Fima à Paris: 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 :)