instead, we were quite thrilled with our pumpkin...casserole. So thrilled that I just finished off the last piece for my breakfast.

Yummm




•• Still don't have my appereil back. All photo credits go to Christina's camera.

I’ve been spending a lot of time traipsing back and forth over various bridges these days. This is due in large part to the fact that Sciences Po is a 15 minute walk from me on foot and across the Seine from my apartment (the metro is not direct and takes at least 25 minutes).

I usually traverse Pont Royal when I’m heading to school in the mornings. My route takes me straight down rue des Pyramides, between the jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre and straight across the bridge down rue du Bac on the rive gauche. On the way home from school I walk straight up rue des Saints Pères and across Pont du Carrousel, which leads me straight through the glass pyramid-filled courtyard of the Louvre.

Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of Pont Royal without me looking like a fool on it:


I’ve also been spending a bit of time on Pont Neuf with my art class, which connects the Eastern façade of the Palais du Louvre with the tip of Île de la Cité and the 6ème arondissement. Every bridge has its own character and history – I think there are something like 36 of them. There’s the sunset bridge, the romantic bridge, the make-out bridge, the political activists’ favorite bridge and probably countless others that I haven’t yet picked up on.

Pont Neuf is supposedly the best make-out spot in Paris, but I’m not sure I believe it. The name means “new bridge” which is kind of funny because it’s actually the oldest bridge still standing in Paris. According to my art history professor, it was named such because when Henri III started building at the end of the 16ème siècle it was the first bridge to be built without houses and buildings on it. This was supposed to present an unobstructed view of the Louvre so the citizens of Paris would be sure to never forget who held the power.

Pont Neuf and its alcoves:


I think it’s supposed to be a good make-out spot because it’s lined with little alcoves and benches, but in my experience it’s more the bridge where you’re most likely to be sexually harassed. Rather than couples stealing kisses in the alcoves, they’re filled with obnoxious guys yelling at every girl who passes them. It was on Pont Neuf where a particularly hairy guy who was probably older than my dad asked, “You want me to give it to you?”

A much more romantic bridge can be found just to the west of Pont Neuf – a pedestrian traffic only bridge called Pont des Arts. On any nice day (and some not-so-nice ones too) the bridge is filled with couples having picnics or bottles of wine. At times it’s hard to walk across, the bridge deck is so filled with people in love.

Pont des Arts is also often the site of political statements. Right now the architecture students at l’École des Beaux Arts are angry and protesting because they don’t have enough space to learn in – according to the fliers they’ve strewn around the city, there are something like 11 classrooms for the 1.300 students in the program. Last weekend they set up these sculptures built out of cardboard boxes in protest. Unfortunately for them, it started pouring rain just a few hours after they’d set up, and the boxes were mush by early afternoon.

Passerelle Solferino is a favorite bridge of the few street runners of Paris – the bridge has a normal deck on top (pedestrians only), and underneath it has a long flight of stairs arching up from water level to the bridge deck and back down to water level on the other side of the Seine. A popular running route (as popular as a running route could possibly be in Paris) is to lap the jardin des Tuileries, then run the Solferino stairs to the rive gauche, and run along the Voie sur Berge. On weekdays, this is dangerous because the street is a busy highway with no sidewalks, but on Sundays the street is closed to cars, and this is where the runners of Paris can be found. (Though I still haven’t determined whether people run on any other days of the week here).

Passerelle Solferino is also known as the sunset bridge, because this is where crowds of strangers come together every evening to watch the sun set behind the Grand Palais. Watching the sunset-watchers from my spot on the right bank of the Seine (preferably with friends and a bottle of wine) is one of my favorite things in Paris.

Grand Palais


I don’t think I have a favorite bridge yet, but I’m still looking. I have about 20 more that I’ve never set foot on, so I’ll need a little time to assess before choosing. So far though, I rather like Solferino.

As it’s been more than two weeks since I last did any laundry, and I really didn’t bring that many clothes to France with me to begin with, I’ve left with a rather bizarre assortment of vêtements to wear these past few days.

Luckily, I’m in Paris – I’m beginning to understand that as long as you look like you put a bit of conscious thought into what you’re wearing, you’re good to go. The city is a capital of fashion, no doubt – but “fashion” is such an all-encompassing term, and Paris is such a diverse city that à la mode is more of a state of mind. What seems to be important here is having respect for clothing and style – less important are the clothes you wear or your personal style.

This is why I haven’t worn my North Face fleece since landing at Charles de Gaulle, and why I’ll only wear my hooded sweatshirts for running or sleeping – having a “scrub” day here seems almost disrespectful. Not to mention the fact that I’d look like an idiot (and be instantly recognized as a tourist) in a hooded sweatshirt here.

This is also why I could get away with throwing together the dregs of my wardrobe into one mish-mashed outfit and feeling totally normal going out in green cargo pants tucked into brown boots, a purple tee-shirt, a black zipper sweater and a grey wool scarf – that’s the other thing, there’s a lot of mixing of black and brown among the über-fashionable here. As long as you look like you gave it a little consideration first, you can pretty much wear whatever the heck you want.

There are a few things though, that no young Parisienne (or American poser) should be without these days. Combine them any way you like, but make sure you have at least a few of these staples.

• First and most importantly – your skinny jeans. You need at the minimum one pair of dark denim skinnies (coup cigarette is okay – there’s no need to look like you’re wearing jean-patterned spandex) and one pair of black. Flares are just not where it’s at these days, and in the cold and rainy fall weather, skinnies are actually a lot more practical – at least you don’t come home with your pants soaked from the hem to the knee from stepping through puddles all day.

• Next you need a pair of boots (into which you will be tucking your skinny jeans). Any color is really okay, but brown is the current popular favorite – and as I mentioned, black and brown go together quite happily in Paris, so it’s cool to wear them with your black jeans. Flats are the most popular option for walking around the city, but heels are good too – just steer clear of anything too high or too Western – the last thing you want to do in Paris centre is look like your style icon is Jessica Simpson.

