Leaving and Paris

I write to you from the beautiful and summery seventh arrondissement of Paris, the city of light and love! It's about 6:06 pm here, although I can't even begin to imagine how long I've been up. Our flight left Reunion last night at 9:25pm and arrived this morning at 6:25am. It was beautiful and surreal watching the sun rise over the western Italian coast as we slowly lowered ourselves into France. I have to say that I love this land.

When we left, the three Americans, "Team America" definitely closed the door on a chapter of our lives. I can't believe that I just lived abroad. I can't believe that I am in Paris now. Leaving was harder than I thought, actually. The hardest part was leaving my friends, for certain. I can't say for sure when I'll see these people again, if ever. That's a hard pill to swallow. I mean, I have friends from all over the world, which means if I had the means, I could go places. And that's cool.

Although, on Leaving Day, everything seemed to go according to plan. Too smoothly, though. Of course, France wouldn't let us used-to-efficiency Americans (old habits die hard) get off the island without a fight. We expected to get our monthly stipends like normal on the beginning of the month, (236 euros to be precise) and we ran into a problem. The school wouldn't give us a measley centime since we were leaving and were going to spend it off the island. I can't go into specifics, because I 1) don't understand it completely myself and 2) it's tooooo long. After thirty minutes of arguing, talking to our useless ISEP coordinator, and the Vice President of forign students, I ended up arguing my way into getting paid for the two days we were in June and the seven days in January when we arrived without getting paid. 94 euros is better than 0 euros, but still not as good as the 236 I budgeted for. Apparently my argumentative French is pretty good. I held my own, and I was proud of myself. It still put me in a bad mood, though.

Regardless, the day rolled into night and we hugged our friends. I'll admit that I welled up just a little bit, and then we hopped on a plane and spent a very fitfull ten hours with AirFrance.

This morning we navigated thorugh the Parisian metro (which is really straightforward and fast, thank goodness) and rolled to Andrew's neighborhood (a one minute walk across two streets to the Eiffel Tower) around 10:30am. Andrew is a friend we found through www.couchsurfing.org who kindly is sharing his apartment to us travelers to show us Paris and give us a more local feel to being a visitor. As it turns out, he's an expat, so we're having fun catching up on the US and pop culture. The website is a great social networking tool, so I highly suggest you check it out! There are even surfers in Antarctica!

My first impressions of the city are exactly what I hoped. I have visited Paris for a few hours on the way here, but being here and staying here is SO much better. It's summer in this city. It was a refreshing, chilly sixty degrees this morning. The people here are nicer and more fashionable than I thought they'd be. While navigating the metro without escalators (each of us with 2 pieces of big luggage; one of mine with a broken handle) several people helped us out. Thankfully, we were in good spirits, simply for having survived a long ass flight and for being the spectical of three Americans dragging their lives behind them through the grimy tiled labyrinth of metro halls. We had a serious case of the giggles.

Paris is exactly like the movies and shows. It's colorful and fresh, and full of people moving at a pace much faster than "tropical island." I can never stop looking at the taupe, smooth buildings with shiny black balconies painted with splotches of red geraniums in terra cotta holders. Little old ladies walk around with shoes that match their handbags and necklaces and sunglasses I don't think I'm adventurous enough to try, old men walk with wicker baskets to get their yogurt and baguettes (which, by the way, BLOW the baguettes from Reunion out of the water), and young fashionable ladies walk their small dogs around with purpose. It's completely Parisian, and completely intoxicating.

It was completely surreal, walking around, hearing AMERICAN accents for the first time in five months. (This arronsissement is full of expats and tourists).We kept remarking on how eerie it was seeing so many white people. Men don't whistle or yell when we walk by. We are not anomalies anymore. It's weird and refreshing. I'm sure it will be many more things as my time outside of Reunion continues.

I am sorry if this post sounds disjointed, but while I'm experiencing this I want to remember as much as possible. Tomorrow I think we will go to the Louvre! Can't wait!

A plus!