New computer!

So sorry that this blog has almost fallen by the wayside. I failed to explain in my last post that I had been trying to sell my computer--and since I sold it, I could not motivate myself to write an entire blog post on my little ipod touch. But now I have a new netbook, which is tiny but it works well, and it is perfectly minimal, and I fell like I can fit it in my pocket.

So what's been going on recently? Well, the time between the end of the vacation and now seems really short, and time is starting to go by much faster in general around here. The most memorable thing: I finally had my day of walking around to small, private art collections in le Marais (3rd and 4th arrondissements). This was, to say the least, a great experience. I was a little worried that it would be more like scanning the pages of an Artforum--where there's just so much art and so many names that to stop and consider and submit everything to memory would take an eternity. And indeed when I read in my guidebook about the number of ''vibrantly international'' and ''essential'' art galleries (18 were listed in the Marais alone) I was sure that I would be left thinking that art is silliness, fashion masked as depth, the empty coffer of cultural meaning. I'm very glad that I was surprised. I minimized the number of galleries I visited to about 5 or 6, and I think that ended up being a perfect number. Many of these places were devoted to the work of one artist's work, like Galerie Maria Lund, which had works by the Korean artist Lee Jin Woo (I can't find info on the internet about him)--all I can say about his stuff is that it succeeded in making abstract expressionism appear like the product of natures sombre decay. At the Musée des Arts Derners, I saw the work of contemporary African artist Soly Cissé, whose work combined fantastic animals--somewhere between cave painting and Basquiat--with scientific note-taking and measurement.

(Sorry the image isn't much big enough, but you can get a sense of it) Other notable things were a video of the hands of someone reading braille (ok, maybe a little trite, but when I realized the conceit, I was really moved and found it surprisingly effective--something about the recognizable effort of reading conveyed by the hands, the speeding up and slowing down, the excitement and concentration, combined with the idea that we who can see can't read precisely because of this fact...) and paintings by a young German artist named André Butzer which I swear could be on the walls of Domy books in Austin or Houston.

Ok, so I could go blabbing forever about this, but I'll stop. I have also been working a fair amount, though I've missed two days recently due to train problems--once due to a strike and once due to a malfunction on the rail that stopped all traffic. Teaching has been so-so. I execute things well about half of the time, and I usually feel prepared enough for every class session. Sometimes I leave feeling like the students are incredibly well-behaved and motivated, and other times I feel like they couldn't care less and would prefer to just ignore me. Often times a single class class can be both over the course of a few sessions, and often their attention slackens if the head teacher isn't there to whip them into place (I'm not kidding, either--the teachers are harsh!). The nice thing about the job is that I don't have to take the student's fates as English-speakers into my own hands--if they want to work, I'm there; but if they don't, I have neither the power nor the time to force them. Also, I have too many classes (9) to take any one of them home with me, so the stress says entre les murs. This job does still leave me in awe of the power of certain teachers to fully transform a classroom. Indeed some of the teachers I work with here have that ability--no yelling, but a kind of calm command--though many of them bludgeon their way through it. Another good thing about school is the amount of French that I get to speak and absorb, both from the kids and from the teachers. I'm not sure how much English I could get away with with the latter--sometimes they speak with me, usually in single mauled phrases like, ''see you on the next Friday'', or ''where have you come from?''. Once a week I host a poorly-attended English conversation session, and we talk for a little bit about the weather or food in very slow English, and then we just speak in French for the rest of the time. However, I cannot hold myself too high above their heads, because when it's all the teachers around the table for lunch, I have an incredibly hard time following along. I always get the topics of conversation, and the general feelings of most people, but the details always escape me. Oh well, I will let this kind of thing be the test of my fluency. Maybe others will agree that poetry and chatter express the opaque secrets of a language.

Ok, once again I cannot write a short post, but I should stop now. This weekend I'm going to go to a place in the 20th arrondissement that serves free coucous if you buy a drink and listen to the jazz music--sign me up!

I leave you all with my thoughts on an advertisement that is everywhere in the Paris metro for the Wall Street Institute of English. At first I was disgusted by these things, but in a flash of understanding I realized the subliminal genius at work here: it plays off of our desire to either bite or grab the literal tongue itself which is then cleverly sublimated into a desire to learn a language (another tongue). The secret lies in the French, where the word langue means both language and tongue--clearly the advertisement is punning on that--and the phrase 'to learn a language', apprendre une langue, is extremely close to the phrase 'to grab or take a tongue', prendre une langue.