• You also need a pair of ballerines – ballet flats (not rain-friendly!). Repetto is the preferred and most authentic marque, because they also provide all the ballet shoes for l’Opéra, but only if you can afford to drop 120 euro on a pair of flimsy (but oh-so-beautiful) ballet shoes. Every other shoe store in the city will offer an acceptable alternative. I will confess that I have a pair from Repetto – but they were last season’s color on super sale at Galaries Lafayette, so I can look like I actually belong in the 2ème arondissement without having to match all the Chanel-clad mamans for spending.

• A pair of high-top Converse All-Stars is also a must – to be worn with style, not for bumming around in with jeans and a pullover sweatshirt.

• Tights are important so you can wear skirts and dresses through the change in seasons. Not so much the footless tights that have been so popular at home, though you’ll see them once in a while. Footed tights are less busy-looking and thus much more chic. On the subject of footless tights, the distressed miniskirts usually paired with them are not cool here. I feel like a hillbilly wearing my cropped jean skirt, even when I pair it with my dark tights and boots. Ripped up denim is a big faux pas – not chic at all.

• Instead of your destroyed jean skirt, try a sweater-dress. Yep, a thick woolly sweater cut as a mini-dress and worn belted with tights and either ballerines or boots. The more of a Frency-French waif you are, the cuter you’ll look.

• For a coat, you’ll want either a leather jacket if your style is more hip, or a trench if your style is more classic. Since I have neither, I go with the Eddie Bauer down vest and the “I like to go camping” look.

• Parisian girls keep their hair in either long gorgeous waves or short and chic cuts. There’s no shoulder-length or in-between here. Their eyebrows are perfect and their hips are…well…nonexistent.

• Slung around these teeny tiny hips are big belts – the most popular on the streets is the D&G leather and bronze. Go for the Dolce & Gabbana if it’s in your budget, but if not, knock-offs abound on every other street corner. A tip – anyone who knows D&G will be able to spot a fake in a second, so if you go that route, wear it with some attitude please. With a good sense of humor you’re impervious to judgment.

• For style street cred, you need a pair of headphones snaking down from your ears to your bag – iPods aren’t particularly big here, so an MP3 player of any mark will do. It’s important to keep the actual player in your purse or pocket so you have your hands free to surf the metro. Even if you’re a big fat faker and the headphones lead to nothing but the inside of your purse, you’ve achieved the “I’m Parisian, I know my way around the city and nothing’s can bug me” look.

• The final and most important wardrobe staple is an infinite number of scarves. Pashminas, wool shawls, sparkly patterned scarves, may they fill your closet diversely and numerously. The scarves are the single most vital addition you can make to your wardrobe. You’re probably going to be sporting one every day (if you’re really into the “I’m Parisian” façade, so make sure you have a good variety.

It’s easy to just buy the trendy basics, but it’s important to wear them with flair. This might depend on your arondissement, your budget or your personality. Yes, each neighborhood has a trademark style (at least according to an article I found in French Elle). The 9ème and 10ème arondissements host the edgy rock-chic look, while the 3ème and 11ème are bobo chic. The 18ème and 19ème are ethnic chic, and the residents of the 8ème and 16ème value les grandes marques – Chanel, Gucci, Prada, Dior, etc. The real fashionistas lurk in the 6ème and 7ème, and those of us who inhabit the 2ème are apparently fresh and hip.

I’ve exhausted my tips for autumn 2006 – go forth and be French. Updates to come for winter and spring and summer.

• By the way, black nail polish is just as big here as it apparently is in the U.S. If you are chic (or wish you were) your fingernails have got to be jet black.

•• I just got this email from one of the Franco-American associations at Sciences Po. I thought it was pretty funny:




" Transatlantique, l’association franco-américaine de Sciences Po, anime la vie étudiante en favorisant :
- les rencontres entre étudiants des deux continents
- les débats d’idées sur des thèmes US
- la promotion de la culture et des arts Américains
- …and some good ol’ American fun !

* Au programme *

• avec nos soirées et nos happy hours, retrouvez la fête au rythme Américain. This year, Sciences Po is the hottest party university !
• événement inédit à Sciences Po, notre American Week vous fera vous sentir chez vous : l’esprit « college » avec brownies, barbecues … and so on …

Share moments, share ideas, share a drink …

and find new French friends !



Ce message et toutes les pièces jointes qu'il contient sont confidentiels et établis à l'intention exclusive de ses destinataires. Toute utilisation de ce message non conforme à sa destination, toute diffusion ou toute publication, totale ou partielle, est interdite. Si vous recevez ce message par erreur, merci d'en avertir immédiatement l'expéditeur et de le détruire. Sciences Po décline toute responsabilité au titre de ce message s'il a été altéré, déformé ou falsifié ou si son émetteur a falsifié son identité ou son statut au sein de Sciences Po. This message and all attachments are confidential and intended solely for the addressees. Any use not in accord with its purpose, any dissemination or disclosure, either whole or partial, is prohibited. If you receive this message in error, please immediately notify the sender and delete it. Sciences Po shall not be liable for this message if altered, changed or falsified or if the sender has falsified his identity or his statute within Sciences Po."





I'm not sure if this is meant to entice the party-hearty Americans or what, but I'm pretty sure Sciences Po is not particularly famous for its apparent status as the "hottest party university." The sports association throws some pretty wild ones, but still.

It’s officially become fall here. I started to pick up the clues when the weather took a sudden change for the colder and my daily Seine runs began to lead me through crunchy piles of red-gold leaves. Boots, scarves and trenches have become the daily uniform, and the men who sell trashcan-roasted corn on street corners have traded their cobs for chestnuts. Yes, it’s fall in Paris.

