#development econ

Following me on snapchat must be an experience. I’m having a morning. WTO, IMF, and World Bank invited to throw hands w me at their earliest convenience.

To any of you out there who have been following my blog and wondering if I fell off the side of the earth this past week (two weeks? three weeks?), I apologize. Studying in Paris, and probably studying abroad more generally, makes each day feel like an eternity of time to explore and learn and endeavor to better yourself and your second language skills. But once one eats for the day, gets lost while trying to not get lost, drinks coffee for cultural and caffeination purposes, and tries to get emotionally pumped up enough to do the laundry, the day is done. I've yet to successfully get myself to the laundry, though I think I might have to tomorrow - you can only buy extra socks a certain number of times before it becomes a little bit pathetic. Paris is a beautiful city. An unbelievable city at times. You're walking home from dinner and you walk past the French Senate. You're studying in library that's a church and it's gorgeous and you can't believe your luck until you go outside to get a sandwich only to find yourself looking directly at the Pantheon. You get upset and a little homesick and you just run, not sure where you're going and you end up circling the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower for god's sake. There are soccer fields (more like futsal but nonetheless) there are soccer fields that are in shadow of the Eiffel Tower at a certain moment of the day. It's unbelievable. It's incredible. It's intimidating. And it makes studying (oh right I have class!) a lot more difficult than one would think. Why read about migration patterns when you can go explore Paris' Chinatown, le Marais where there's so much falafel to be eaten. History is all around me as I walk to class, the book doesn't seem as all encompassing anymore. Yet, in spite of that, my classes do seem really cool. My economics classes take on the macro and micro levels of the study of development economics with a focus on gender issues (read as: THIS IS MAH JAM AND IT ROCKS - I AM FINALLY LEARNING THE TYPE OF ECONOMICS I WANT TO LEARN WOOOOOOOOOOOO). I'm learning about European Migration and it's quite interesting and also very helpful as a tool for learning how to read maps (we all know I have many strengths and maps/geography are about as far removed as possible from those strengths). I'm taking an art history class in French in the Musée D'Orsay so that's another one of those Paris is incredible holy hell kind of situations. The professor is so cool and chic and passionate about art and it reminds me how much I miss my art classes and how much meaning really can be derived from the smallest of things. Especially when being so overstimulated senses wise throughout the day, it's really nice to take an hour and focus on one painting. It's kind of like meditating. My final class is an international relations/political theory class that discusses how large nations created their own enemies. It's really interesting, it moves quite fast, most everyone else is French (and speaks like they're French French aka I'm two minutes behind no matter what), and there's a lot of time spent critiquing America which is interesting exercise for me because I'm feeling more nationalistic and patriotic here in Paris than I ever have in Washington, DC. But I think that might be a good thing; it's helping me reevaluate biases and how I see my world when I'm just living in it as opposed to critically examining it. There's so much more to say, but I have reading to do and it's calling my name (yay again about economics rocking). So I'll get back you all soon with more of the social stuff in my life. It shocks me that it's only been eighteen days in Paris.