The First Couple of Days

Hello everyone! I have decided to write a blog about my experiences since that will be the easiest way for me to share them. However, I'm not sure how often I will be able to update the blog for the first month since I'm not sure when I will or will not have internet access. Also. if I continue to type these on french keyboards (where the a and q, w and z, ? and m, among other keys have switched places. Also, please forgive me for any spelling errors, as the spellcheck only seems to know french.

Anyways, the flight over here on Air France was very good. The airplane was moderately new, the crew spoke both french and english very fluently, and the pasta dinner was actually pretty good. My only complaint was that there weren't any air vents and the plane got kind of hot so that wasn't very comfortable. I did manage to sleep but I'm not exactly sure for how long. After the flight arrived, I had to wait about a half hour to get through immigration since there was a pretty long line. Luckily customs didn't pull me over to check my baggage so that made the process a bit quicker. I then took a taxi to the place where I stored my two large bags for the month before school starts on the 21st of September. I had a bit of trouble locating the baggage place since it was on a pedestrian only side street, but luckily I had downloaded a map of Paris to my iPod touch before I came so I used that to figure out where I needed to go.

I then checked in at the hotel FIAP Jean Monnet, which so far has been ok. It's in a very residental area, so there aren't many things nearby, but there is a Franprix (a Walgreens size grocery store) so I can purchase items for a quick meal if I want. After that I took a nap since I was quite tired, and pretty much didn't do much else the rest of the evening.


Today (8/25) I started off by going to the Pompidou center, which turned out to be closed. That ended up being ok since it wasn't too hard to get to my second choice - La Défense and the Grande Arche. La défense is the business area of Paris, and it is somewhat similar to downtown Minneapolis. La Grande Arche is a large white arch that is the main attraction in the area. I took the glass elevator to the top of the arch and there was a pretty good view of the Champs-Elysee since they are along the same line. I then went to the Tuileries gardens (right next to the Louvre) and did some people watching and rested for a little while. After that I went to the St. Eustache church which had some good stained glass windows and was fairly cool inside.

I do have pictures of most of this, however without my computer I can't upload them. I'm off to Norway tomorrow, so I'll write more after that!