It’s also October 24th – a Tuesday and the two-month anniversary of my Parisian invasion. I guess it’s time for a check-up. A month ago R and I were still living near Gare de l’Est in the September apartment. We were in the middle of the stage d’integration at Sciences Po and while I had at least secured my nanny job, neither of us had any clue what our years would bring.

Tired and overwhelmed on our first day in Paris:


Good thing we brought these guys:


Now we’ve made it almost to November and we both have places to call home, French bank accounts (complete with bank cards that read Mlle before our names), cell phone plans and (almost) our cartes de séjour (they’re being processed). We have classes and homework (!) and R finally bought her bike. We're settled – or at least further along in the settling process, and Paris and I are pretty much in love.*

I have a courtyard:


Two months feels both long and short – I feel like I’ve lived here forever, but when I look at the calendar I feel a little uneasy. I’m still waiting for the “out of my element” part to happen. Where’s the culture shock? Why haven’t I been lost and confused and homesick and depressed? Of course I’ve had bad days here – getting mildly accosted on the Champs Elysées wasn’t exactly a highlight of my year. Neither was losing the first apartment Rachael and I wanted, or having nobody to hang out with last Wednesday.

Bad days are nothing though – there are plenty of bad days in Seattle. What I’m waiting for is that wild fear – that “what am I doing here,” and “how am I going to survive for an entire year?” Maybe that fear will never find me – or maybe it will. Maybe two months isn’t long enough to estimate anything – maybe I’m still on my honeymoon with Paris. According the study abroad orientation held at UW last spring, the four-month mark is where it’ll get a little rocky.

Holidays and anniversaries can be rough for newlyweds – and I’m about to hit two pretty significant ones. My three-month mark happens to fall directly on Thanksgiving and four months will be Christmas Eve. Thanksgiving is going to be particularly rough – it’s been my favorite holiday for years and I can’t imagine it without Camp Indianola. All of my parents’ friends singing and dancing and cooking in the kitchen, the stormy beach, the circle of guitar-playing dads plus the musically-inclined of the younger generations. The knitting high school girls, the Kapla blocks, ‘Nola Ball, the pies and salads and bread and mashed potatoes, staying up late playing nertz and pick, the Johnny Appleseed song and how incredibly, disturbingly dirty the floor of the main lodge will be by the end of every evening. Thinking about missing it makes my heart hurt a little.

Every relationship has its ups and downs though – and every bad bit is obliviated by all of the very very good bits. Being able to jet off to Munich or Barcelona for a long weekend. Living three blocks from Coco Chanel's apartment and seeing l'Opéra from my window. Directing lost American tourists (and some lost French ones too!), having to explain to everyone I meet that no, I don't live near the White House. Buying my bread at boulangeries and running through the Jardin des Tuileries. Owning a Louvre membership. Owning an electric fan called "The AIr Force." Nutella.

Posing like statues is also important to happiness.


Having a healthy relationship means being willing to compromise – hey, I miss good spicy Mexican food – but today I was the first customer for lunch at L’as du Falafel (I was there at 11:45 between classes, and nobody eats before 13h here). This meant that my falafel was made fresh while I waited – I actually watched them ball up the dough (? Paste?) and fry it before filling my pita. It was the best falafel of my life.

And yeah, maybe I miss my dance girls in Tacoma – but I love love love my French hip-hop class. We had some more people join last week, so I’m no longer the only one who’s ever danced before. Today though, we learned a new piece to Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous Girl” (ha!) and midway through dancing it out, Flo stopped the music and had me come to the front to perform it (solo!) for everybody else. I probably should have been embarrassed (a normal person would have been), but I’m really just a big fat show-off so I felt special instead. (Yeah, I would probably have thrown stuff at me.)

What, I don’t have as many friends here yet as I do in Seattle? No matter, I’ve got a Georges who loves me (he can now recognize my footsteps and starts yelling for “Ollie!” as soon as I come over in the afternoons), and I’ve got Paris. Maybe we’re still honeymooning, but two months is a pretty solid foundation. There was no champagne for our anniversary (it’s a school night!), but we did celebrate with a crêpe nutella-banane (from who else but my favorite racist crêpe man). It was delicious.



* I’m pretty sure that Paris is a girl – a dark-haired one, very skinny and very chic.** It took me a while to decide on the gender of the city, but I think I’m definitely right – and I’m definitely harboring a pretty massive girl-crush. I think Seattle, on the other hand, is an outdoorsy guy – definitely wearing khaki shorts and hiking boots. I haven’t quite gauged what Tacoma is yet though.

** Yes we actually do refer to things as “chic” here. Like instead of “Oh, you look cute today!” it’s, “Oh you look so chic in that outfit!”

*** We found all these weird hooded (for cleaning? repair?) statues at Versailles. We didn't realize the pictures were so reminiscent of Abu Ghraib until after we'd taken them. This one is actually kind of scary.

As cool as it is just to be living in France in the midst of the 2007 presidential campaigns, it's even cooler to be living and attending school in the political center of the country.

Every week the Sciences Po newsletter informs us of more opportunities to immerse ourselves in French politics – and because we happen to be studying in the right city, some of those opportunities are really really cool. This weekend for example, Cité de la Reussite hosted a series of debates with themes pertaining to the upcoming elections and the current political scene in France.

The cool part was that one debate featured Nicholas Sarkozy and the other featured Ségolène Royal. And, thanks to my Sciences Po connections, I managed to score a ticket to the Ségolène debate this morning. I would have been really interested to attend the debate with Nicholas "George W. of France" Sarkozy too, but there were only 300 places available at each one and billets were disappearing with record speed.

The debate was held in the grand ampitheatre of la Sorbonne, and as I walked up to the building I passed through some really diverse crowds of people. There were scruffy-looking young people (who would have fit in easily at UW) passing out pamphlets in favor of Ségolène, FBI-style security guards at the doors and groups of political folk in suits standing around in small clusters. As I don't have a printer, I couldn't produce a paper copy of my e-ticket, so I just brought my computer with me and showed it to the security guards. The guy who checked mine apparently thought that was cute, because he winked at me and told me I was very organized. Yeah, I don't know.