And what could the stupid uneasiness of this guy's expression and the viscerally unsettling painted tongue express but that torturous feeling one gets when a stranger is so close to them that it would be almost nothing (and indeed quite exhilarating) to touch their face, tickle them, blow on their hair? And where does one feel this more than on a crowded metro? In the end, a brilliant slight of hand by the Wall Street Institute.

Fin des vacances

I've had a pretty great vacation, though I've passed it lazily. For instance, today I woke up at 9, went to the market down the street (the market wasn't as inexpensive as I had hoped, but they did have black beans!), and then came back and made some scrambled eggs and read all day. Ironically, maybe magically, I've just started an excellent book called The Savage Detectives by a Mexican-Chilean writer named Roberto Bolaño, which begins journal-style with one sentence for November 2 and then three pages for November 3–which was yesterday, and my birthday. I know I've commented before on how much I love just walking with friends aimlessly around Paris–and how, for a poor young person, this is how the city offers itself to my heart–so that's mainly what I did. We stopped at some English-language bookstores and a coffee shop on our way through Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter over to Chatelet and the Marais, and then over to Bastille and then to Belleville. I've made a little map, which doesn't include all of the little diversions, but it says we walked 7.8 kilometers, or about 5 miles:


Along the way, we stopped and ate some amazing Lebanese and, when the bartender found out it was my birthday in the process of flirting with one of the girls who was there, we got free drinks and little pastries. We went to Belleville to recover a scarf I had left at a Halloween house party–we got stuck in the rain, soaked, but I got the scarf. Belleville is much cheaper and less pretentious than most of the rest of Paris, so we stopped in at a bar to have drinks and chat, and that's pretty much how we spent the rest of the night. Despite the rain, it was a great day.

There's been less to growl about lately, thank goodness. The apartment is holding up pretty well, and I've been decorating a little bit with some birthday-gift postcards. I've posted some pictures on my flickr, so go check that stuff out. It's not as easy as I had hoped to post a set of pictures to my blog, so I will only have photo posts if they relate directly to the things I'm writing about. Otherwise, you know where to find them. Thanks to everyone for all of the birthday wishes sent my way yesterday!

Finally, some pictures

Hello everyone,

So, here's my first picture post. I haven't been taking very many pictures because, until earlier today, I was without the capability to take pictures off my camera and put them on my computer. Now I can do that. But this first set of photos doesn't begin to cover what I have seen. It's mostly stuff from my first few days in France, and then some pictures of my apartment. Here we go:

These first few are from the plane, flying over London and the U.K.
It is always so startling how an organism like London can be reduced to a texture of lights from this high up.



This is a Park in the 19th arrondissement called Butte Chaumont that I visited when I thought I might be living in the area. The whole thing is fake, the butte most of all.

These next couple are from my weekend in Pontoise, a town Northwest of Paris, in the old town at the top of 12th century (I think) ramparts.


Who would advertise psychoanalysis like this in the U.S.?




This is the view from where I stayed.

And finally, here are some shots of my new place, beginning with the cute shower curtain, which, because of my small hot water heater, I can only stay on the other side of for about 7 minutes.
This doubles as a kitchen and bathroom sink.
Here you can see almost the width of the apartment.
The building is very old, and I think these tiles have been preserved from the original construction.
That's about it for now, folks. I am starting a 1.5 week vacation (do I deserve this already?) and I will be taking my camera everywhere from now on. Tomorrow I'm going out of town a little ways to see an Le Corbusier house, so look for those pictures soon.

New Address

Hi! Really quick, I wanted to let everyone know that my new address is:

30 rue de l'Église, Studio 16
92200 Neuilly-sur-Seine, Île-de-France, France

What's been happening

Hello everyone,

So it's been a while since I last posted, so I'll just skip a lot of the details and go bullet point-style through what I've been up to:

•I've started teaching. I have a lot of classes and work with many different teachers, and I'm expected to do different things in every class. I'm working with several different age groups and level's. And boy oh boy are the teachers hesitant to speak English. The suggestion that we have English conversations over lunch once a week was met with eyes turned down to shuffling feet, and then almost an immediate change of subject. If nothing else, my french is improving a lot, and the kids are all really great.

