Now that I've caught up with my trips and stories- real life. Everything has been going rather well in this crazy, beautiful city. Today marks 1 month that I've been living here! We've been having lots of rain and the leaves are changing all around me. My classes are getting more and more interesting, as we really delve into topics and challenge ourselves. All of the professors are growing on me, they're just so animated. I feel like my life is full of characters right now. Well written and quirky characters.
This past week I have been feeling a bit down, nothing is wrong, I just haven't been particularly happy. But I'm working on changing that. Today already was a better day. And I have my weekend to look forward to because Julianne is visiting me! She's studying over in London and is taking the train on Saturday to come have a super Parisian weekend. And last night the two of us booked our fall break to Dublin for a week.
On Monday I had an interesting experience I should share. Immigration. Because of the length of time I'm in France, I have to go through the whole process. This includes a medical examine that I went for on Monday. It's basically just to make sure you aren't bringing tuberculosis into the country, but they make it far more complicated than that. Because it's the French. And they invented bureaucracy. My appointment was at 2:30 (which meant I had to miss a class visit to the Louvre- the government isn't into letting you schedule yourself, they just assign times) and so I met my friend Stephen for lunch before. We had a lot of time so we walked around the Bastille area and ended up being about 40 minutes early. This was probably for the best since we walked up to to find a line wrapped around the building. So we stood in line and laughed way too hard when someone near us remarked that they thought this only happened in Russia. We eventually got in and that's when the fun started. You have to present a paper to the front desk, just to be sent to another desk upstairs. That desk takes a paper or two and makes you sit. When they eventually call your name, you're brought into another room...where you wait, until a nurse calls you in to be x-rayed. They weight and measure, and very rapidly speak French which is unnerving and then test your eyes and put you in a closet-like thing to strip for the x-ray. I had yet to experience walking into a room of strangers (all women of course) mostly naked to be x-rayed. I was hugging a giant machine when one of the nurses shouted, "ASPIREZ!!" I was confused but quickly remembered that meant breath in, so I took a deep breath and machine noises happened. Once my clothes were back on, I was sent back to the room to wait some more. I met a guy from El Salvador and laughed about how weird this was with Stephen. Eventually I was called again, this time by a doctor who looks at your x-ray with you and asks more questions. I got a very lively man who told me I had "les yeux magnifiques, vraiment" (beautiful eyes- sorry Mom, it's just prettier in French). Once he was done, I was handed the x-ray and told to go sit again and wait for the office people. Then they took me to have my visa stamped and all my papers finalized. It sounds harmless now, but it was just a kind of unnerving and, really, hilarious couple hours trying to understand what the hell was happening. So, to reward ourselves for dealing with the French immigration process, Stephen and I sat down for drinks and relaxation in a café. Oh! And we got pho later that night with two other friends in Stephen's neighborhood, which is 'Chinatown.'
Overall, life is good. And I'm now officially official in France. No classes tomorrow, so I think I'll make it a museum day.
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