I got to the debate pretty early so I was able to score a prime seat, but even so, there wouldn't have been a bad one. The grand ampitheatre is still small enough that a seat at the way back would have provided a fine view of the people on stage. The way the debate was set up was more of a question and answer session. Ségolène had a seat on stage and there was a host sitting with her who asked the bulk of the questions. There were also 5 young people representing different arondissements and suburbs perched on stools on each side of the two chairs who had prepared questions to ask about different policy issues.

The really cool thing is that they also took questions from the audience. I obviously was not about to stand up in front of the France 2 camera crews and ask a question in my accented French, but the point is that I could have. That's what I mean about opportunities here. The fact that if I felt like it, I could find an occasion for a little tête-à-tête with the possible next president of France.

Sitting in the ampitheatre it became really clear how much the people love Ségolène Royal. And I can definitely see why. She's poised and pretty with the kind of presence that invokes a great deal of confidence from the French people (and the American exchange students...) When the event's host first walked onstage to introduce her, the cheering and applause at the mention of her name silenced him for several minutes. He finally managed to regain the crowd's attention by reminding us that if we shut up and let him finish, we'd actually get to see her. Sitting 15 metres from Ségolène Royal and getting to hear her speak was way cooler then seeing Lindsay Lohan would have been (who is the current object of R and my pathetic celebrity-stalking attempts).



For the most part, everything she said was appreciated by the audience. She's really been working hard to present herself as a candidate of the people, and took pains to make points like "Moi, je n'ai pas peur du peuple. Au contraire, je les respecte." (Me, I'm not afraid of the people – on the contrary, I respect them.) The one thing the audience didn't like was her answer to the final question – how to deal with the violence and riots in the banlieue.

She gave an admirable but idealistic response about finding ways to show the underpriviledged youth from impoverished suburbs that they can succeed and become l'avenir (the future) de la France. When she stopped without outlining any specific solutions, the audience actually began yelling. The young guy next to me was bouncing around like he was about to run up onstage, yelling "Mais quelles mésures? Quelles mésures?"

This topic is particularly poignant because next Friday is the first anniversary of the electrocution deaths of the two young guys from the banlieue, supposedly killed while running from the police – the event that kicked off the riots and car-burnings of last November. Actually, the past couple weeks have seen several foreboding incidents in the suburbs of Epinay-sur-Seine and Clichy-Sous-Bois. Riots, vandalism, attacks on police officers all seem to be leading up to some kind of climax that may be reminiscent of last year's destruction. According to a few papers, there have been rumblings in some suburbs of how best to "celebrate" the anniversary. Once again, I wish wish wish that I had my camera.

After the debate, I spent a few hours wandering around the Louvre, then window shopping along rue St. Honoré – host to the flagship Chanel store and Coco Chanel's apartment, located right above the store. Place du Palais Royal is always fun on sunny days (and some not-so-sunny ones too) because the inline skaters come out to play. Today there was a guy skating around like an Olympic ice skater, doing leaps and spins and axel-type jumps. Half an hour disappeared before I even realized that he'd hypnotized me.

I also went to see "The Queen" with Helen Mirren, because it's been getting rave reviews from the French press. I was hesitant to see it at first because it seemed so tactless coming out not quite a decade after Princess Diana's death. The movie itself was actually really really good, but I felt uncomfortable watching it. It's a movie that would probably have been even better given another 10 years of distance. It was just hard to separate the movie from reality – seeing Helen Mirren playing Queen Elizabeth II onscreen and thinking about the fact that the actual queen is probably chilling in a palace just across the English Channel from me right now. The timing just isn't right, and it makes the movie kind of awkward. Good, but awkward.



••• So a friend of Cassie's saw Dustin Hoffman shopping about three blocks from my building, and Lindsay Lohan is supposedly also trotting around Paris right now – all these famous people are supposedly orbiting right around my neighborhood and I have yet to see any. I am the worst stalker of all time. R and I couldn't even muster up the balls to stroll into the lobby of the George V hotel and peek around – we were too scared. (The George V, along with the Ritz in Place Vendôme, is where anyone who is anyone rich or important stays when visiting Paris).

•••• Funny Georges story numero deux: The other night I was reading books to Georges and he somehow found this incredibly dry book called "Herbs for Cooking and Health." He plopped it down on my lap and refused to let me read anything else. The weird part is that we made it through 20 pages of "frequent picking will allow your basil to flourish..." before he got distracted, and we could probably have made it through 20 more if it hadn't been time for dinner.

Officially noted: Everything is better when you have friends.

As thrilling and fresh as living in a new city on a new continent; going to a new school; speaking a new language can be, and as bored as I think I would have been this year in Seattle, it's rough to start over with nothing.

I cleared all the projected hurdles during the first few weeks I was in Paris – getting lost, shopping at grocery stores filled with unfamiliar food items, getting used to speaking French every day, searching for an apartment, jet-lag, life. Throughout the hard times, R and I just kept reminding ourselves that it would get better, we'd get used to the city, find a place to live, adjust to being Ameri-transplant-Parisiennes.

What I should have considered (but truthfully didn't give much thought to) was that getting used to living in a new city, in a new country, on a new continent, in a new time zone, is not a one-time event. It's an ongoing process that will probably never be completely tied up.

Now that I have the metro figured out, I only need my street map a third of the time, I know my way around the supermarchés and I have a place to call home, there's a whole new set of adjustments to be taken into consideration. For the most part, there isn't much that really jars me. In fact, most of the little differences tickle me rather than befuddle me, and I soak them up.