•Like I told everyone, I have been trying to move. I have found something, but not without being, well, screwed out of money by the lady I was living with (I always knew she was crazy!)–basically, when she said that a verbal warning of my leaving was enough for her, I thought she was telling the truth. That, however, was not the case, and she gladly informed me that, due to some very subtle technical language in French contracts, she didn't have to return my deposit because my warning wasn't official. Basically, even though I was polite enough to give her adequate time to find another person for the room, she invoked the law in order to take my money, and there's about nothing I can do: "¡¡¡Initiate revenge sequence!!! No....calm down, don't make this worse–There must be some kind of metaphysical justice–Yes, her conscience will kick in right at the moment when she can do nothing to relieve it–Bottomless fire-lake of regret–I'm controlling the currents from somewhere much higher-up–from some apartment, yes, in Paris..."

•Here's something I found on the street, which I like very much:

But it seemed more like the cat found me. Stumbling upon this made me feel like I had all along been on a sort of scavenger hunt without knowing it. Chris Marker, one of my favorite film directors, made a documentary called 'The Case of the Grinning Cat', about graffiti-images of smiling cats which began to appear on famous walls all over Paris, the artist and her intention unknown. I like his films so much because they take their direction from things on which light is thrown only for an instant, long enough to be shaken by their enigma but never to know their cause. The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (hence comes the title of Marker's movie) disappears into the sky and leaves only the outline of a grin whose origin lies out of reach. This little porcelain kitty is clearly smiling, and it's wry look to the side is to what's off-screen...

•I've found an apartment, thank goodness, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a neighborhood barely outside of Paris and still on the metro lines. Apparently Marcel Proust was born here, so yeah, its very bourgeois. I need to do some exploring, but so far, it seems like a pretty great place to live. It's a little studio, about like an old-school maid's quarters, but big enough for me. There's a kitchen, a leaky shower, and a window with a nice view. Also, I will spend two nights per week tutoring the children of some people who live here for 10 euros an hour, making around 30 euros a week. So I will make up my losses from the other place in about two months. With government aid for housing, I will be a lot better off financially in this new place, and of course I am basically in Paris now.

That's about it for now, folks. I have a week long vacation starting at the end of this week. It seems undeserved, but I'll take it, and it will be nice to have time off to celebrate my birthday. Stay tuned...

Thriving in low culture Paris

Hello everyone,

I'm sure I walked about 20 miles in Paris this weekend, and though I was doing it in recovery from a little cold, and big limits on my food expenditures, and sleeping against the hardest carpet I've ever known one night and a fold-out couch with a bar about mid-back. Still, about an hour after waking up each day, I was able to convince myself to hit the streets again, walk with a half-aim towards someplace I only vaguely remembered the name of, hoping to stumble upon it or something else, since I've found that this is a city that foils prudence, remembering the lines 'vaut le détour!' Anyways, I spent the evenings mostly wandering around with friends. We found that it is both cheaper and (unlike in the states) legal to drink wine in the streets, in crowds of young people doing likewise near monuments or in areas near museums. In fact, one bottle of wine in the convienience store is cheaper than one glass of wine in a restaurant or a bar, so if you are with a group and feeling thrifty, I highly recommend the slightly-more-trashy, but very widely accepted, alternative. Saturday night was called Nuit Blanche, which I mentioned in my last post. Officially, it was an event organized around a set of all-night contemporary art exhibits, though the lines were way too long at all of the locations to justify waiting around. So we ended up just walking around, watching street performers in front of the Centre Pompidou and the Pantheon, meeting strange French people who insisted on speaking English to us instead of us speaking French with them...I've really enjoyed the friends I've met here so far have; we are all more or less like minded, and, what's better, we can share endless conversation.

During the day on Saturday, I made my way back to the town I'm living in to open a bank account and eat a cheap lunch (tomatoes, cheese, bread, orange juice). After that I went back to Pontoise, where I repayed my couch-surfing weekend up there by helping the woman repaint her bathroom. We then went out for sushi, I being willing to break my eating tendency if only for once, spending 11 euros on a tuna roll, some teriyaki duck-kabob, and shrimp sashimi. It was delicious.

