Recap of Week 1

Ahhhhhhhhh. I am failing miserably at this blog! I just started off being behind and so it’s been too overwhelming to catch up and then I keep getting more and more behind and it’s just an endless cycle that results in nothing good at all. So I will just breeze through the past week in an attempt to catch up.

So in terms of some general things. I am absolutely in love with this city and do not ever want to leave. I’ve been to Paris once before for a few days while traveling around Western Europe and did all the typical sightseeing and all, and it was cool to see the Eiffel Tower and the Mona Lisa, and walk down the Champs Elysées and all that. Yet at the same time I felt very disconnected from the city. And now, living here it is much, much different. We haven’t even done much sightseeing yet, but the city itself is worth to marvel at, and I love being able to do it without being in a touristic rush.

Some of the great things about living in Paris:

-The architecture. Holy shit. It’s impossible to walk down virtually any street in Paris without it being a visually stimulating experience. Every single building on the thousands of Paris’s narrow streets is unique and different. Every single door is giant, beautiful and different from the next one. The entranceways are decked with intricate, breath-taking façades. And the other cool thing, many of the buildings have the architect’s name engraved on them.

-French children speaking French. Cutest thing ever. That’s all.

-The food. Oh my god the food. From the thousands of boulangeries with the most amazing baguettes and pastries, to the crêpe stands sprinkled all over the city, to the open-air markets – it is all amazing and delicious. It’s also really cool having so many different kinds of stores all around you, and being able to go when you have the need and stock up on fresh ingredients that you can use that day, instead of going to Meijers and buying weeks’ worth of food. Going out to eat at a restaurant, however, is pretty damn expensive.

-The public transportation is great. Especially the buses. They work really efficiently and it’s really easy to get around and to know where you’re going. Each bus stop has a map of its route, as well as an electronic display telling you when the next bus is going to arrive and what direction it is heading. It’s really great. Plus we bought the Pass Navigo (57 euros) that allows us unlimited use of the RER, metro, and buses for a month. They also have this amazing Vélib system of public bikes with stations throughout the city, where you can rent out a bike and then drop it off at another location. I’ve yet to try this out, but it’s a really cool concept and I’ve heard great things about it. I am a little apprehensive, however, because the drivers here can be a little nuts.

Some of the highlights of the stuff we’ve done over the past week:

-Saturday we walked around the Marais district, which was absolutely amazing. It’s a very pedestrian area and the roads are mostly blocked off to cars so people just spill out into the streets. There’s tons of shops around, most of which are way out of my price range, but it was still very cool to walk around, and it’s SO beautiful – the buildings, the cobblestone streets, the people. Le Marais also houses the Jewish Quarter which of course we visited, in search of some falafel. It being Saturday, however, a lot the places were closed for Shabbat, but one was open. And I am so glad it was. It's called Chez Hanna and there I had the most wonderfully delicious falafel of my life. Mingling among the deep-fried falafel in a scrumptious pita bread was: eggplant, hummus, red cabbage, sauerkraut, horseradish, a delicious tomato paste, carrots, and probably some other stuff as well. YUM.

-Sunday, Phoebe and I went to Marché Bastille, which is an amazing open-air market, and conveniently a 10-minute walk from our apartment [have I mentioned how much I love living here??]. It was an awesome atmosphere, and everything looked delicious. We bought some radishes, zucchini, eggplant, eggs, fromage, and DELICIOUS butter (the butter in France is so much better than anything ever). After that we had our first home-cooked meal in which Phoebe made a really good Ratatouille-style sauce for the cheese ravioli that we bought. Later in the week we made awesome zucchini fritters.


Well I’m going to go to sleep now, because we have a long day of sightseeing tomorrow! I still haven’t fully catched up yet, but I’ll try to this weekend!



My delicious falafel from Chez Hanna


Marché Bastille


Phoebe cooking in our kitchen

Voilà. Je suis à Paris!

I'm sorry I'm really quite terrible at keeping a blog. I'll try to be better.

It's only my fifth day in Paris, but it feels like I've been here already for some weeks. I love it and am having a great time. But let me start where I left off.

So I landed in Paris at 6 am local time and had to wait for a couple of hours for my friends Phoebe and Heather to land. We actually all took three separate flights into Paris, since we were all coming from different parts of the States, and since we wouldn't have phones to use when we landed we had to decide a place to meet beforehand. Since this was Heather's first time going out of the country, we decided to come to her terminal. I'm really glad we decided beforehand on a place to meet because the Charles de Gaulle airport is HUGE. We found each other without too much trouble in the end, and our adventure began!

We took a taxi into Paris, which turned out to be the cheapest/most practical option for the three of us. The taxi guy was a really nice guy from Algeria, but his English was really good, and I got to speak to him in French a bit as well. He dropped us off in front of our apartment building and we had to wait a little bit before our landlord came to meet us. Oh, Madame Azzoug. I could not think of a better personality to welcome us to Paris. She was hilarious. She's this short, quick, middle-aged woman who definitely talked to us mostly in French even though I'm the only one of our group with passable French. But I actually did understand most of what she was saying, I just couldn't stop laughing at her mannerisms. And her phone kept going off literally every 2 minutes she was here. She's a busy lady I guess.

