In France, back to school is known as "la rentrée" - the return. Grocery stores bulk up their selection of school supplies, and little kids become more populous on the streets in their school uniforms. At the university level, it's never quite as big a deal to go back to school, but this for me was the start of my last school year EVER, and my first class was in French. I approached Monday with a mixture of excitement and anxiety.
Let me take a moment to describe Sciences Po, the university I'm attending here. As I've said before, it's located in the Saint-Germain district near some famous expat cafés and not too far south of the Seine. It's a very swanky area - stores that I see on the way to class include: Cartier, Swarovski, Ralph Lauren, Christian Louboutin, Prada, Karl Lagerfeld, and Stuart Weitzman. Sciences Po doesn't have a self-contained campus as I've grown used to in my history of higher education, and despite being a pretty big school (12,000 students, 46% of whom are not from France), from what I can tell classes are taught in only five buildings spread out over several streets within the same general area. Despite the school's prestige, these buildings and their classrooms aren't particularly fancy or memorable, except for the one building which appears to be a converted mansion of some sort because the classrooms are rooms with high ceilings, large marble fireplaces, and gold-gilded wall moldings. A lot of people have commented that this is what you get when you hardly pay anything to attend a school (tuition for the French law students here is like $4,000 a year compared to our much, much higher tuition in the US). Still, I enjoy the unimpressive classrooms for what they are: very old rooms previously put to some other use that now serve educational purposes. It's a bit like being in the Wren building at William & Mary - nothing too fancy, but cool because of the history.
Anyway, on Monday I showed up for my first class in one of these fancier rooms, and it went pretty well! That professor is German, so her French is much easier to understand (it's always easier to understand a non-native speaker). I think I got 85% or so of what went on, which is encouraging. At the same time, we Americans clearly have to get used to certain things. That professor assumed some background knowledge in European law that we simply don't have; it's a good thing that all of us, probably through our own efforts rather than from formal legal study, have some idea of how the EU works and where to find legislation. It will be interesting to see how that progresses.
My next class, 15 minutes later (and all of my classes are two hours long because they only meet once a week) ended up being 30 minutes of waiting for the professor, who never came. (There was much discussion of "does the 15-minute rule apply in France?" before we finally decided 30 minutes was more than sufficient time to wait, especially on such a lovely day.) When I told my roommate about this at home, her immediate response was "c'est normal; he's still on vacation," in a tone like "why are you even concerned about this?"
The same thing happened the next morning for both the English and French versions of one of our required classes, and given that my Wednesday class had already been canceled (thank you to that Professor for emailing us in advance!), I found myself with two days off from class. I spent part of Tuesday afternoon sitting in both the sun and the shade at the Jardin du Luxembourg, which was still plenty busy despite the return of most Parisians from their August vacances.
On Tuesday night, one of my new friends proposed that we meet up for wine on Ile de la Cité. I suggested that we picnic on the top of the island where we could sit right over the Seine, and we ended up with about ten of us sharing wine of every color plus bread, cheese, olives, figs, and ham. We were surrounded by similar groups all taking advantage of the nice weather, and it was a ton of fun! We watched a lot of nighttime river cruises pass by, including one ship that annoyingly had huge floodlights all along its side as if to light up the surroundings in order to improve the picture quality of its passengers - it was blinding! Here was the view from our area:
On Wednesday I took advantage of the day off by going to the top of Montparnasse tower (I posted pictures of that before) and then standing in line for about an hour and a half to get my student ID. Why did it take so long, you ask? Because the registrar only had one person working during the entire duration of the time I stood in line, despite having six desks and a few other people who were there!!!! Fortunately, I had my Kindle with me, so I just stood and read for most of that time, and in the end I got my ID and was officially registered - so that's all fine. Later that afternoon I went for a run through the Tuileries and down the Seine with my new Italian friend. I discovered that from the gates to the Tuileries on Place de la Concorde you can look straight down the Champs-Elysées to the Arche de Triomphe - it's in the center of this picture if you look carefully:
On Thursday I went over to school fairly early in the day because I wanted to change my schedule and wasn't sure how much pleading I would have to do in order to accomplish that. I had signed up to do a clinic here, but since no one else seemed to be doing a clinic, I did not want to be the only non-native French speaker in a clinic that operated in French. (It is one thing to be a non-native speaker in a French class when there are other non-native speakers with you, but it is another thing entirely if you are alone and if you're supposed to be producing actual legal work.) I went to the building where the law school administrative offices are and learned that rather than walking into an office and sitting down with someone face-to-face, you instead reach a self-service welcome desk of sorts, where there is a little sign indicating the telephone extensions of various people and a phone on which to call them. I managed to carry out this entire conversation in French and on the phone, and ultimately I got out of the clinic and into the bankruptcy class (still in French). That was the class I described in my previous post, with the hard-to-hear but very sexily dressed professor.
A group of us went out Thursday night in a part of the city I'd never seen, much further east on the Seine. The area reminded me immediately of the Scheveningen boardwalk where I spent so much time in The Hague. It's a quai where several large boats have tied up and serve as pop-up restaurants during the summer. It's all outdoors, and several of the places have big lounge areas (just like at Scheveningen) where people can sip drinks from the comfort of a couch or a canvas recliner. The light's not great in these pictures, but you get the idea:
We had a very nice, very reasonably priced dinner under one of the tents and then moved on later in the evening to a pop-up bar at the very end of the quai, where I was pleased to find the best caipirinha (other than my own!) that I've had outside of Brazil. (For some reason I've seen caipirinhas everywhere here.)
