Birthday in Paris

Well yet again, it's been awhile. And of course I forgot my photos. I promise when I get back to the US everyone will get a good taste of some pictures!!

As for what has been happening...Nothing really. Strange to say but it feels normal now. I have been out seeing the beautiful Christmas decorations that have been put up around Paris! I absolutely love that I get to experience Christmas here.

It is getting fairly cold and constantly cloudy. That is getting really old but I guess that's winter in Paris. I went to see a Moliere play yesterday. I was able to understand some of it but they talked really fast. And of course, with my wonderful luck, I was infront of some lady who was having issue with her seat and a manager of sorts had to come talk to her and it was absolutely ridiculous considering I couldn't understand her or the play! So that was by far, very interesting. Oh and any one come to Paris, you tip the people in theatres who show you to your seats, strange huh?

Sarah and her sister Mandy came to visit. I had a wonderful Friday afternoon/evening with them. The more reminders of home I get the more I want to go home but at the same time it's nice to share this with others, otherwise it feels almost like a dream!

So the last week was fairly uneventful however this upcoming week should be very exciting. Today is my birthday, no big plans because I have crazy amounts of classes and my volunteer work tonight. Thursday I am going to see the Lion King musical thing in French of course!! And then this weekend Tyler comes down and hopefully I will adequately celebrate my birthday! Time is really flying by and I will be home soon!

Love and miss everyone!!

30 days

30 days until my last day of class. 30 days until my parents and sister get on a plane headed to Paris. 31 days until I see them again. 38 days until I go home home, USA home. 30 days leaves a lot of time left, thank goodness, although it seems so short too!

I just got back from Rennes and visiting a friend there. I got to stay with his homestay family and it was wonderful! A home cooked meal again, though I realize why it is better I left the homestay I'd be huge otherwise!! Rennes was beautiful though and another small town feel. Definitely a college town though which was an interesting experience being in France and still feeling as if I was in a college town back home. Tyler and I went to Mont St Michel which is this huge cathedral/abbey at the top of a hill bascially. The most facinating thing is that there are times of the day where the tide is so high that you use to not be able to get in or out of the area. Facinating and I really loved it! Again it was wonderful to see a friend from Doane and get to know someone else better. We also went to a dinner with a group of French students and some Chinese students. It was a good Chinese meal and the experience was priceless. To hang out and discuss with other students in French was amazing. You could tell they were all in the process of growing up. One day they will have perfected throwing dinner parties and the conversation will be even more interesting. Amazing to watch it all in the making.

So it may sound like lately I've been mentioning my return more but it is simply due to a slight fear of coming back. I know that I have changed which means that others have while I was gone. It is so funny, but I know what to expect here now and I have no idea what to expect when I go back home! So 30 days left and I will live it to the fullest here but I don't think that fear can ever go away, not until I face it. But I simply worry that I will not fit in again! How silly I'm sure..but nonetheless that is the final part of this culture shock and experience and I am a little scared to face it but after all of this, it cannot be that scary!

I got a wonderful gift today from a very good friend back home Kacy! I got some skittles :) but also a note. So as I ate a slice of French pizza from the bakery I got to feel as if I was kind of back home again :) It was amazingly wonderful!!

My roommate is still wonderful and I really enjoy her company. I put up post-its around the room labeling items in French that I wasn't sure of what the French word was. She then was adorable and associated it with other things. So I had closet (le placard) and she wrote like Miss Belle's closet and then for hanger she wrote "To hang princesses dresses on." Things have been going very well for us. We might be getting together with some of her friends soon and I can't wait for my family to meet her :)

And yet again I forgot my camera thus no pictures. I really should work on that...! This weekend we are going to Chartres which has some beautiful cathedral apparantly. Otherwise, Thanksgiving is next week and then my 20th birthday in which I can legally drink for :) How funny! So birthday, then the 13th I will go to EuroDisney (the trip during fall break was delayed until Christmas decorations would be up.) So that is the run down. In between are a bunch of little trips here and there around Paris. I feel as if I live here and yet I know I have not seen everything or even a portion of everything, but I have plenty of time in my life to explore Paris and so many other cities and countries which is the beautiful thing. And thanks to every day here I know I have the strength and ability to do it all.