For example, it's impossible to buy lined notebook paper – that's okay, I'm starting to appreciate writing in graph. During the first minute of any class (at Sciences Po, au collège or école maternelle, according to Zoë and Ella), students pull out their notebooks and loose-leaf paper for note-taking and set their pencil pouches (!!) at the front of their desks. Yes, the pencil pouch – not that bizarre in itself, but the weird thing is that no student would be caught in class without one. Stored in the pouches are pencils, pens and miniature rulers (!! again) for underlining important points with the utmost of tidyness. After a week of merely being entertained at the pouches, I went out and bought one – why not? They're useful, and when in France, right?

Maybe it's more that I've become accustomed to the fact that there are differences (hundreds of miniscule oddities every day) than that I've become really used to living in France. Either way, the fact is that for the most part, I'm used to life here.

Last night though, I had one of those moments that really jarred me – and for the first time was really achingly lonely for Tacoma-Seattle and everyone I know there.

Since arriving in Paris, I've never had a shortage of people to hang out with. I know a few people from Seattle (R, Amelia, Sarah, etc.), and I've met my share of Sciences Po people and other Parisians. Making friends (or not being able to) has never been something that's concerned me, in Tacoma or in Paris. I tend to find that if you don't worry about it, there will always be people around to hang out with – which is true. What I never remember to think about is that it takes time to turn friends into really good ones.

Last night there was another Sciences Po party, this time within walking distance of my apartment. R and I were supposed to go together, but she's sick (yet again) and had to bail. I ended up getting stuck with her ticket, and spent most of the day trying to find someone else to go with me. I must have called about 8 people, and not a single one could go. I realize it was a Wednesday night, and their reasons made complete sense – they were too tired to go out, or they had classes on Thursday. I understand. I know it wasn't me, and it's not that I don't have any friends – but it was kind of a shock to be sitting alone in my apartment realizing that I didn't have a single person to go out with. So different from the UW network.

In Seattle, I probably would have gone out anyway, and assumed that I'd find someone I kind of knew to hang out with. In Paris, everyone I know is still on the level of those "kind-of-know-them" acquaintences at UW. If none of my Paris "friends" could go out, the implication is that I would not know (or even recognize) a soul at this Sciences Po party. I ended up not going and feeling kind of lame and bitter all night.

It's a harsh change, to go from having 7 or 8 people you are really really close to and spend tons of time with, and plenty of people you know well enough to hang out with if you need to, to having no really close friends. My network has been drained to 7 or 8 acquaintences and not much else. People I'll hang out with once in a while, but don't feel that comfortable calling too often. It was a pretty lonely realization.

Actually, it was a pretty lonely night.

But today, as always, was a new day. There are only a few girls in my hip-hop class, so we've bonded more than is probably normal for two dance classes. One of them, Sonia, was really excited to meet an American to practice her English with, so we decided during class on Tuesday to meet every Thursday mid-morning at Sciences Po to get a café and croissant and practice our language skills. Today was our first day, and we spent half an hour talking about everything in French, then switched to English for half an hour. It was so unbelievably nice to have a girlfriend just to sit and talk to for an hour, rather than someone to chat with during class or an outing.

I was already in a much better mood as I went to leave Sciences Po and as I was passing through the penîche I ran into Ana, another girl from my hip-hop class. We took the metro to class together on Tuesday, and she's one of the first people I've really clicked with as more than a possible acquaintence. We stopped in the middle of the foyer and talked about random anything for probably 40 minutes without realizing it, and decided to hang out this weekend and celebrate nothing in particular – life, I guess.

This was another one of those jarring moments – the counterpart of Wednesday night's. I don't think I completely understood why I felt so lonely on Wednesday until I realized that I had a new friend today. I never realized what I was missing until I had it again.

When you have friends, it's hard to completely get why they mean so much to you. When you're lacking in girls (or guys), life is rough. All the little things just feel tougher without a good buffer. So phew. Thanks to Ana and Sonia, I feel like things are looking up again, when I didn't even know they'd been looking down.



•• It should be stated that I'm not sad and I'm not lonely in Paris – I just had a lonely moment realizing that I missed my girls in Seattle. I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing my emotions – all I generally feel here is pretty darn pleased with my situation.

••• The rumors about French boys being quite romantically forward are proving to be pretty accurate. Even two-year old Georges has already tried to remove my pants. I was getting him ready for a bath yesterday and he apparently thought it would be really fun if I got in with him. I didn't quite realize what was happening until I looked down and he was very frustratedly working on the top button of my jeans. Once he'd realized he had my attention, he grabbed my leg and began pulling me toward the tub, shouting "Ollie, là! Ollie, là!" (Needless to say, I did not bathe with him).

The daily task of supervising Paul(7)'s piano practicing has, by default, fallen to me. While Cassie makes dinner for the kids (and sometimes me), P and I head downstairs to the piano, where I typically entertain Georges while listening to P run through his exercises.

Tuesdays I have my hip-hop class and arrive to nanny half an hour later then usual. Because of Cassie's super-mom efficiency, P was already done with his homework when I jogged in the door at 5:30, so the two of us got a headstart on practicing before G got home from preschool. P had a new song to work on (disturbingly titled "Indian War Whoop" or something equally un-p.c.) and was having a terrible time with it. It's a complicated tempo with about four hand position changes and half in staccato. This could have been P being an airhead, but he had no clue what "staccato" mean and no recognition of its symbol. I'm a little concerned that his private teacher hadn't explained this to him, but I magically remembered and gave a pretty good explanation/demonstration, or so I would like to think.

Because I had no wiggling G to deal with, I actually had a few minutes to concentrate on what P was trying to do. His hands were a mess and he was getting really stressed out, so I asked if I could try to figure it out for him. I sat down at the piano and played the whole song. To an unknowing reader, this may not sound like much, but I had no clue until today that I still knew how to sight-read. I gave up on the clarinet (ohhh how I hated band) after 8th grade, and my few years of piano lessons had ended years even before that. I don't think I've actually looked at a piece of music since then.

