Christmas in October

People in North America often complain about stores beginning to roll out the Christmas merchandise and music in early November; at Starbucks, we used to start playing Christmas music within a couple of days after Halloween, and we would always have customers make a stink about it. I've personally never had a problem with a long holiday season in stores, (although I do find it to be in somewhat bad taste to start aggressive holiday campaigns before Remembrance Day (Nov. 11)), however, since early October, my local Monoprix has looked like Santa Claus has thrown up all over it, which even I think is ridiculous. I guess since Thanksgiving and Halloween are strictly North American holidays (and merchandising bonanzas), there's really nothing in the French calendar that can be turned into a commercial holiday. 

I'm all settled into my Parisian home, although I've been having some serious problems working the washing machine. As a result, I've managed to dye all of my underwear and white clothes a not-so-attractive shade of blue. For a girl who came to Paris with not too many shirts, most of which were originally white or a variation of white, this has been a problem. Given the wild fluctuations in the Euro-CAD exchange rate lately, shopping to replace my wardrobe is not really an option, so I've had to resort to creative layering to try to hide the weird blue stains all over my shirts. Luckily, I should be starting work at Starbucks this week (I have an 'interview' this Thursday, but it's really just a session for the store manager to make sure that my paperwork to work in France is all in order), and will then soon be able to hit the Parisian shops and piece together a brand new winter wardrobe worthy of the streets of Paris. 

Speaking of paperwork, I've been here for just under two months now, and I'm just finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of filing away my paperwork. I've got a bank account, a student number, a student card, a social security number, personal liability insurance, and applications in the works for my long-stay visa and student housing allowance. Let it be known that there is a ridiculous amount of paperwork involved when one wants to spend any length of time living in France. It took me an extra-long time to get my carte de séjour stuff sorted out because there were problems with my birth certificate that required making an appointment at the Canadian embassy to get an attestation de naissance  before i could proceed with my application. FYI for any Ontario-born Canadians looking to get anything done in France, make sure you have a copy of the long-form of your birth certificate with both of your parents' names on it, otherwise you too will have to get friendly with the embassy staff.

I've not been very good about updating this blog. I've been finding it a little/lot harder to write this time around (compared to my last blogging experience during my Summer '07 trip), perhaps because my days are not filled with exciting, one of a kind experiences, but instead involve the mundanities of daily life, such as going to school, reading, grocery shopping, etc... things that I feel most people wouldn't be so interested in reading about. That being said, life in Paris is definitely blog-worthy, and I will start to make the effort to write about it more often.

For those of you who aren't aware, there's a Canadian federal election coming up in exactly one week. Technically, the voting procedure for Canadians overseas is a relatively simple one: you send in a form requesting a ballot, the government sends one, and you mail it back to Ottawa in time for election day. I faxed in my request form nearly three weeks ago and have not yet received my ballot, and I'm beginning to get a little antsy, given that my filled in ballot needs to be back in Ottawa in exactly one week, and I have zero faith in Canada Post (I swear, somewhere in the head office of Canada Post, there is a box full of mail that I've sent over the years that just never made it to its final destination). At first I thought that maybe the postman was witholding my mail (since I've actually been having a hard time getting my mail since moving into my new home), but I've spoken with a bunch of other Canadians who have also not yet received their ballots. There was a rumour floating around that we'd be able to just cast a vote at the embassy, but that did in fact turn out to be a rumour. I'm just a little ticked off, especially since I'm meant to be throwing a Canadian Election Party(!) next week, and it seems a little ridiculous that the organizer of such an event didn't even vote!

In other news, I've been in Paris for just over a month now, and to be honest, life here is a lot like life in Toronto: I wake up, brush my teeth, go to school, blah blah blah...the only thing that is remarkably different is that I've begun to shower in the morning instead of at night (this is a big change for a girl who has ALWAYS been a night time bather) and I tend to wear high heels a lot more here than I do at home.

Speaking of high heels, Paris fashion week (pret à porter for spring 2009) just ended. I didn't get to do as much fashion stalking as I had hoped to, but I did manage to convince a friend to come with me to the Tuileries for an afternoon to skulk around the tent where the Christian Lacroix show was taking place. While we didn't actually see anything inside of the tent, we did spot a number of très fashionable people wearing crazy high heels (photos to come), some very skinny girls (we assumed they were models or wannabe models), and some very well dressed security guards.

