Paris

On Thursday I arrived in Paris around 7 am. Everything went smoothly except the flight itself, which was one of the bumpiest I have ever been on. It made sleeping and eating a little difficult, but I did manage to doze on and off. Louisa accidentally slept through her alarm, but once I managed to get ahold of her, she came and picked me up and brought me back to her host family's apartment. 


After a long nap, we went out to check out the huuuuge Christmas market on the Champs-Élysées, which is pretty close to the apartment. We strolled around and checked out all of the goods in hundreds of little booths as well as picking up a few snacks - pretzels,  which would have been much better if they were warm and biere chaud (hot beer) which was kinda syrup-y and sweet and not as good as we had hoped. We made it in time to see the Eiffel Tower light up (which it does every hour) which was an exciting welcome to Paris.
For dinner we picked up some warm bread - I'm really obsessed with it, even though it was just your standard baguette, the warnings I got about how much better French bread is just didn't fully warn me - and wine from Languedoc (the region where Montpellier is) to have for dinner with cheese and salad. It was the perfect first dinner in France!


We watched a movie and chatted and then went to bed for a nice loooong sleep.
Yesterday (Friday) we got up and walked to the 6th for a really nice lunch with Caroline Cunfer, one of my former campers who is living in Rennes for the year. She is absolutely loving it there and we all loved sharing stories about camp and France and life in general. After Caroline left, Louisa and I continued our walk through the Jardins Tuileries with all the tourists and saw the Louvre (which is HUGE!) which I haven't ever seen, since we decided to skip it the last time I was in Paris. 


We had another chill evening, since tonight, New Years Eve will be much more eventful. Today I slept in pretty late again, so we are getting a slow start as Louisa makes plans for the night with her friends in the city. Right now, the game plan is to have dinner with some people from her group and a friend from Hamilton who is now living in Paris before heading to Montmartre to find some bars. We will see how the night turns out, hopefully it'll be a great start to 2012!


Tomorrow I take a train down to Montpellier and my program starts on Monday. Everything is happening really fast and I can't believe I'll be starting classes in a little over a week. But for now, I'm going to enjoy the holiday and my last night with Louisa before I move on to the next adventure!


HAPPY NEW YEARS!