Awww, Parisian band kids!


For these reasons, both Paul and I were pretty astonished. Well, I was astonished for those reasons – he was astonished because he'd catagorized the new American nanny as the one who "likes to do sports" (i.e., I run and dance), not as the one who "knows how to play the piano." The au pair I replaced was training to be a "master harpist" or something, so to a 7 year-old, the musician au pair and the sporty au pair were two completely seperate entities.

Once I'd realized I could read the song and recognized all the notes and most of the symbols, I also knew how to explain it to Paul. This is when I got to impart my staccato knowledge, and I pulled a lesson on notes and octaves somewhere out of a back corner of my brain as well. We ran into a little confusion because instead of "c-d-e-f-g-a-b" going up the scale, the French use "do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si-do." (I know we have the do-re-mis too, but we tend to use the letter names in the U.S.) Yes, "si" instead of "ti," whiched caused undo stress for Paul everytime I asked him about "middle c." Once we'd straightened that out and established that "middle c" and "do moyen" were one and the same, we got into quite a productive practice.

P usually shoots through his exercises and starts fidgeting at about the five minute point, but tonight we held each other rapt for at least half an hour. I think Cassie was quite surprised when she came downstairs and found us practicing "Indian War Whoop" as a duet. I think she had a musical/sporty nanny cleavage in her head as well. Ha, we sound like the "Spice Nannies" or something. Musical Nanny, Sporty Nanny, Bad Nanny (yes there was a bad nanny), Weird French Fry Nanny, Muslim Nanny, etc. Maybe we'll unify as one super band some day.

Anyway, it's a trivial thing, but I was pretty excited about my latent (rusty!) piano skills. I'm going to take advantage of this yer and practice while I can – I'll be learning alongside Paul at any rate.

In other news, Christina and I just bought our tickets to Barcelona for the Toussaint vacation. I'll see her for the few days she has to stay with me before she flies home in December, but other than that, this is probably our last hurrah for a long time. It was nice how I only had to say goodbye to half my friends in August. December is going to be a tough month though, once I'm actually all alone over here.


•• I feel like an invalid without my camera. If it's not back in my arms by Barcelona, I'm going to cry.

••• All I have to say to this sign is...I don't believe you!!!

There's a shifty (and unsupervised) character. Look at him...he's just waiting for me to give him privacy so he can go nuts pooping all over the sidewalk.


•••• I just liked this name:

This weekend I continued with the theme of creating Seattle-in-Paris. My main tools for this operation were two of my best girls and former roommates, Christina (who is studying fall quarter studying in Nantes and Amelia, who is doing the UW Comparative Literature program for two months in Paris. (Her school is actually only about 3 blocks from Sciences Po).

As I had to nanny off and on throughout the weekend, things were a little more complicated then they could have been, but Christina (who stayed with me) and I ended up just leaving my apartment key hidden for eachother outside my door. Don't worry, since my door opens off of the abandoned former maids' hallway, no one comes up the stairs. It's me, three doors that lead to old chambres de bonnes (rooms where maids would have lived) and a communal bathroom at the end of the hall. Luckily, as I am in a renovated chambre de bonne, I do have my own bathroom inside my apartment.

After retrieving Christina from gare Montparnasse, I left her with Amelia and I ran to my art history class. It's actually a Sciences Po class, but the séances are held in the l'ENA building. I hadn't realized that's where they were until I arrived for class, and after hearing about the l'ENA controversy basically since I've been in France, it gave me a nerdy thrill to step inside.

If Sciences Po was founded to train the future elite leaders of France, L'ENA, or L'École Nationale d'Administration is the entity that has the power to turn the elite of the elite into actual leaders of France. For anyone who wishes to enter French politics, (the French equivalent of) undergraduate studies at Sciences Po, followed by (the French equivalent of) graduate studies at l'ENA. After graduating, énarques are ushered into leadership positions reserved especially for them. Dominique Villepin is an énarque, as is Ségolène Royal. So is Jean-Baptiste, my nanny family's dad – he's actually not only an énarque, but an X (Polytechnique grad), and he went on to found his own investment bank.

Despite the intimidating immeuble, my art class is definitely going to be my most chill. It's taught by a professor who spends half her time at NYU and half at Sciences Po (it's my only class in English), and I can already tell that it's going to be really really good. I've never taken any kind of art history before, only physical art classes, so I didn't know what to expect, but I think it'll be really interesting. And what better place to learn art history then in Paris? On Friday we're meeting at 8h (instead of our usual 14h45) at Palais Royal (behind the Louvre) to take a walking tour of artistically important areas of Paris.

Saturday afternoon I had to babysit as usual, so after hanging out with Christina and Amelia for a while, I let myself into the big apartment at my scheduled 14h arrival time. When I walked in the door, Cassie took off with Paul, told the girls to do their homework, and Jean-Baptiste took off into the kitchen to bake a tarte aux prunes (plums). This left Alexi and I in the living room to "get to know eachother" for an entire hour and a half, until the family finally left at 15h30. It was a pretty obvious set-up, but Alexi turned out to be really nice and we managed to pass the time together with minimal awkwardness. I'm still not completely over the oddness of the whole situation though. Especially after nannying tonight and hearing, "Didn't you think Alex was cuuute?" all night long.

I feel like X's and Pôtistes are kind of supposed to be rivals, but we're all in the same elite squadron...or something...we'll see what happens the next time they try to set up the two Americans in Paris.

This morning I woke up and for the first time really missed Seattle. I always miss the people of course, but as far as cities go, Paris has been doing a rather good job of pleasing me so far.

I think I was sad when I woke up because it was raining and drizzly – peering through the window over my bed into the endlessly grey sky, I could have easily been looking at the sky over Seattle (although apparently, it didn't rain there today).