Sunday was free museum day, and luckily, probably because of the long Saturday night, lines at the two big museums I visited were fairly short. The first was the Centre Pompidou, one of the strangest looking structures I've ever seen (Chris described it as a huge air-conditioning unit), but which gives an amazing view of Paris. The surrealist film and photography exhibit was sadly not free, and so the list of things to see was kind of limited. But the modernism section was pretty amazing. My two favorites were CoBrA-affiliated painter Asger Jorn, whose work turn expressionism into a kind of landscape or even geographical art, and Simon Hantaï, whose work was kind of a revelation for me.
You probably can't see with this image, but apparently he created the 'background' or 'negative space' around the symbols and splashes of color by copying down things that he had thought or read over the course of a year, though the writing is so layered that you cannot see anything but intersecting scribbles. After more than two semesters of work on my failed honors thesis in school, I found myself moved by the way in which a years worth of intellectual activity isn't represented as a group of coherent thoughts per se, or a final, organized thesis, but as the pattern and texture the multitude of that activity gives rise to. The crude shapes and concentrations of color, like pleats in the background, then become something like a key map to the indecipherable writing of the past itself, as well as the promise for the persistence of a vision...

As a testament to my idea that it's better to travel obliquely and with vague intention than according to a hard schedule, I then stumbled upon the Museum of Hunting and Nature, which was more like a sordid natural history museum than an educational tour through the history of French chasse. I was kind of shocked by the irony of the place, the blunt, totally decontextualized arrangement of ornate guns and knives, taxidermied animals, grotesque paintings. And mixed in at random with all of this were weird pieces of art, with at most a vague connection to (and sometimes an outright negation of) hunting and nature: a metal laptop sculpture with a coffee-bean screen surrounded by a dining set, situated between two 13th century hunting rifles; a silly rock and roll song and music video accompanying the tour through a bourgeois lodge with an elk-antler table; the unicorn display; the small corner room with a ceiling made out of owl feathers and obviously synthetic and oversized owl faces poking out randomly; the abstract painting of an elephant slaughter on the ceiling in the taxidermy and ivory room (I forgot to bring my camera, but it's better if you just use your imagination). Clearly this place was designed by someone with a sense of humor–who didn't care much about hunting, for an audience who cares less. But for anyone with a taste for the grotesque and absurd, this was a wonderland.

The only other thing that I won't soon forget is my misadventure in the cold rain on the way to observe an English lesson. I was on foot, and got lost mistaking the road to Argenteuil for Route Argenteuil (roads in France are generally unmarked, so you kind of have to guess). I realized I had made the wrong turn about 20 minutes later, soaking wet despite my umbrella, when I saw the signs letting me know that I was leaving the town in which the school was located, and entering Argenteuil itself. But by the goodwill of some imperial spirit, I saw that big oasis of French Americana, Buffalo Grill, right next to, what else, the outlet mall.


When I entered to ask for directions, I felt like I had walked into some culture warp. First this made me dizzy and nauseous, then warm and pillowy like a pair of wool socks: I was greeted by pictures of shiny meat and potatoes, cowboy regalia, buffalo kitsch, squishy booths, and country music. I almost said, 'Howdy! Y'all have the all-you-can-eat buffet on Mondays?' But once I saw the board with the daily specials, recommendations of Le Sheriff, I remember my predicament–still only half-way, though, almost asking 'Where abouts is this place?' I was able finally to get directions to the school, and was moseyed along, surer of my bearings (I had misread the class schedule anyways, and was an hour early). I'll have to return someday to repay my debts, enjoy a chicken fried steak, and maybe sing along to the tunes.

I have just finished my teacher-training, and I will start working officially on Thursday. I am also in the process of looking for a new place to live, having realized, after being urged by people at the schools I'm working for and by almost everyone else I've talked to, to move to a place a little more well-connected. In the end, I think that traveling around in this area is a lot harder than I had first expected, and I get the feeling that after a few months, I will find myself a little too isolated for my own good. Plus, I think the mother is a little resentful that I have taken down the tweety-bird poster. Wish me luck!

