Sur Paname

My friend invited me to a quiet, unassuming restaurant that he had worked at in the 17th. Le cafe d'Angel - a beautiful, classic, but refined restaurant with truly outstanding, seasonal dishes and attentive, lovely service. The best food that I have eaten in Paris so far and certainly my favorite Wednesday evening in a long time. 

It is nice to live with a French family, though. The family is pretty big and they have a beautiful house in Boulogne. Saturday the mom and I went to the local market, which was enormous and sold much more than produce - it also had clothes, electronics, flowers, you name it. The market was a theatre of sorts- the vendors yelling out their prices and the shoppers trying to get attended to and snap up the best produce. We bought so many things that we could hardly carry them all between us - figs, tomatoes, kiwis, melons, mushrooms, spinach, grapes, prunes, salmon, shrimp, mangoes, endives, and so on. We all put away the groceries as a family and sat around the table as the mom made a salmon ceviche. We had a beautiful lunch that afternoon from the bounty of the market, and then took the youngest son and his friend to a carnival in le bois de boulogne. I'm an only child and I find that I need my privacy, but I absolutely love staying with big families and participating in everything. They are so wonderfully sweet to receive me and I look forward to spending the rest of the week with them, doing the little things that make up being part of a family. 

So, I had a little visa problem before coming here. Un petit probleme. I was away from New York for almost the entire year and I had no idea how to start the process away from home, given the fact that I would have to mail things to the Campus France headquarters and that my mom was 150% occupied with her upcoming wedding. Finally, when I was in Turkey, I got my dad to help me out and I made an appointment at the Consulate, but for the end of September since there was nothing available earlier. Then I finally went back to NY, saw my mom get married (tear), had my Campus France application validated, and tried to get an earlier appointment at the Consulate (with a lot of crying and frustration involved). You know how they say the process can take from 3-6 months? Yeah, I had to do it all in one. I don't want to talk about French bureaucracy right now. But! NYU Paris accepted me late and I am finally here, having arrived maybe 4 days ago. I had to plead and beg for them to accept me late - I talked about how I had already lived in Paris and knew how to get around, was fluent in French and really looking forward to my Program II courses etc. They were really sweet about helping me take the best courses for me ever since I arrived, and I am in Advanced Composition, a class at Sciences Po called Espace Mondial, The Contemporary Art World, and Multiculturalism in France. It's strange to compare NYU Paris to NYU Buenos Aires, but since I was in Buenos Aires not too long ago, I can at least say this: NYU Paris has a much better program for advanced speakers. In Buenos Aires, I took the most challenging courses in Spanish available - and they were not challenging at all. Moreover, many of my classmates were not fluent in Spanish. NYU Paris is much bigger, so they even have two sections of the most advanced course, and I noticed the big difference between the two sections based on the rigorousness of the professor, and the level of my peers. I am someone who likes to challenge myself with languages (I am going to try to teach myself Arabic this semester since I can't study it, and I have to keep up my Portuguese) and the reason why I came to Paris was to study entirely in French, at the highest level possible, and to see if I could do a Master's at Sciences Po. I know that I have to take it one step at a time, but... so far, so good.