Love and miss everyone. And be seeing so many of you soon

Sarah Palin

Twice this week I have been told I resemble Sarah Palin! How strange and even stranger since she is now out of the spotlight... Anywho

Life here in France is going well. I got my birthday cards from my parents today! One of them included a birthday to-do list (very subtle mom) but nonetheless it was wise "Be true to yourself and to what you want out of life. Broken hearts heal, but broken dreams don't" And I realize what a dream come true coming here has been. Though no broken hearts have resulted from it, it is wonderful getting to achieve a dream. And now I get to start dreaming of something else, working to achieve something else. It is an increcible feeling living what you've wanted and knowning that there is still more to come.

I don't think I have sat down and really realized how lucky I am. I am not even 20 years old and I am spending a semester in Paris. Some people will wait their whole lives before even seeing another country, and I get to spend 4 months in one. While I realize how incredibly blessed I am to have family and friends and a boyfriend that supprot me, I also realize how attainable other dreams and hopes are with a little hard work and lots of love from family!

I am heading off to the north of France this weekend to visit another friend from Doane. The Doane reunions have been very nice! I'm excited to see another part of France though and I am still amazed that it will only take me a couple hours to go from the center to the north...what a small country!! I really do like it though. A lot of the girls going back at semester are starting to feel ready for it and I agree. Maybe after I get past Thanksgiving and my birthday I'll change my mind. Life just seems so much more like life now, though still a little exciting, it feels so much more normal! I am going to see the Lion King musical (in French) in December! I am pretty excited it looks like a blast!

New things I have learned:

There is a lot of time in the day when you don't watch tv
There is even more time when you don't spend it online
I like Accounting more than French
Studying one subject all the time gets very, very boring
In the markets, some meat (like birds) are sold with their heads still on!
I really like it here though!

I love and miss everyone so much and I can't wait for my family to come out!!

This Journey

One of my friends here is deciding to stay another semester. That, of course, had me thinking as to whether or not I would stay another semester. For me, I think that would be hiding though. There is much to do back at home and I cannot shrug my responsibilities. That has been part of growing up here. There is a difference between what I want to do and what is possible. But, for me, I also believe that my journey needs to continue back at home. There is still much learning to do. I have fallen in love with Paris and would of course love to stay but that would then be easy. The difficulty will be going back to the United States and adapting again.

I really do love life here. Things seem normal now and regular. I have managed to adapt to the life and I am very sad at the thought that it is less than 50 days until I go home. There just doesn't seem to be enough time to complete everything, but I have full confidence I will accomplish most of what I want in the time given. That is why I need to return home and use what I learned and readapt again. Though this probably seems silly and useless for others, it is hard to describe the feeling I get when I think about going home. I really have a hard time accepting it.

Otherwise. Germany was good, it snowed! It was so incredibly good though and I loved it! I hope to go back again someday and I am sure I will. Transportation took forever though! When I go back I plan to get a car so I can see more much quicker. It will be so much better that way! I will get pictures soon I hope.

I love and miss everyone!

Wow I have changed

So I have been in Germany now for less than a day, but already I cannot believe how much I have changed from my time abroad and it took leaving my comfort zone of Paris to figure it out.

My trip to Germany was going fairly well until I missed a stop and subsequently missed my train. I am thus without Andy's phone number or a way to get to her town. I expected full out tears and hyperventillating. None of it came. I was so relaxed about it all I amazed myself. That is not to say I wasn't worrying a bit, for heaven's sake I might not have had a place to sleep! The kind German on the train with me helped me get back to where I needed to be and told me a cab would take me. The kind cab man did take me, for 56 euros!! It was worth not sleeping outside though. Everything ended up fine I met up with Andy and we made it to her place without any more events. I just really was amazed at how calmly I took it. HUGE change...