Enfin, à l'abri

Hello everyone,

I would like to say now that I am very close to being settled in France, though I know I will have spoken too soon. At least I have found a place to live–my clothes are in an armoire, my books on a shelf, my papers scattered on a desk. I have a big room in a house, located in a town called Montigny-lès-Cormeilles, which is in-between Paris and the schools I will be working in. My commute is not as easy as I had imagined when I first moved in, but it will not be too bad. The town is old and pretty, very French, with a bakery, a cafe, and a butcher a short walk away, and an organic grocery a little bit further. The best thing about this place is the rent–300 euros tout compris per month, which is about 100 euros less than my friends who found places in Paris are paying, and that's not including utilities and the cost of added enticements. I have three friends who found places in the heart of Montmartre for fairly cheap, but it would be impossible to live in such a neighborhood and not go out every night to eat, drink coffee, and cultivate one's Parisianism. I will have to save that for the weekends.
I am living with a very mother and her son. The son is my age. We don't have too much in common; his favorite past times seem to be working out, playing video games, and listening to American music. Sometimes we play games together on his Playstation, and we also have been watching soccer together. I think he will be leaving in a week to start training to become a police officer (hopefully I can write a little at some point on the presence of the police in France, which is entirely different and more sinister than that in the U.S.). The mother works from home, and among other things she runs an organization that puts on English plays in elementary schools in the area. She is very friendly, and, though very good at English, she speaks mostly French with me. I hear the mother and son arguing about politics sometimes, though I can't follow along very well. The mother refers to French president Nicholas Sarkozy as 'Le Petit Nicolas', which is a reference to a popular radio program/recent movie in France about an annoying little boy, and she insists that he is as far to the right as a person can be (I wanted to say, 'Connaissez-vous Bush!?').
My room has one big window that I can use to come and go from the house and another on the ceiling above the bed. It was decorated by the daughter that used to live here with amusing posters ('Le Cinquieme Element', MLK's I Have a Dream speech, kung-fu Tweetybird, Mona Lisa smoking a pipe and saying 'Chill Out!', and two Betty Boops holding American flags), and the bedsheets are patterned in pink, yellow, and blue neon stripes that glow through my eyelids every morning when the sun starts to pour in.
Before and after moving in were very busy. I spent the weekend couch surfing in Pontoise, in an apartment on the top of 800 year old ramparts. I had dinner with my host and her friends (we ate cantaloupe with prosciutto, which was surprisingly delicious), and I saw first hand how dizzying a French debate can be, and when it stops being a debate and becomes a real fight. Today, I met with my academie and finally got a sense of what I will be doing and when I will start doing it. More on that later. This Friday night I will be playing ultimate frisbee (!?) in Paris, back again Saturday for Nuit Blanche, and then again for free museum day on Sunday.

Oh yes, and, stay tuned for pictures; I didn't bring the right USB cable, so I will have to find one somewhere. Also, my permanent address is:
18 bis Avenue des Bois
95370 Montigny-lès-Cormeilles, France
and my cellopone number here is 06 69 99 38 82

In Paris!

Hey all, sorry it's taken me so long to put up my second post. Things have been busy around here, and when I'm not wondering around Paris looking for housing and learning what it feels like to get lost and find my way again, I'm either eating a piece of bread–I think I've eaten around 10 pieces since Monday morning–, chatting with people in the hostel and around the city who are also looking for housing, or sleeping. My housing search hadn't been very fruitful as of yesterday, when I spent most of the day looking in the wrong direction for the American Church in Paris, which has great listings, and looking for an anglo-parisien housing magazine called Fusac, which I found at one of the coolest English-language bookstores I've ever seen, Shakespeare and Company, on the Left Bank right near Notre Dame. I ran out of minutes on my cheap cellphone right in the middle of following my first lead, a French woman who bought my confidence by knowing all of the best areas in Houston and then comparing them to neighborhoods in Paris. When I got back in contact with her, I found out that the place she was renting was 1500 euros/month for two people–way too high for my budget. But, like I said, today was a lot better. I hung out with people from the hostel last night but managed to get up by sunrise, eat an early breakfast, charge up my cellphone again and start looking for places right away. I also met up with another English teacher named Slaven who is looking for a place in Montmartre, and we walked up to the Sacre Coeur, where I got an amazing view of Paris, of just how small it is, but also of how unified it is despite, or maybe because of, its stunning diversity.

At a café just down the street, Slaven and I had coffee and called housing places. I was able to see a room in an apartment in Belleville–some very Parisian mix of Brooklyn and Queens, great outdoor markets too–that is in my price limit (actually cheaper than a lot of places I've seen out of town), is furnished, and doesn't require a big deposit or a long-term contract. After I visited the place, I took the metro down to the train that goes strait out to where I teach, and took that train to the Champs-Élysées just to make sure that it didn't take too long to get to where I need to go, and it went just fine. If I do end up getting this place, I will have a pretty long commute, but it will be at most four days a week, and it will give me time to prepare my lessons! This weekend, I'm going to couch surf in Pontoise, a small old town near where I will teach. I may end up liking this area a lot, which I am still open to, but if the place in Paris is available tomorrow, I will have a really hard time turning it down. In any case, I plan on finding a place by the end of the weekend.

