Post 11:11! make a wish!

Bonjour tout le monde!

Warning: this is kind of long.

I feel like I should be writing this in French, but as one of my favorite Amelias pointed out, "How can I understand your blog if it's in fucking french?!?!" A very good point, especially considering the state of my French. However! I dreamed in French last night, and that's only ever happened once before, so at least my subconscious knows what's up.

I arrived in France on Friday morning, with just the scribbled addresses and suggested metro stops for the places I needed to find (a storage locker Stanford rented for our luggage and then a student hostel for the first day and night of orientation). I think my mom may have been a bit worried about me, which was obviously unnecessary given my natural ability to beast at public transportation. Using my masterful charades skills and somewhat less masterful French, I managed to get on a bus headed to within a block of the storage locker and then took the metro to the hostel, which turned out to be very close to Notre Dame. After half an hour or so of wandering the neighborhood I located the hostel and buzzed myself in through the imposing blue doors, to what felt at the time like the Garden of Eden. There was a quiet, shady courtyard and a room full of welcoming (temporarily English-speaking!) faces, free water, and croissants. So as not to defile this paradise with l'odeur de métro, I took a sink shower and collapsed into a contented stupor for the rest of the day.

There are 27 students, only one of whom I was friends with before this weekend, all of whom I'm friends with now! :D (kidding.) Yesterday we did orientation stuff at ISEP, the engineering school where the Stanford Center is located, and then were let loose upon the city like spawning salmon in the waterways of the world to swim upstream and find our way home.

I am living with my host mom, Guillemette, and her 23 year old daughter Lucile. Their colorful apartment is about a 20 minute walk from ISEP, in the 15th arrondissement. Last night we went to see a movie, "Habemus Papam", which was in Italian with French subtitles, and it was miraculously understandable! I was happy to realize I understood a fair bit of the Italian from my limited knowledge of Spanish, which sounds pretty similar, and the Italian I picked up when I was there in June, and that plus the French subtitles was definitely enough for me to get the gist.

My family and I are going to le Jardin de Luxembourg this afternoon and I need to run some errands. The weather is unseasonably warm and sunny, and I just wish it wasn't going to change!

Homemade blackberry jam for breakfast, BOOYAH!

Clare

also: Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night" is playing on the radio in the kitchen. :)