Week Two: Orientation Madness

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In my attempt to catch up at blogging my French adventures, I present you with week two, January 14-20:

Rather than giving us time to recover from Nice, as any sane program would do, Sarah Lawrence hauled us out of our beds and had us back at Reid Hall bright and early the next morning for Week 2 of orientation.

For the most part, it was all very useful and necessary; we learned a lot of practical things about living in France (banking, the metro, telephones), we got a tour of Reid Hall, we got to meet our future professors and see if their classes would interest us, etc. They also got us out into the city several times, making sure we weren’t just wasting away in our rooms being homesick.

Among other things, we saw a French movie at the theater (some bizarre film called Actrices, which I think must have been made after the director consumed a fair amount of vin rouge); we ate lunch together at a Resto-U, the cheap student dining halls that are scattered throughout Paris; we visited the little market at Edgar Quinet; etc. The highlight of all this was our visit to the quartier Vavin, which we finished by enjoying a nice hot pot of café creme (coffee with cream) at Select, the café where Hemingway, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir spent most of their afternoons. The coffee was great, and so was the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, it was just all too much at the same time, and it didn’t help that we brought the nasty rainy cold back with us from Nice. Most days I was at Reid Hall from 8 or 9 until 6 or later; when we saw the movie, it finished at 11, and after that they tried to take us out to wine to discuss it. Not feeling well, I bailed, and made it home by 11:30; most of the others didn’t make it home until around 1, then woke up to visit the library at 8:45 the next morning, which entailed waiting in a line outside for an hour in 30 degree weather. We Parisians are hardcore.

I was also nursing a little cold/cough/whatever all through this week, trying to get nine or more hours of sleep a night and not doing a very good job, so by the weekend I was a little testy. Then, on Friday night the girls I was supposed to go out with cancelled on me, and I was fairly bummed. I intended to spend Saturday exploring but instead spent it dealing with bank and phone issues which came up unexpectedly and took most of the day to sort out, so it wasn’t a very thrilling day.

That night, however, one of the girls who’d cancelled the night before called back and suggested we try again, so that night I went out to dinner in Montmartre, Paris’s famous former (and current) red light district. Paris’s two most famous clubs, the Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir (of Toulouse Lautrec’s famous paintings), are nestled in amongst innumerable sex shops with incredible names like the Sexodrome and Pussy’s, all doing a booming business on Saturday night. Paris has different regulations about what kind of pictures you can show in public, so the first few shows we walked past were pretty startling, adorned as they were with almost completely naked women and other such things. After taking a few pictures in front of the Moulin Rouge we trekked up into the old city (avoiding some friendly Parisian men on the way) and got pizza at a cute little diner, then decided to head over and see Sacre Coeur, the famous church set on a hilltop that overlooks Montmartre.

Since it was night, Sacre Coeur wasn’t open, so we could only see it from the outside; that was cool enough, however. I made the unfortunate mistake of taking the stairs up, since you had to pay to take the little tram; halfway up the 15 or so flights of stairs, I realized the tram would have been well worth a Euro. However, some very friendly students who were hanging out and playing music on the various landings offered me booze, romance, and weed on my long lonesome trek up the stairs, so I guess I experienced a little more culture than my less stalwart companions, who all took the tram.

The view from the hilltop was pretty great, though, and the Sacre Coeur was all lit up at night, so even though we didn’t go inside we got to see how lovely it is, and there were lots of musicians and street performers gathered around it. After we were done we wandered back along the main streets of Montmartre, just shopping in some touristy stores, before a creepy old man started following us and trying to make friends. After we lost him, none of us really felt like going any closer to the red light district again, so we all just caught the metro home.

The next day Sarah Lawrence treated us to an adorable little boat ride on the Seine that let you catch glimpses of all the main buildings/attractions in the first district. It was my first view of Notre Dame, the Tuileries, the Louvre, and several other such huge landmarks of France; although it was a little too cold, I still had fun. Afterwards, Sarah Lawrence treated us to hot chocolate at Angelina’s, a really swank tearoom on the rue Rivoli, which was far and away the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had. It was sooooo good.

And that finishes off week number two . . .

Sorry I’m so behind on these; hopefully I’ll eventually get caught up and you’ll get the updates in my life a reasonable amount of time after they happen.

As always, love to all . . .

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