Germany seems so much different then France. The people are more friendly and less indifferent. They will strike up conversations without a problem, and they look at you! In France you don't really look at people, more you look through them. It is so much more like the United States here that I really enjoy it...or maybe it's more like Nebraska. I'm not in some huge city. People have houses and lawns and drive ways. I really enjoy seeing that again. By all means I love Paris, but I prefer smaller cities and towns I think. And here they have decorated some for Halloween, that makes me feel so much better! So I'm not quite done with my trip but I wanted to share my changes. It still is incredible how much more independent I'm becoming and how much more calm I am. Everything (almost) is fixable, taking everything in stride makes life much less stressful!!

I am taking tons of pictures and will upload them when I get back to Paris...so strange but I do miss it and I've hardly been away!


Love and miss everyone

8 weeks in, 8 weeks left

I am officially about halfway through my trip! I cannot, and almost refuse, to believe it! There is still way to much to do! Thus, I am sorry for my lack of updates so this one will be incredibly long with tons of pictures to make up for it. So get ready...Here we goooooooooooooooooo

Okay so when I left you it was a couple weeks ago! I will try to update as best as possible. I went to Marseille and Aix-En-Provence shortly after my last post. They are both in the south of France and both absolutely beautiful!!! I preferred Aix because it was more of a small town feeling to it. In Marseille we saw the old part of the town and I took tons of pictures. In Aix I went to the market and it was beautiful. The fruits and vegetables almost looked fake I couldn't believe it. It was overall a wonderful weekend.

Following that wonderful trip I had classes, tutoring, Salsa lessons and more classes. The best thing that happened last week was we went to the National Archives of France. If any of you have seen the movie Marie Antoinette, I got to stand in the same room where some of that film was made!! I then, amazingly, got to see so many wonderfully amazing things. I got to see the last will and testament of Louis the 14th and Napoleon! It was so incredible. The coolest though was seeing the playing cards of Louis the 16th! On his cards he would write who he wanted to see that night in the card room. We also saw his hunting journal where on Bastille day, he wrote that nothing happened! He had no idea what was going on, none at all! Last, and by far the most impressive for me, was we got to see Marie Antoinette's final letter before she was killed. It was so sad but we could actually read some of it! Now when I say we saw these, he pulled them out of a locked vault and had them simply laying ina folder in front of us. No glass, no security. It was incredible. The picture below is of him closing one of the 3 huge doors he had to open in order to get to the relics.

The Friday of last week I climbed the Eiffel tower with a friend. You can only reach the 2nd level this way but it is incredibly cheaper and quite the exercise. I really had fun but it was sooo tiring!! Later that night I went out with some friends and enjoyed the evening.

I spent the next day at a flea market looking at incredibly cool stuff and then went to Victor Hugo's house. It was really neat to walk through it and see some of his old things including first drafts of Les Miserables. Before I made it to his house though there was a "manifestation" or a demonstration in the streets. It was really neat to see. I think it had something to do with immigration rights and problems. Following that it was a pretty relaxed day. Place Voges which is a park by Victor Hugo's house is beautiful and so very French!

Sunday I went to do my homework in the Luxembourg gardens and ran across...another manifestation!! This one was about teacher's and their wages and the fact that there are not enough teachers these days because the government is cutting spending. So since the gardens were not at peaceful as I had hoped I gave up that endeavor and went back to the dorm to work.

This past week has been good. I babysat for the first time. It was definately an experience. The teens are 11 and 15 and really don't need a sitter, save for the fact that they would beat each other up if no one was there. The 11 year old was extremely helpful with dinner which was a blessing because I'd never prepared a French dinner. The 15 year old was not as helpful or as kind. He seemed very put off that I was there, though I'm not sure I blame him! However, it was a nice way to make some extra cash for the week.

