Five years ago, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, or even what university was my first choice. I had a vague idea that going NYU would be cool. I had no clue as to what I would want to study or what direction I wanted to steer my life in. I was a freshman in high school at a new school that was crazy. "College oriented" they said; "academically obsessed" I thought. Most everyone knew what they were doing and where they saw themselves in five years. Me, I just wanted to get through high school. If someone had told me that I would be studying at NYU and getting the chance to study abroad twice in the same academic school year, well, I wouldn't have laughed in their face and backed away slowly, but I would have certainly thought it was an awesome life I could only dream about.
Looking back at this semester, I'm jealous of myself. I don't mean in a "na-na-na-poo-poo look what I got to do and you didn't" sort of way, but in an incredulous "holy crap I actually lived this" kind of way. First of all, I got to live in Europe. But not just Europe, in Paris. Paris, the City of Lights, the City of Romance, where every cliché romance novel takes it's heroine to walk along the Seine munching on a croissant and sipping wine. The Paris of fairytales and love story. But that wasn't my Paris. My Paris was better than that. I didn't just visit Paris and stick to wandering around the Louvre. I made it my own. One of my friends once told me that home is where she is, not where she's from, and I think that it's a very good way to look at life. So I did. I rearranged my room, I picked out my grocery store, I made my daily commute, I wandered around Paris and discovered things that--while I was not the first to ever see them--became my own very important Parisian landmarks (almost as important as the Eiffel Tower). I loved Notre Dame (ok,ok, everyone goes there), the Pont des Arts, the Arènes de Lutece, that fountain at the end of that one road, that little café we found in the Marais, the Cluny-La Sorbonne metro stop, the Pont d'Europe, the walk down to the Opera, and so on. It's the little details I found that were amazing and will stay with me forever.
Of course, we can't forget about the classes. After all, that's what I was there for. Writing. History. Architecture. Literature. They all contributed not only to my academic enrichment, but to my cultural and overall experience in Paris. To paraphrase Easy A: What we study in class often seems to have some sort of weird correlation with our lives at the moment. To be fair, I was in France, learning about France and French. We could go look at the flying buttresses, or visit museums to complement our lessons, or go to the Opera. The Opera. I regret not going to the Opera Garnier for something, but seeing Gounod's Faust and Nouriyev's Cendrillon at the Opera Bastille wasn't too shabby. The cultural opportunities provided by NYU in France were amazing. Meeting renowned storytellers like Mimi Barthelemy and bestselling authors like Faïza Guène are not everyday experiences. The overnight trips provided for were 1) free and 2) a great opportunity to have guided tours of other notable French cities and landmarks. I was able to attend three out of the four trips (and one could go on all four if one tried hard enough). I got to go to the Loire Valley (the land of castles and more castles), Lyon (the second largest city in France), and--my favorite trip--the Dordogne. There, we saw cave paintings, ancient cave paintings that were kilometers into the earth, painted high above our heads, and the first use of perspective in art. And not only that, it was a fantastic trip to go on because it was so small, only twelve people, and it was the longest, a whole weekend. A spontaneous trip to some elevated gardens, Les Jardins Suspendus de Marqueyssac, provided some much-needed inspiration to a then-uninspired idea. Sure, we spent a lot of time on the bus on that trip, but the scenery was worth it.
In the end though, no amount of Opera outings and free trips could make me regain the honeymoon feeling Paris and I had going on at the beginning. I became disillusioned and accepted (but not really) that Paris was a city like any other. It was still the City of Lights but I had noticed the dark underbelly. I suppose it began with the tourist season. As the most visited city in the world, you can imagine how insanely packed the Metro became. It was terrible. You could be packed in like a sardine and be pressed up against any manner of person with any manner of body odor. Those Metro trips weren't to anywhere fantastic either. In the end, it became not trip after trip to go stare at the Eiffel Tower once more, or to picnic on the Pont des Arts again, but to school and back, to study and read and write and prepare for the end of the semester. No longer could I stand having to bundle up to get to the sauna they called the Metro, sweat for half an hour, then step into the cold again, to deliver myself into the clutches of that best we call academia. But maybe I'm waxing dramatic. It certainly built up into a terrible image of a supposedly wonderful city. It still is, but I highly suggest studying in Paris in the spring so come finals time, you can go study in a pleasant garden instead of having to hole up with various layers and a mug of tea and your school books and essays.
theartofmadeline
gracieabrams
amandla
gummygunk
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