As a result of the homesickness, my mind managed to transform Paris into the Pacific Northwest for me, just for one afternoon. I spent the entire day doing Seattle-girl things, and didn't realize it until the wet grey light was nearly gone.

Shout-out to Seattle!


In Paris, even if you spend the day doing laundry and errands, you manage to remain very chic doing so. In Seattle, sweatpants are my automatic uniform for laundry day, but here I tend to conform to the city and end up in my last clean jeans and my cute shoes even for grocery shopping.

Because I woke up today intending to run immediately, I put on my typical running outfit of yoga pants, running shoes and my T-Town (Tacoma) sweatshirt (because of the drizzle). The running was inevitably postponed until after the errands, so in true West Coast fashion I trotted around all day in my workout clothes.

My good friend (and last year's roommate) Christina is coming to stay with me for the weekend, and I am so excited about my first houseguest that I wanted to clean and go shopping for all kinds of tasty things to ply her with. Christina, however, is a lactose-intolerant vegetarian, and it can be hard – especially in France – to find things she can eat.

Yeah, this girl's coming tomorrow!


I'd heard rumors of a store called "Naturalia" that sells organic products, so I walked over to Les Halles in the 1ème to check it out. I almost fainted with joy when I walked inside – just when I'd been missing P.C.C. the most, I found a perfect subsitute in a most unlikely location. I actually had fun buying things like yaourt en soja (soy yogurt) and herbed tofu – things I would never buy even in granola-green Seattle.

I tried to convey my elation and sense of being at home in Naturalia to the clerk, but he responded with a very confused look. I guess you have to have experienced the PNW to really understand what it's all about.

After paying, I headed back toward the 2ème, my recycled shopping bag full of not only soy milk, but organic vegetable chips and organic dark chocolate-dipped rice cakes – hallelujah for Naturia. I'm trying to wait to open them until Christina gets here tomorrow, but they're staring at me from the corner of the kitchen.

As I was waiting to cross rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré I spotted the little fleet of biodiesel cars that wheel around Paris emblazoned with slogans like "Je suis bíologique!" (I'm organic!) This isn't the first time I've crossed paths with the biodiesel crowd here, but on Seattle in Paris day it couldn't have been more perfect.

Before dropping off my groceries at home, I swung by the American bookstore (right across avenue de l'Opéra from me) to buy (finally!) American Vogue. I'm not discriminating against French Vogue – I buy that too, but it takes me about five times as long to read the articles. I paid twice as much for it as I would have in the States, but I don't care. It was like a treasure burning through my Naturia bag the rest of the way home, just begging to be cracked open.

Before I could settle down with the Vogue though, I still had to get my run in. Still drizzling, I enjoyed a Seattle-style rain run down to Montparnasse and back. As the day could not possibly have been complete without a stop-off at Starbucks, I splurged on an overpriced café americano on the way home.

It was, typically, overflowing with American tourists, but I didn't care. The shop around the corner from my building is progressive enough to fill carafes of nonfat milk on the sugar/milk bar. (Not all French Starbucks offer this – the last time I was in one, the options were cream, half and half or whole milk). Again I'd paid twice what I would have in Seattle, but with one sip I was transported to the parking lot of the Westgate Starbucks, on my way home from running the Point Defiance trails with Wilbur (the dog).

WILBUR!!


After stopping by the corner boulangerie to pick up a chausson aux pommes (basically an applesauce-filled pastry), I was officially back in Paris – but it was nice to have a little vacation.



••• The Franco-American nephew of Jean-Baptiste (whose family lives in America) is spending all year studying at École Polytechnique (nicknamed "X" for some unknown (to me) reason), the engineering and math equivalent of Sciences Po. He lives elsewhere in Paris, but will be spending the weekend at Cassie and Jean-Baptiste's. In the preparations for his arrival, there has been a lot of very blatent hinting that he and I should probably fall in love and get married.

It's perfect, apparently – we're both from America studying in Paris, him at X, me at Sciences Po. We're apparently both intelligent and nice, and he is, selon Cassie, "just adorable." I think this all started as a joke, but in the middle of one conversation this evening, C, Z and E were getting more and more serious about his and my compatible qualities. I don't even know this guy yet, but I'm sure I was beet red.

Alexi (oh yes, Alexi) will be over tomorrow, so I guess that's when we'll find out if the Toulouse family's grand dreams of a union between their American nephew and American nanny will ever be realized. As it is, I've been hearing about this guy for so long I hope I can introduce myself without turning red and running to hide.

My disturbing encounter of the day was made even more bizarre by the fact that the person who caused it was honestly trying to be nice.

Tonight is the first night R can spend in her new apartment, so after nannying I had the wine guy at Monoprix pick me out a nice bottle of Saint Emilion, threw some plastic glasses into my bag and hopped onto the metro to christen her new apartment. She's now living in the 11ème, which is a mostly nice "bobo" area with a few sketchy bits (like any part of town, really). When I exited the metro, an older gentleman with a pipe saw me consulting my map and immediately knew I was American.

He was quite excited to practice his English on me and share stories about his trip to California several years ago. After consulting my map, he informed me that he'd lead me to where I needed to go because I was a girl, and according to him, there are "dirty people in the street."

He got me to the corner of rue Léon Frot and rue Emile Lepeu, but would not believe me that there existed a passage Gustave Lepeu a little further up the road. Finally I managed to convince him that I'd go look for it myself, that I'd be fine and he could go on with his evening. I thanked him, and he removed his pipe from his mouth long enough to say,

"Be careful, there are a lot of Arabs around here."

I stared at him for a minute, but he was completely serious, so I just waved and continued up the street. It was a little unnerving.

Anyway, Rachael's apartment is kind of hilarious at the moment. I arrived at what I thought was number 7, but there was no address on the building. There were also no names on the interphone outside, and since she'd mentioned that the building was currently under construction, I assumed that had to be it. I had to call her since the interphone was set up, and she came all the way downstairs to manually unlock the heavy front door.

