So, for those of you who don't know, I'm going to be boarding a Paris-bound plane on September 4th for a year of studies at the Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris, otherwise known as Sciences Po Paris. SciPo is a grande ecole francaise, which means that it's separate from the normal French public university system, and it feeds directly into France's Ecole nationale d'administration, the place to get an education if you have any ambition to be a person of any of consequence in French politics or the civil service. While I don't have any ambition to become a player in French public life, SciPo is home to some really amazing and prominent scholars in political science and international relations, and the chance to live in Paris for a year made the opportunity to study at SciPo too good to pass up.
As of now I have a place to live only for the month of September. I'm going to be staying the Cite Internationale Universitaire de Paris (former student residence of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who also happens to be a SciPo alumnus) in September, but come October 1st, I'll be put to the streets. SciPo doesn't have any student housing, so the great housing search for a long term place will begin in earnest when I get there. Since classes don't begin until the last week of September (I'm getting there early for a two week orientation session and language classes), I'm feeling mildly optimistic that I'll be able to find something, although I've been warned by many people that finding housing in Paris can be a nightmare.
There are approximately fifty days between now and when I leave for Paris, and it feels like there's just not enough time to get everything done! I'm currently finishing up one last class at UofT (which is unfortunately on the most deadly boring topic ever: statistics and political science research methodology), working as much as possible to save up for the year to come (the damn euro kills the Canadian dollar), packing up my apartment and finding a place to store all of my things for the next year, going through mountains of paperwork to get my student visa stuff worked out (French bureaucracy is infamous for a reason), planning my upcoming August trip to Hong Kong/Malaysia/Japan (I'm going to Hong Kong for my grandmother's birthday, and figured I might as well make the bazillion hour flight over a little more worthwhile by sticking around for a couple of weeks), and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life. Needless to say, there's a lot that needs to be done, and I'm feeling a teensy bit stressed.
There's not a whole lot else to blog about right now, but I'll probably have more to write about starting in August when I'm in Asia and then when making final preparations to leave Toronto. On a final note, I thought about titles for this blog for awhile, trying a variety of different Paris/travel related titles ("Ma vie parisienne", "A Canadian in Paris", etc, etc, etc...), but in the end I decided that "Steph at 24" was the most appropriate since this blog will essentially be about my 24th year of life that I'll be spending as a student in Paris, France. Okay, okay, I know I'm not turning 24 for a few more weeks (24 days to be exact!), but....whatever.
As of now I have a place to live only for the month of September. I'm going to be staying the Cite Internationale Universitaire de Paris (former student residence of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who also happens to be a SciPo alumnus) in September, but come October 1st, I'll be put to the streets. SciPo doesn't have any student housing, so the great housing search for a long term place will begin in earnest when I get there. Since classes don't begin until the last week of September (I'm getting there early for a two week orientation session and language classes), I'm feeling mildly optimistic that I'll be able to find something, although I've been warned by many people that finding housing in Paris can be a nightmare.
There are approximately fifty days between now and when I leave for Paris, and it feels like there's just not enough time to get everything done! I'm currently finishing up one last class at UofT (which is unfortunately on the most deadly boring topic ever: statistics and political science research methodology), working as much as possible to save up for the year to come (the damn euro kills the Canadian dollar), packing up my apartment and finding a place to store all of my things for the next year, going through mountains of paperwork to get my student visa stuff worked out (French bureaucracy is infamous for a reason), planning my upcoming August trip to Hong Kong/Malaysia/Japan (I'm going to Hong Kong for my grandmother's birthday, and figured I might as well make the bazillion hour flight over a little more worthwhile by sticking around for a couple of weeks), and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life. Needless to say, there's a lot that needs to be done, and I'm feeling a teensy bit stressed.
There's not a whole lot else to blog about right now, but I'll probably have more to write about starting in August when I'm in Asia and then when making final preparations to leave Toronto. On a final note, I thought about titles for this blog for awhile, trying a variety of different Paris/travel related titles ("Ma vie parisienne", "A Canadian in Paris", etc, etc, etc...), but in the end I decided that "Steph at 24" was the most appropriate since this blog will essentially be about my 24th year of life that I'll be spending as a student in Paris, France. Okay, okay, I know I'm not turning 24 for a few more weeks (24 days to be exact!), but....whatever.
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