My roommate and I are finally seeing each other bit by bit. She is really nice and I love that she is so patient. We spent a couple hours Friday talking and she taught me some French sayings to be aware of because they are popular. We talked about everything from our families to Christmas and it was really incredible. Those types of experiences are what make me believe I am really learning French. Yesterday, Saturday, I went to another flea market which I didn't really like as much. After that I went and bought some boots and did some grocery shopping. My roommate and I went to see Vicky, Christina, Barcelona which was a decent movie but not my favorite. After that we both crashed and benefited from the time change last night! Today, as she told me yesterday, was our day for homework. I still have some more to do but I am currently taking a break! She is really helping and I am so glad I got so lucky!!

Thanks to my wonderful grandparents and parents I head out to Germany Tuesday for a 4 day trip! I am so excited and I can not thank you all enough !!

Pictures:

1. Me in front of the Eiffel Tower

2. Me and Notre Dame

3. View from the 2nd level of the Eiffel Tower

4. Me in Mareseille

5. The national archives and the crazy doors!

6. Those beautiful strawberries from Aix-En-Provence!!

Love and miss EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!

Week 2

I promise to try to get photos up soon..but with no easy access to internet there's no telling when I'll get around to it! Things have been good this week and crazy busy. It was the second week of classes which are still pretty easy for now. Monday I started my tutoring for English. It is going to be hard because the teenagers here speak very, very quickly and it is harder to understand them then the adults. Last night was my first Salsa dance class! It wasn't horribly embarassing and I laughed a lot (mostly at my awful skills!) When the guys know what they are doing I'm fine..I can usually stumble through it easily, but when the guy gets lost so do I! It is fun though and I can understand most of what the dance teacher says. He is from Portugal though so it is a little more difficult to understand his French :)

I went to the Basilique St-Denis last night with our class. It is where all the kings and queens of France are buried. It was pretty but we didn't get a lot of time so I hope to go back again, maybe with my family! It is fairly facinating.

I went shopping today and bought some much needed winter weather stuff. A couple scarves, a hat (which is really cute and not so winter friendly..but that's okay!) and some gloves :). I also bought a pretty sweater because I was getting tired of my clothes. I definately don't have enough. The only thing that looks decent is my black skirt from Banana Republic which is a size 6..everything else is HUGE. I talked to my director about a tailor, she says it will cost as much as a new pair of pants so..I will be getting a new pair of pants and having my jeans hemmed. Seems like a decent solution! My next thing to tackle will be some flat shoes that are comfortable and maybe some heels...but that's for another time! I went into Galleries Lafayette (some good shopping Kelsey) and stumbled upon the floor with all of the name brands. I mean, Prada, Dolce and Gabana and heaven knows what other names! It was absolutely insane!

It still amazes me that I can walk down the street and see the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame. It is so unreal! The city is just beautiful. My shopping today was so much fun because I kept stumbling upon different historic churches or sites in Paris and I just kept taking pictures! I went to Place de Concord today, which is near the American Embassy, and the French are celebrating 100 years of aviation so they had some fighter planes being shown. I took some pictures for Josh and I hope they are decent but there were soooooo many people!!

I had my first dream in French which was pretty cool! The person I was talking to was speaking English and I was trying to speak French. It made me feel like I am finally learning. I still don't have a roommate which makes speaking French outside of class time a little hard but hopefully she shows up this weekend.

I really will try to post some pictures after this weekend. We are going to Marseille and it should be nice and warm! I found some people to go to Normandy with so I am looking forward to the trip. I'm hoping to plan it toward the end of November (the weekend before my birthday!) I am still hoping to go to Germany for fall break, but the Monday of fall break I am going to EURO DISNEY!! YAY! Yes I am a dork, but some other girls were going and I decided to join them. The park is doing some Halloween themed stuff so it should be amazing!

I love and miss everyone!!