Pour vous mettre au courant...

Wow, I am really bad at this blogging thing. I do believe it's been a month since I last posted here. Oops...let's play catch up (the title of this post, for non-Francophones)!

The past few weeks have involved lots of visitors! And museums...lots of museums.

 The first weekend of visitors included Noelle's friend, who is studying in London, and her two friends. With them we went on our first outside-of-class exploration of the Louvre...making sure to take some time for the ultimate tourist pictures. Complete necessity. Next up (in the same weekend) was Maura from Lehigh! It was really awesome to see someone from home and be able to show her around my new city. Hopefully I'll be able to visit her in Dublin before we leave!

Two weeks later, my bestest and oldest friend from home made the trip up from Aix-en-Provence in southern France (excuse the selfie shot)! This was a great weekend, seeing as Kayla and I have been talking about studying abroad in France together since middle school. We didn't end up in the same city, but it was pretty surreal to actually hang out in France after talking about it for so long!

Then, just as Kayla was leaving for Normandy, my boyfriend Jake arrived, all the way from Arizona/California! Touristy activities ensued, including more selfies because of my incurable fear someone will run away with my camera if I ask a stranger to take a picture. Anyways. There was also more Louvre-ing (yes, it is in fact a verb) involved, and much entertainment at the headless statues. Another fantastic weekend!

Coming up is midterms (blech), more visitors from Lehigh (yay!), and hopefully some travel plans! I'm only now starting to consider travel elsewhere - Paris is such a giant and historical city, I don't think I could ever run out of things to explore! I'll leave you with an assortment of pictures from the past few weeks!

Clockwise from upper left: gorgeous Valentines' Day flowers from Jake; a Saturday spent exploring Montmartre; gulping down the best hot chocolate in the world; Sacre-Coeur from the bottom of the hill; the insane view from the top; our default no-cooking-required dinner of cheese, prosciutto, avocado, and bread (yum); what I see when I open my bedroom windows (life is good); street artist near the Louvre

Des Choses Que J'ai Appris Jusqu'à Présent

I haven't been here long, but I've definitely learned quite a few things already. From silly to shocking, here are a few (in no particular order).

1. I'm sure this is true when travelling to any foreign destination, but I've been shocked at how some items are far less expensive here than in the United States (chèvre!) and some things are way more expensive. A dire example of the latter is notebooks, a necessary item for any college student and one that can be procured fairly cheaply in the U.S. Here in Paris, the cheapest, most basic one I could find was a whopping 6 euros, or just over EIGHT DOLLARS.  Maybe I'm a cheapskate, but this was both shocking and problematic (the price was perhaps partially due to the fact that most notebooks here seem to be graph paper; simple lined paper is rare).

2. The French seem to be allergic to wearing any sort of color. Sure, the H&Ms are chock-full of spring collections in all sorts of pastels and brights, but I have yet to see a real live French person wear much more than a scarf that wasn't black, grey, white, or the ever-adventurous beige. This is actually not a problem for me, because I don't seem to own much color either...

3. Macarons have some sort of addictive quality to them. This was probably obvious in my last post, and is pretty cliché for an American in Paris, but I am head-over-heels obsessed with these things. I don't really consider it a problem.

At the macaron baking workshop in Chartres. Clearly, an egg white whipping expert.

4. PEANUT BUTTER DOES NOT EXIST. Okay, it does, but at 5 euros for a container the size of my pinky finger found in one tiny grocery store in a remote corner of the city, it might as well not. I am not happy. Fortunately, my housemate Noelle's friends in London a) do not have the same problem, b) are visiting this weekend, and most importantly, c) are bringing us some of the good stuff. God save the Queen!

Edited to add: Noelle's father sent us four jumbo containers for Skippy's Natural, much to the disgust of our host mother. I think I'm gonna make it through the semester.

5. Baguettes. Baguettes. CHEESE. Baguettes. I think I'm developing an obsessive personality.