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.

Packing Up, Moving Out and On

Where has the summer gone?? I feel like the last six weeks since I first posted have gone by at an alarming rate. So much as happened since Bastille Day (July 14th for you non-francophiles, and the date of my inaugural post): I finished my my last class ever at UofT, I went on a three week trip to Asia, I've been wading through the mountain of paperwork and necessary appointments required to move to France (after scrambling to get my paperwork together, I got my student visa last week!), and I've finally begun packing up my apartment, cancelling services, giving most of my furniture and household items away, and making moving arrangements. Exactly one week from this time tomorrow, I'll be sitting at a gate at Pearson International Airport waiting to board my flight bound for Paris via Dusseldorf. I can definitely feel my stress levels beginning to spike, but I'm trying my best to stay cool under pressure. I'm not going to lie, a large part of my time has been preoccupied with trying to decide how many pairs of shoes and how many books I can get away with bringing, without being ridiculous...



Once I arrive in Paris, my number one priority is finding a place to live from October until June/July of next year. As of now, I have a room at a student housing complex for the month of September, but nothing set October 1st. I've been scoring the online ads, and so far I've emailed a lot of people, some of which seem kind of promising. I've set up a viewing appointment for the day that I arrive, but I'm definitely going to be conducting an intensive housing search once I get there. Housing in Paris is super expensive, but luckily the French government subsidizes student rent, which should take some of the financial pressure off.



Speaking of financial pressure, my second priority is to find a job as quickly as possible. Government subsidies aside, the euro-CAD exchange rate is pretty terrible now (currently, the exchange rate floats somewhere between 1EURO=1.55-163 CAD; just to give you an idea of how much the Euro has appreciated in value, when I backpacked around Europe five years ago, the exchange rate was something closer to 1EURO=1.30 CAD), so I need to start making local currency as soon as possible, otherwise I can see myself burning through my savings pretty quickly. As blech as I currently feel about it, I'm probably going to wind up working at a Starbucks in Paris for awhile, just until I get my Parisienne life going and can maybe start looking for something else a little more local/Parisian.



Even though I'm feeling an increase in my stress, I'm beginning to get excited. I'm looking forward to exploring Paris, starting new classes, and meeting lots of (politically-minded) young people from all over Europe and the world. Although I have steadfastly maintained that I am not a Torontonian (I'm ABSOLUTELY an Ottawan at heart), I do feel a twinge of sadness when I think about leaving Toronto. This was the first summer that I've spent almost entirely in Toronto, and I definitely developed a newfound appreciation for the city. Mostly though, I'm sad to be leaving behind some very good friends that I've made over the last few years.



On an entirely different note, my Asia trip was fantastic! This year my mom's brothers and sisters decided to throw a huge birthday party for their mom (my grandmother, obviously), which involved buying plane tickets for almost all of her grandchildren from around the world, and inviting 75 of her closest friends to a big dinner party in Hong Kong. After the party shindig, my mom and I headed to Malaysia for a weeklong vacation. We spent almost all of our time on the island Pulau Perhentian Besar, on the northeast coast of peninsular Malaysia. The food was mostly delicious (luckily no cases of traveller's 'stomachache'), the weather was almost entirely beach friendly (although the one night that it did rain, it was the most insane downpour ever), and it was nice to just spend some time with my mom, who I don't see very often because she lives in Vancouver. The highlight of my trip was that I became a PADI-certified open-water scuba diver! This has been a goal of mine for quite awhile, so after four days of spending eight hours in scuba class, I'm finally licensed to dive! In the four dives that i completed, I saw a bazillion clownfish, lots of beautiful corals, a pair of sharks (!), sea cucumbers, and just about every kind of tropical fish you can imagine. It was very "Finding Nemo". I'm addicted, and I'm already planning on trying to make a trip to Egypt in the next year in order to go diving in the Red Sea...and maybe also see the Pyramids.



Anyhow, there's nothing much else to write about at the moment. My next post will most likely be coming from the otherside of the Atlantic!