So the apartment. Holy fucking shit. It's amazing. We have a huge living room with a futon, and a HUGE built-in bookshelf from the floor to the ceiling FILLED with books (most of them in French). And then we have another huge bookcase on the other side of the room. The apartment is all hardwood floors, and there's art, and it's just really nicely made and lit. We have a kitchen with a dishwasher, oven, washer/dryer, fridge, freezer, and a bunch of kitchenware. It's great. There are two pretty big bedrooms, one with a queen-sized bed, and another with two twins. The girls took the twin bedroom, which I didn't mind too much since I couldn't even fit on them length-wise. So when Matt gets here in a few days (the Fourth Musketeer) we'll have to figure out if we'll just share the bed or take turn sleeping in the futon in the living room. There are also two bathrooms in the apartment, which is awesome! One of which has a bidet, haha soo French. All in all, I I love our apartment. And the location is really great too. It's in the 11th arrondissement (Paris, if you're unaware, is split up into 20 arrondissements), which is great because it's not in the middle of the very busy and touristy part, but at the same time it's very close to the center of Paris and to where we work at Université Pierre et Marie Curie.

Which takes me to our second day in Paris. In the morning, we all went down to Jussieu (the area where our university's campus is) by a city bus that stops pretty much right outside our apartment. We got out at Gare D'Austerlitz, the final stop, and we knew we had to walk through des jardins (gardens) to get to our university. Well hello, Jardins des Plantes! This beautiful garden/giant estate in front of the Muséum nationale d'Histoire naturelle is amazing, and just happens to be part of our daily walk to work! God, I could definitely get used to this. Immediately after walking through this, we step out right in front of a mosque. And I flip a fucking shit, because this just happens to be the mosque from that scene in “Paris, je t'aime”. Ahhh.

So we find our university and go to our respective labs to meet our advisors and start research! [Oh yeah, is that what we came to this wonderful city for?] My PIs name is Sandrine Sagan, and she is very nice! The lab is called Laboratoire des BioMolécules. I met everyone in the lab, and read up on some papers related to the project I’ll be working on; it seems pretty interesting and is related to cell-penetrating peptides. Then I met the grad school student I’ll be working with, Cherine, and she’s super super nice. She speaks English really well, so we’ve mostly been speaking in English so far, but when I feel comfortable with the protocols, I’ll try to switch to French with her. I watched her do the main experiment and got a good idea of what I’ll be doing for the next three months. It was so cool to realize how even though I am in a country so far away, where the culture and the language is so different, the laboratory techniques and principles are still pretty much the same.

After lab Phoebe and I went home and after a couple of hours of being MIA on the public transportation system of Paris, Heather showed up at our apartment as well. We went grocery shopping and then organized our kitchen. It's really starting to feel home here, chez nous :)


Heather in the living room


Our beautiful étagère


View from our window to our favorite boulangerie (bakery)

En Route

Well, I made it to Paris! :)

I left Detroit Sunday afternoon and flew to Montreal. I had a connection there on the way to Paris, and since I've never been I wanted to spend a night there and check out the city a bit. I got there in the evening and took a bus into downtown. Everyone spoke French everywhere, so it was kind of intidimidating and it's also a lot harder to understand Québécois. I don't think it's as pretty as Parisian French either.

Anyway I stayed at Montreal Centrale Hostel, which was really nice! Two girls I was rooming with were actually from Toulouse, so I practiced my French with them a bit, which was cool. I didn't really do much that night, since it was late, but I just walked around town a bit and grabbed a bite to eat a place called Frites, Alors! It was pretty good.

Tuesday morning I woke up, grabbed some breakfast and realized that it was raining outside so my options for sightseeing were limited. Plus I only had a few hours until my flight to Paris. But I think I made the most of it. I went to check out the Biodôme in the Olympic village, but it was a little lame I thought. Then I went to the McGill campus and walked around for a while, it was pretty cool. Maybe I'll look into going to grad school there.

At this point it finally stopped drizzling and the sun started to come out. I went to get some lunch at Schwartz's deli, which is a famous Jewish deli in Montreal. It was pretty cheap too, I was afraid it was going to be Zingerman's-style prices. I got a smoked meat sandwich and it was delicious. Then I walked around rue Saint-Laurent, and there was a little pedestrian street there with a bunch of cool little shops and cafés.

Then I booked it to Old Montreal. I only had like half an hour before I had to go back to the hostel and get my stuff to go the airport, but I really wanted to at least go there for a little bit. I ended up only seeing the Basilique Notre-Dame, which is basically Montreal's version of the same thing in Paris. But it was neat.

Then back to the hostel, airport and my plane! I got jipped with a window seat in a three person row (although row 47! [out of like 58, the plane was pretty huge]), which sucked because my legs are too long to sit like that for a long time, but other than that the flight was actually really nice. Since it was an Air France flight from Montréal to Paris, it was very French, but in a good way. There were like at least 50 movies to choose from, and all of them were pretty good and a lot them haven't even come out in the States yet. I watched "Mirmacs à tire-larigot", which is Jean-Pierre Jeunet newest film (director of Amélie), it was pretty good. Yolande Moreau was in it, and I like her a lot. The dinner they served was awesome too! Among the cool/unusual things there was pâté (which was delicious), gouda cheese, and a small bottle of Merlot (for free!). After that I took a nap, but it didn't last very long. After that I watched an episode of How I Met your Mother, and I decided to watch it dubbed in French, since I've already seen it in English. IT WAS AWESOME. (It was the episode where Barney tells Lily that he's in love with Robin, and Ted makes that chick from Scrubs he's dating watch Star Wars).

And then I landed in Paris...

TBC