Arrival

After waking up too early in the morning (2 am!) for my flight out of Detroit, I arrived in Miami tired and cold. Miami was about 40 degrees! Of course, because I had a layover there for 9 hours, I decided I had to explore the city a bit. So I hopped on a bus and went to the beach. The bus ride was about 40 minutes, and when I got to the beach I was surprised that I was in a Jewish neighborhood. Very Jewish. The men wore yamikas(I know that isn't how to spell it) and had long beards and long curly sideburns and the women were wearing all black for some reason. So I passed many people speaking Hebrew while I strolled along the beach looking at the pieces of coral and shells that washed up to shore. My time at the beach was short because it was very windy and cold, so I soon took the bus back to the airport and sat around there waiting all day for my flight.

When we finally boarded for Paris, of course something had to go wrong. Apparently, a pebble hit the plane when it landed on its previous flight and they couldn't determine if the damage was significant or not. So it took them 3 hours to determine that the damage was significant and they made us switch planes. While waiting to reboard in the terminal, I met someone else who was in IES(my study abroad program). Her name was Maria and she was from Colombia.

Finally we boarded the plane a second time. Everyone on the plane spoke French, it seemed, except for the stewardists and the captain. I sat next to a French man very briefly before he left for another seat, and I had the whole bench to myself. For this reason, I had the most comfortable plane ride of my life! I made my two seats into a bed with lots of pillows and blankets and stretched out over them. It was wonderful. I woke in the morning for breakfast, and soon we had landed at rainy Charles De Gualle.

I met up with Maria again at the airport, and we took the metro together to our homestays. This took a very long time because CDG is way out of town. Also, I had to lug my bags up and down the stairs through a bunch of different metro stations. It was totally impracticle, but I saved a lot of money. The price of a cab from CDG to town was about 60 Euros! I got to town on about 10 Euros.

Finally, I arrived at my homestay and I recognized everything from looking at my street on Google Earth. I knew exactly where to go. I met my host mother and she was very nice and showed me around the apartment. She doesn't speak a word of English, so I'm excited to be totally immersed in the language. After my tour of the apartment, I unpacked and then fell asleep for a while because I was very jetlagged. I woke up later that evening and had dinner with her and her husband. We had soup, salad, wine, and a galette du roi for dessert. It was all very good food! They were very friendly to me, and we talked about Obama, and my trip to France, and I even told them about Gran Torino and how my uncle plays the organ in the first scene. Now even Paris knows! I went to bed after dinner and woke up the next morning prepared for orientation.

I had to take the metro all over town to get to La Rue Daguerre, where IES is. It was a small street of a big boulevard called Avenue du Maine. I walked up and down the street a thousand times trying to find IES, but it was nowhere. No signs or anything. Finally, I knew I must be late for orientation, but I didn't have a watch or a phone, so I was completely disconnected. I saw a few people speaking English and I decided to follow them, and Voila! They went right to the IES building. There was no sign on the building; I think it was to keep a low profile.

So I arrived late, and then I had to sit through boring orientation where they told us the rules and yada yada (all in French of course), and then I bought a cell phone for $20, which was a pretty good deal, I thought. After that, I went back to the apartment and tried to set up my internet. I finally got it working, and I emailed someone in my program to see if they wanted to get together today. We set up a time and place, and I then had dinner again with my host family. For dinner, we had soup and salad again, then we had cheese and wine for dessert. We had very good goat cheese on a baguette, and I told them that I used to own dairy goats. They were very surprised about that! Then we had a cheese that looked like yogurt and it came in a little cup. We put sugar on it and it was absolutely delicious! I scraped every bit off my plate.

Today we met up at Le Tour d'Eiffel, and took a free sightseeing bus around the touristy part of town. We went down Le Champs-Elysee and past the Louvre and many pretty parks. I saw Napoleon's tomb and L'arc de Triomphe. The tour was about an hour, and after it, I went to a cafe with some people from IES. The cafe was not very French, because we were in such a touristy area, but we were able to convince them to speak French to us. After the cafe, I made plans to get together with the IES students again, and then I came back to the apartment and made some tea and read some F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tomorrow, I am completely free again, but I hope to go to the market to get some groceries for the week. Well, I must go now. I will update again soon!

Leah