Study Abroad is About Learning!!

This has all been one epic day for me, and it's not over yet! Dinner is generally around 8:30 PM, though we are now getting promises of earlier because we both look exhausted, but I'll start at the beginning...

Lesson #1: If you like to get up and walk around, don't take a window seat. On my Detroit-Amsterdam leg (7 hours), the man on the aisle of my window seat fell asleep and never got up again around 30 minutes into the flight. Other than that, it was a good flight. I watched Prince of Persia, which had pretty people and pretty awful dialogue. A-Team was worse-- I stopped that in the middle. Apparently tired me has a lower tolerance for bad movies.

Lesson #2: Too heavy is too heavy. I tried to take public transportation, but the change didn't work out, and I was just too exhausted to figure everything out, so I took a cab. The guy was really nice, and the man who pointed out the cab laughingly told me they picked out the biggest one in the whole place, just for me.

Lesson #3: I didn't need to worry that much about speaking French. I don't remember any of the rules of grammar, but communicating vocabulary-wise has been just fine with my host mom all day. In that vein, though,

Lesson #3A: It's really nice to have an English-speaker in the house. My mom and I talked for a while before other Katherine came, and that really put my conversational skills to the test right from the spot. She complimented me on them, in fact, which made me very proud :-). 

Lesson #4: I packed wayyyy too much. But luckily, she had room to hold it all! Check out a couple of pictures of my room! 

Lesson #5: Getting lost with a friend is a lot more fun than getting lost without one. Katherine and I wandered around the touristy part of Paris for three hours this afternoon. Here's some evidence that we did some serious footwork:

We started at the Opera, fairly confident that we knew where the Champs-Elysses was...

We found La Place de La Conchord! We should go through the Tuilieries, because that will surely take us to the Arc de Triomphe! Also, if you turn your head sideways (still working out the kinks on my photo program) you can see the Eiffel Tower... that probably should have been a clue....

...And by "Arc de Triomphe", we meant the Louvre and the Arc in front of that. Me: Is that the Arch de Triomphe? I always thought it was, you know, a little bigger...

 

The Louvre, on the other hand, is pretty  humongous. I took a lot of pictures of it.

WE FOUND IT! (About two hours later). And then promptly navigated the metro, at which we are far more competent, back to our home. Katherine and I spent lots of quality walking time together and successfully navigated the metro at rush hour without being pickpocketed, which I think adds up to a pretty good first day. More photos of the apartment to come! Perhaps when it's not raining, I'll even take a picture of the surprisingly picturesque rue Eugene Jumin :-)