Picnic in the Park

Today I met up with a few of my classmates for an afternoon picnic in the parc des buttes Chaumont. The weather in Paris has been really nice over the last week (unlike the first week that I arrived and it rained every day), so it was a pretty ideal day for a day in the park. If someone were to listen in to the conversations that we were having, they would have probably thought that we were crazy, as the language kept jumping from English, French, and German.

While there, we were sitting not too far from a group of men who were having what appeared to be a stag party for one of their members. We had the pleasure of watching the poor guy get the worst makeup job I've ever seen, and forced into black stockings, a nun's habit, and handed a copy of the Bible, and a leather whip. It was quite a spectacle, although I'm pretty sure that if I were a parent, I would have covered my child's eyes. In any case, the man-nun actually seemed to be having a pretty good time (there was undoubtedly a good amount of alcohol involved), and he even asked to have his photo take with us, although he insisted that it be an all female shot.

Overall, things are going well in Paris... except for the petit problème that my computer repairman has just informed me that he can't repair my laptop...

Public Flogging or Intellectual Exercise?

I have been warned many times before that Sciences Po employs what one might be tempted to call a 'Socratic' method of teaching. Apparently this method involves professors tearing students down and then seeing them rise from the ashes and achieve intellectual brilliance. I'm not so sure I like this method, as I experienced it firsthand this morning. We had our first round of oral presentations in my methodology class today, and every presentation ended (my own included) with the professor inviting the class to tell the presenter what he or she did poorly, and then the professor systematically listing off all of the errors that the presenter had made. There's not a whole lot of stock placed in positive reinforcement, so I'm pretty sure that there were a number of wounded egos that walked out of the classroom. It's not clear if these presentations are meant to be an intellectual exercise or a public flogging session...oh well, I suppose that we can all look forward to the day that we rise from the ashes, and we'll be intellectual warriors at the end.

Elsewhere, la vie continues to be très belle, although it would be nice if the laptop repairman would actually repair my laptop rather than telling me ''il y a un tout petit problème...''.

How to Fix a Laptop in France

I've been in Paris for a week now, and so far things have been mostly great. I say mostly great because while almost everything has been going as smoothly as I could have wanted, my laptop decided to die the day after I arrived in Paris, and I had to take it into a shop to get repaired. I've never had to get any electronic device repaired before, but I always imagined that it would be a fairly straight forward procedure: you take the broken electronic to a shop, they fix it, you pay them for their services and you leave with a newly functioning device. Maybe this is how it works in Canada (although perhaps not), but certainly not here in Paris. The problem is fairly straightforward: my hard drive needed to be replaced, and Windows XP needed to be reinstalled; simple, no? I left my laptop at the repair shop on Monday, with the promise that it would be ready to be picked up on Tuesday, however, everyday since Tuesday I've been told that it would take another 24 hours for such and such a reason...finally, today the repairman PROMISED me that it will be ready tomorrow, but I'm definitely not holding my breath. Oh well,I'm not going to complain, because as I've said, otherwise everything has been great.

Orientation began on Monday, and I have two preparatory classes for the next two weeks in order to prepare international students for their studies at Sciences Po: methodology and French language classes. I won't bore you with the details of the classes, but suffice it to say that the Sciences Po methodology classes are pretty intense. I enrolled in my fall semester classes on Wednesday, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster, and I wound up having to take classes such as 'French Intellectuals in the Public Space', and 'Enjeux politiques'...while I'm sure that they'll be interesting enough, these are definitely not the classes I would have chosen.

There's really not too much to say right now (This post is going to have to be on the short side since I'm not working on my laptop , and the keys on this french keyboard are in all the wrong places!), however one last mildly exciting tidbit is that I saw the Pope's motorcade this afternoon! I was sitting with some classmates at a sidewalk cafe on St. Germain des Près (right up the street from Sciences Po) for an afternoon drink, when suddenly the streets were all blockaded, and dozens of police officers were prowling the streets, a helicopter was hovering up above, and then the motorcade zoomed right past us. We were blessed with the Pope's exhaust! No Popemobile today, just motorcyles and black cars with tinted windows. Apparently he's in town for the weekend, and is giving a huge speech at Les invalides tomorrow afternoon; a few of us are thinking of going to try to see him, if only for the experience, and to be able to say that we saw the Pope in Paris.

Greetings from Paris! I've been here since last Thursday morning, but it still doesn't seem real that I'm here for an entire year. Since arriving, the only thing that has been on my mind has been finding a permanent place to live. I was seriously stressing about not having a permanent address, and so the last few days have been spent doing nothing but apartment hunting and worrying about being homeless. Thankfully, yesterday afternoon I got an e-mail from a woman who had interviewed me on Friday, offering me a room in her flat, and I am now happy to announce that I have a home for the next nine or ten months. I'm going to be living in a four bedroom apartment with a lady named Beatrice, and her two kids who are only there two nights a week (they spend the rest of the time at their dad's), located in the 19e. Now, originally I had been hesitant about this particular place because I had wanted to live with people who are a little closer to me in age and spirit, but after having spent a couple of days looking at some real dumps/apartments, I was feeling pretty discouraged and the anxiety was beginning to set in. Besides, the room that I'm getting is the nicest room I saw (it has a fireplace!), in the cleanest apartment i saw, AND comes with a fully stocked kitchen AND an in house washing machine (rare for Paris). The only downer about the place is that it's definitely not walking distance to my school, and the location is a little out of the way. That being said, I am supremely relieved to have found housing, and am now ready to relax a little and enjoy Paris before classes begin in three weeks.

On one final note, although it's been five years since I was last in Europe, it's nice to see that some things never change: it seems that Parisian couples just can't seem to keep their hands off of each other, and everywhere you turn there are people practically falling over each other in the streets and walking into oncoming traffic, passionately engaged in the art of tasting each others throats.