The second I stepped inside I started laughing. The floor was bare concrete spattered with paint. There are clear tarps, dirty pieces of carpet, electrical wires and assorted hammers and drills strewn everywhere. The lights are just lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. She led me upstairs to her apartment, where we had to step over a toolbox to get inside.

She and her roommate Vita are apparently the first ones to move into the building, because the construction is contintuing all month. They currently have no electricity (or hot water), except for a tiny generator lighting a few lamps in the living room.

Except for the fact that they're living in a construction site, everything is pretty perfect. Their apartment is brand new and completely furnished – complete with brand new Ikea dishes and cookware. They have tables and lamps and curtains and a futon for the living room. In fact, all they have to buy are mattresses or futons for their own rooms and they're all set.

Their street is also very quiet and cute, with boulangers, restaurants and fromagers lining the adjacent rue Léon Frot. With the exception of racist old men wandering the street and trying to impart their bigotry on young American girls, it's a very cute little area.


ªªª My sink is fixed – Cassie asked how it was and I had to tell her the truth. It was broken!! She ended up coming up here while I was giving P and G their baths and fixing it for me – although she did concede that it was very difficult to take apart.

**** The little green arrow is pointing to the sidewalk immediately in front of my apartment building.

Today I had one of the best hip hop classes I've ever taken. It was up there with the time we had the hip hop/funk teacher from Velocity Dance Studio substitute teach for my UW jazz class Freshman year, and with one hip hop class I took with Whitney at Westlake Dance Center (the caliber of which was never found again).

For some reason I didn't really expect there to be a big hip hop scene in France. That's why I brought leotards and ballet and tap shoes, but left my jazz sneakers and hip hop stuff back in Tacoma. I'm not quite sure what lent to this perception – maybe just that hip hop seems so very New York and Los Angeles, and so not Paris. We've got the East and West Coast hand signs but seem to be lacking one for Île de France. Maybe we could have a Paris-specific hip hop rivalry between Rive droit and Rive gauche...somehow that doesn't really compute in my mind.

I was both excited and weary of Sciences Po hip hop classes – somehow uppity French political science students don't seem the type to get down on the marley (a kind of dance floor). I imagined a class that would be amusing, but would probably be kind of boring, considering that the level was specified as "all" and I've been hip-hopping for plusieurs years now.

Wow was I wrong. Well, at least mostly wrong. Wrong about the lack of a hip-hop scene in France, that's for sure. I was a little more on target with my assessment of the hip-hop scene at Sciences Po – of the four girls (including me) in the class, only one is an authentic Frenchie. With her (and the teacher), there's me, a German girl and an Italian girl – a very international group, that's for sure.

Of the four, I was the only one with any prior dance experience, so I was interested to see how the teacher would approach it. I needn't have worried. Hip-hop is not like ballet. With ballet, you learn the exact same pliés and tendus at every studio from every teacher. No matter what your level of hip-hop is though, the dance is always going to be half ability, half personal style. Every hip-hop studio, class and teacher is different.

The teacher, an energetic woman in her early 40s (I would guess), came bounding into the room decked out like a P.E. teacher, in a reebok track suit and a top-of-the head, scrunchied ponytail. Her style was anything but. She managed to put together warm-ups and floor combinations that were simple enough to be followed by someone with no dance experience, and her style was so original that I wasn't bored for a second.

If the Seattle hip-hop scene is a fusion of Northwest grunge and Manhattan street funk, this class was a French twist on L.A. hip-hop. It was so fun because it was so different from any hip-hop class I've ever taken. We krumped and c-walked and did the "killing bee." It was crazy fun.

Although dance classes in the U.S. tend to be half in French because the names of all the steps are French, it was also really entertaining to take a full class in French. What might have been called "contractions" or "full-body shimmying" in the U.S. was called "La libération" by our teacher. The name is kind of perfect for the move – when it's time for the liberation, you stand with your feet facing the side of the room, but your arms and chest open to the mirror. Then you start shaking both your upper and lower half as fast as you possibly can in time with the music. Throughout this, our teacher was yelling,

"Laissez-les bouger!" Literally translated, it's "let them move." What she was referring to, was our posteriors. I also couldn't help giggling everytime I heard "Un, deux, trois, et KRUMP!" Everything's just funnier in French. And from hip-hop to plumbing...

I've been having problems with my bathroom sink since I moved in. Basically, it doesn't drain. Or, it drains, but it takes 15 minutes to do so fully. I tried pouring an entire bottle of the French equivalent of Dran-o in last week, but nada. I asked Cassie and Jean-Baptiste about it earlier tonight, and they started describing to me how you have to unscrew this bent piece of pipe under the sink and check for gross hairballs left by the previous girl. Cassie asked if I wanted her to come show me, but being a fool and not wanting to sound like a useless girl, I said no.

The problem is that I am a useless girl. The kind so useless that she can't put a chain back onto her own bike. So useless that she had to get her brother to put windshield wiper fluid in the car for her. So useless that she would try to put motor oil into the car at a gas station and have to call her dad to ask how to unscrew the cap (apparently, being a cap, you just unscrew it).

I came back up to my apartment thinking I'd finally have a working sink, but having of course forgotten the whole I actually am a useless girl thing. I got on the floor underneath the sink and managed to unscrew something back there, but whatever it is won't budge. All that happened is the pipes started to leak some really gross-looking brown water. Of course I was too embarrassed to go back down and ask, so I now have a non-working bathroom sink. I'm a little bit lost without the boys I usually ask for help – my Dad and brother for car stuff, Robb and Conner for computer stuff, my other brother for gross stuff...

I'd probably be a better ambassador of Wopeople if I actually knew how to do this stuff on my own. As it is, I might as well be in the kitchen with an apron on. Though instead of making dinner in my apron, I might be closer to being strangled with it. I guess Paris is as good a place as any to begin untangling myself.