11.89 Miles Later

Written while eating the last of my macrons from Laduree and figuring out when I can go to the Champs-Elysees to get another box before leaving Paris.

Bonjour encore from Paris!  Let me start with a fun little announcement...I AM FAMOUS!  Okay, maybe instagram isn't necessarily big or anything (but to anybody under the age of, say, 30 it is), but I was excited to come back from a long day in the heart of the city to find my picture from the late Love Lock Bridge on the IES Abroad instagram account!  Shameless plug, you should totally follow their account.  It is mostly awesome regrams of their current and former students' experiences studying abroad, taken in the cities where they offer programs (Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Vienna, Sydney, etc.)  Anyway, here's the picture (again) and a link to their social media account.

Okay, now down to the fun stuff.  The reason why I am here.  Studying abroad, remember?  Okay, yeah so that stuff (if this doesn't interest you at all, feel free to scroll down below to the pictures.  But I can guarantee that you won't understand any of them without reading so just listen to me...haha so back to school.  Today we had our first Museums and Heritage class at the BIA Center, which was even more interesting than I expected it to be.  It was a 2-hour lecture with an Art History professor from Belgium, and the whole time he talked to us about museums, what they are in detail and specifically their purpose in society, particularly in Paris, before going into detail about some of Paris's most famous museums.  Having never been to Paris before last week, I was fascinated by what he had to say.  Even though it was a traditional lecture session, I was intrigued because we have our first field study tomorrow.  Once the two hours were up, we met our class field study director who will be taking us to the Museum of Natural History tomorrow afternoon and the Louvre on Thursday.  Once class and our meeting was over, we walked across the street to Le Grenier a Pain, our favorite bakery close to the BIA Center.  I got this absolutely delicious lemon & raspberry tart before walking back in the windy cold (can you say Florida winter? it was 60 degrees!) to the center with my classmates.  We sat in the student lounge and enjoyed our treats with coffee (as a non-coffee drinker, I had a cup of hot chocolate with milk & 2 sugars) before meeting up with the center's Student Activities Director to go to Le Marais.  Have you ever had that one professor, who no matter what they did, you idolized them for pretty much everything and thought they were the coolest ever?  Well, that's about how we all feel about Laurie.  She's amazing and literally her job at the center, besides working the front desk, is to take students on tours of local sites in the area.  She also makes it easy because she knows so much that pretty much makes her better than a tour guide.  Anyway, we headed out to the Marais, the neighborhood most representative of the old Paris, complete with cobblestone streets and medieval architecture.  The area is filled with famous homes converted into gardens and  beautiful churches.  In addition to it also being the Jewish Quarter, complete with popular restaurants and synagogues, it is referred to by visitors as the "SoHo of Paris."  It is a trendy neighborhood, spanning 2 arrondisements, and filled with boutiques, shops and nightclubs.  We even got the chance to walk by the newly renovated Pablo Picasso Museum, which I hope to visit sometime before heading to Rome.  We walked around for a few hours before stopping at this cute Mediterranean restaurant, where we ate pita sandwiches and had delicious lemonade.  After some more sight-spotting, as she called it, we split up and each explored what we wanted to see.

"Dedicated to the memory of the director, staff and pupils of this school arrested from 1943 to 1944 by the Vichy and Gestapo Police deported and exterminated at Auschwitz because they were Jews." There were several plaques around the neighborhood memorializing members of the community who perished in the Holocaust like this one.

Post-feeling like I was a contestant on House Hunters because I wanted to move in to all of these houses.

Because we were somewhat near the area, one of my classmates and I decided to take a walk along the Seine River.  Despite getting lost off the metro and then finding ourselves stuck in a windstorm, we walked along the river, even stopping at a street artist to buy paintings of famous monuments in Paris.  I got a different kind of one, the Eiffel Tower at sunset, while she got one of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral that we visited this weekend.  Somewhere on our walk, I decided that I wanted to visit the famous tower again...when in Paris, right?  So we walked the somewhat endless sidewalk path leading to my favorite Paris monument before stopping in awe at its beauty and then hopping on the Metro back to our arrondisement...dead tired after walking a total of 11.89 MILES through the city.

Pleasantly amused as I am?  Haha turns out language doesn't always translate like we think it does.

Who could pass up another picture or view of this worldly icon?

It is almost 10:00PM here and the sun is still up, which is already abnormal, but even more abnormal in that it comes up every morning by 6:15AM, subtly waking me up for class as I have no excuse to press snooze on my alarm.  With that in mind, I'm off to do my reading for class tomorrow, which we happen to be having at Fauchon, my mom's favorite bakery in Paris.  Yes, we are having class in a cafe with our teacher before heading out to Musee d'Orsay (and yes, you can be jealous now).

Au revoir!