On Friday morning I set off to yet another new part of the city, this time on the Right Bank, a little bit afield from the Trocadéro area near the Eiffel Tower. Sciences Po provides a huge range of sports and arts classes that students can take as electives (for actual credit, but not credit towards a law degree sadly). My friend and I, since we're both working in London next year, decided to sign up for squash, which neither of us had ever played. I dabbled in tennis very briefly during one point of my childhood, so at least I have some idea of how to use a racquet! Our classes are in a squash club in an old building that's very charming on the inside. Our instructor gave us a quick overview of things (in rapid French) and then left us to our own devices. It was just the two of us and a nice French guy who was equally clueless. We spent the next 45 minutes laughing constantly as we attempted to play squash. The main issue is that the ball is very small, and it doesn't bounce - so there is a lot of running around trying to make sure the ball doesn't hit the floor, and even when you manage to hit the ball, there is no guarantee that you won't send it right back to the floor! I am still sore from this 48 hours later, so I think this will be a good way to stay fit - and a lot of fun!
My final class of the week (and first in English!!!) was Friday night from 7:15-9:15. It felt really strange to get off the metro and head towards school with my backpack at that time, and there wasn't really anyone else around. I think that class will be really interesting in terms of both substance and class composition; of the 20 students, we represent France, the US, Switzerland, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Canada, India, China, Singapore, Russia, and probably one other that I'm forgetting. Lots of different perspectives! The one funny thing about having class until 9:15 is that a very loud bell rings at 9:10 to signal to everyone in the building that it's time to get the hell out of there - so at least we know we'll never stay late!
Yesterday (Saturday) I started the day with a very long run that I thoroughly enjoyed. I took the metro over to the Assemblée Nationale, which is on the Left Bank across from the Tuileries. I ran along the Seine on that side of the river (there's a nice, paved avenue right next to the river) for a little over a mile until I got to a pedestrian bridge about half a mile away from the Eiffel Tower. Here's the view from the bridge:
I crossed the river to the Right Bank, ran back towards the east for a while, and eventually turned left to run north (and slightly uphill) to the Arche de Triomphe, at which point I turned right and ran down the Champs-Elysées:
I continued running through the Tuileries, then dropped south to run along the Seine until I got to the Pont Neuf (on the western tip of Ile de la Cité), at which point I crossed to the island and then ran west until I got to Notre Dame, at which point I finally stopped after 5.24 miles! I'm really not a great runner (and I miss my DC running buddy!), but I can run for a long time if I don't get bored - which is very easy to avoid in Paris with so many new things to see!
A couple hours later, even more sore than before, I got a surprise message from my Danish "cousin" (her dad was an exchange student with my dad's family, and they're still like brothers 50 years later) telling me that she was in Paris, so I met up with her in the Place d'Italie, which is an area I'd heard a bit about but hadn't yet visited. It's just east of where I live, in the next arrondisement over. I neglected to take pictures of the area, but the Place d'Italie is a huge circle with a sort of sunken park in the center of it. Signe and I sat down at a café on one of the corners and spent the next two hours enjoying a carafe of rosé (which came with its own bucket of ice!) and goat cheese salads:
We also got a real treat in the form of a band that played for about half an hour right in front of us. They were part of some sort of festival, and their music was AWESOME - kind of a mix of genres, with a sort of jazz-Jewish-gypsy flavor to everything. They refused money (which I would have gladly given) and made the experience all the more enjoyable for those of us in the audience by showing how much they were having fun. Signe and I both thought they looked like a group that would be very fun to hang out with:
After this very Parisian experience, we walked southeast towards the Seine (not too far away from where I'd been Thursday night) to check out this place called the Frigo that Signe had heard about. It's a really interesting building: it used to be a huge warehouse for refrigerated goods being unloaded from ships on the Seine, and over the last few decades it's become a place for all sorts of creative thought and production - art, music, architecture, writing... there was a very lengthy list posted on the wall. The building looks almost abandoned from the outside and stands in stark contrast to its surrounding neighbors, which are all very modern (to the point that I actually felt like I was in London).
As you can see, there's a little bit of artsy graffiti on the outside of the building, and that's a tiny taste of what you see once you get inside. Every inch of wall space, on every floor and including the spiral stairs leading up that tower, is covered in graffiti of some sort. We didn't encounter any artists (though we could hear someone playing guitar), but we did see a lot of graffiti:
After saying good-bye to Signe (who really saved me from a day of wallowing in my frustrations about my phone and bank!), I went back home, quickly changed clothes, and hopped on the metro to go over to Bastille for my best friend's sister's birthday party. I was treated very kindly by the all-French attendees in this very loud and lively bar, and I even engaged in a few conversations in French. I still felt really self-conscious, but at least I was practicing!
And that, friends, is everything from my first week of school in Paris. This week promises to be a bit more academic (since hopefully all of my classes will actually meet), and the dropping temperatures suggest fewer nights spent outside. We'll see!
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