After a few weeks of being in Paris, it really started to feel like my home. As with any new experience in life, there is a “honeymoon” phase which involves excitement, exploration, and adapting to the situation. Over time, the new begins to feel more normal. After a couple of weeks, I felt more relaxed and confident about navigating the city. During week one, I remember feeling overwhelmed about finding the correct metro station and getting on the right line. It was like solving a math problem: once you’ve got the formula, you have to plug in the variables and find the solution. When I had done the same thing enough times, it became part of my muscle memory.
Developing a routine was also a crucial part of my success while studying in Paris. It became easier to follow a routine and begin to settle down when I knew how to find the places I would need to go to frequently. One major place I needed to find was a good grocery store where I could buy food and necessities for my apartment. This was not super difficult as there were plenty of grocery stores near my apartment that were surprisingly more affordable than those in the United States. On every school day, however, we had a two hour lunch break between Art History class and film/photography class with Professor Stinson. This gave my friends and I time to go home and make lunch before the next class if we wanted to. For me, spending the lunch period near the school was necessary because my apartment was 40 minutes away by metro. The silver lining of this situation was that some friends and I decided to go searching for a restaurant we could get lunch at one day, and we discovered a good Italian restaurant called East Mamma that we ended up going to several times during our weeks in Paris. My favorite dishes from this restaurant was the margarita pizza and the truffle pasta, and we all thought they had the best cappuccino in Paris. I had a nice apartment with a full kitchen, and while it might have been more efficient to utilize it, I was able to really bond with the people on the trip during our lunches together. One of my main goals, while I was in Paris, was to try the various restaurants, and I was able to accomplish this.
Other highlights of my time in Paris included seeing several public art museums, visiting the Eiffel Tower several times, and having picnics there, as well as seeing the Catacombs. As part of the Art History class, we saw the Louvre, the Orangerie, the Georges Pompidou Center, among others. One of my expectations from the beginning of the trip was that seeing the museums would improve my learning experience, and it certainly did. It piqued my interest in the subject when I saw the art pieces we were studying in real life, but also because seeing some of the museums redefined my opinion of what art was. Before Paris, I thought art was mainly referring to paintings and sculptures, but now I know that art comes in all different forms. The Catacombs, for example, is first and foremost a cemetery which came to be because Paris’ cemeteries were causing public health issues in the late 1700’s. Nonetheless, the way the bones are arranged in certain areas of the Catacombs could be considered art.
I am shocked at how fast the five weeks in Paris went by, but time goes by when you’re having fun. My plans for the mid-term break are to visit Croatia and spend lots of time on the beach, which is something I missed doing especially since Paris starts to get cold around this time of year. I hope to be able to visit Paris again soon, but I look forward to traveling to Croatia and then going to Rome.
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