A little bit about the hostel I'm staying in: I've met six or seven other people here that are also looking for housing in Paris, and it has been nice teaming up with people. I've made friends with a German guy and a Brazilian girl who are both students, and I have also gotten to know two other English-teaching assistants. I've also met some interesting and strange people who are just traveling, like a guy from Taiwan whose English is barely passable (and he speaks no French), and I can't tell if he is here because he was laid off from his job or if he is on sabbatical. He seems to be in good spirits despite asking me questions like, 'where should I go?' and 'what is there to do?' I first noticed him on the train from Charles de Gaulle, and then in the giant metro station Gare du Nord, carrying a big cardboard box that seemed to be quite heavy. I then ran into him at the hostel, where I found out that they box contained all the parts that he needed to build a bicycle, and that he planned to ride the bike through France (or Paris, I couldn't quite understand what he was saying...). That's about all I've got for now. The next few days should see me settling in, probably writing in the blog more frequently if I find a permanent place to stay, so check back soon.

First post, introduction

Hello everyone,

Though I know that I don't have to make this inaugural post in letter form, I feel obligated, in a way, because this blog mostly takes the place of general emails to family and friends letting them know what I am doing, thinking, seeing, on my trip to France in...let's see, wow, about 4 hours.

As most of you probably know, I am moving to the Paris region to become an English teaching assistant in an école (elementary school) in a small town about 40km northwest of Paris called Menucourt, in a conglomeration of towns and cities called Cergy-Pontoise, in the Val d'Oise department (kind of like a county in the US). I have thought about adding little French lessons to my posts, more anecdote than pedagogy, and luckily I can double up and make this part of the introduction to Menucourt. In French, the word Menucourt could be read as a pun on the size of the town and as a kind of ironic redundancy. 'Menu', besides referring most commonly to the thing you point to to order at restaurants, means 'slight' or 'tiny'; and 'court' means short. So we have either 'short menu'–i.e. there's not a lot to choose from–or the redoubled 'tiny-short', which we might as well translate as 'little-bitty'.




In any case, the place I'm teaching is small and fairly lifeless. The French wiki says that it consists mostly of suburban-style houses with a population of 5,084. So that means that I won't be living there! Luckily it's not too far from a lot of great places. I'll either live in a bigger town northwest of Paris with good transport, or in Paris itself. I will know much more about this in the next few days, so stay tuned!

When I arrive in Paris, around midnight our time, around 8 am there, I will stay in a hostel in the northeast 19th arrondissement (sort of like 'district' or 'ward' in the U.S.), right near the big loop called the Boulevard Peripherique. My French professor used to sarcastically refer to Paris as 'le centre de l'universe', and the loop is a kind of Saturn's ring; so I will be at the edge of the force field, subject, of course, to the law of falling bodies. The hostel is famous for....bedbugs! I can deal, though; the area is supposed to be pretty cool, near a nice park with a big outdoor movie screen where they play 3D films. I have tossed around the idea of visiting several of the most touristy locations–maybe the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées–tomorrow in the depths of jet lag delirium, both because they will be full of energetic people and endless stimulus and because I cynically lump them in with places people visit mostly in order to tell other people that they have been there. (My friend Chris gave me the perfect example of a place like this: at the Louvre, you don't so much look at the Mona Lisa as jockey with the crowd for elbow room to hold up your camera, snap a picture, and look at later.) And perhaps one can only truly seize they day in Baron Haussmann's modernized Paris in a body that should be in a dream. I will be meeting with someone who is doing the same job as me, but in a different school, and who apparently knows the area near the hostel. Although I don't know her, it will be nice to have someone to talk to and walk around with for the first few days, and I'm sure we will become friends, if for no other reason than for survival.



I'll check in soon with an update from Paris, and I might have some pictures and video too! I've considered filming my walk through the Gare du Nord (the busiest railway station in Europe), but I think I'll wait for a more leisurely occasion. Wish me luck!

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.