The first few days

Time check: 1716pm on the 7th of September 2011. I have no classes today (yay!) but am using my free time do some readings for a group presentation that is happening scarily fast next Tuesday (not so yay.) So i'm taking a break by blogging.


Okay so the aforementioned jitters very quickly disappeared when i got on the plane- like i thought, cos once you're in the plane, your guard is up and you're too busy becoming independent to feel scared or sad anymore. Sat next to a Vietnamese-French guy on the plane who told me he would help me get on the right metro to my appartment but disappeared once we landed in Charles De Gaulle Airport...stupid fella :P 


Sadly, my first taste of Paris sucked. CDG staff are horrible as are their services, but thankfully that was over with in about an hour. Cabbed to the city centre with 3 other ladies who were also frustrated with the airport shuttle bus service. Came up to be cheaper than the bus itself though!


So, wrestling jet-lag, a questionable haven't-bathed-for-24-hours smell, and my bad sense of direction, my roomie Jack and I walked around the city (more precisely along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées which is the equivalent of Orchard Road) to get a sim card, groceries, metro tickets blah blah...


My other roomie Phyllis arrived on Saturday night, so we went to the big station to fetch her. Next day we had dinner in the same area, duck confit or whatever it was, was good! On Sunday itself, there was a big welcome gathering at Bois de Vincennes, so we walked over there and met quite a few people both foreign and French and played some stupid games and then went over to a place called La Bastille for some beer (3 euros~$5.50ish a glass!)


Classes started on Monday, i skipped the very first 8am one cos i was too darn tired but went for the others and well what i observed was that the professors are pretty brilliant. Many of them aren't of French origin, some are Russian, Italian, German etc, but they can also speak French and English fluently, and i won't be surprised if they can speak more. They tend to have very Euro-centric views of the world though, like how they seem to just accept that civilization and government and all started in Europe, whereas stuff like that existed in India and China way earlier. Most memorable prof was this tall, bald Italian man (just like a caricature :P) who emphasized every single word he spoke like...."ToDAY WE are GOING to LOOK AT the THEOries of INTerNATIONAL ReLATIONS" and you could see his neck veins straining as he spoke. It was all good amusement.


Oh yes and about the university itself! It's called Sciences-Po and weirdly enough, it's located on several different streets, in several different buildings. Quite a shock when we went there on Saturday to get a look at the place, cos it is very different from SG. But it's a nice place, a lot of white people (most exchange students seem to be from Europe/USA) not too fond of them cos as I said white people can either be very very nice or very very mean. Luckily the very very mean ones seem to be concentrated at the airport XD