One Year Later

A year ago today, I landed in Paris (well, technically, an airplane did).

I still remember navigating through Charles de Gaulle airport terminals to find the RER B line with my overpacked bags, fighting with the automated ticket machines to buy my ticket to get on the train to the city, and reading my gigantic métro map to try and find my stop, where a few friendly strangers both gave me my first chance to practice my real-life French skills and disproved the myth that all Parisians love to hate tourists (though I still cringe when I remember my pronunciation of my stop as LuxembERG and not LuxembOOOHRGH).

On that day, I made it to my dorm building and checked in (after a few métro mishaps), and then had my first   experience at a Parisian café with some of my program-mates who happened to arrive within a minute of me. We ate in the shadows of the Pantheon, and I still remember glancing to my left and catching my first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, behind the trees of Luxembourg Gardens. We had no idea what to expect or what to do at a café, and I'm sure our naivete annoyed our waiter somewhat. But I finished up my crepe and cognac and left with a sort of pride that I had just finished my first meal in Paris, then walked back and took a detour to explore Luxembourg Gardens across the street from our building, and headed back to my dorms for our orientation.

It was a Sunday, so most of the city was asleep, but my professor still had us walk around and locate various staples of our neighborhood- a boulangerie, a supermarché, a laundromat, and more. The evening sunset had painted the city in a soft, romantic light, and I couldn't help but think about how lucky I was to be there. It was all so surreal to me, so bizarre that all these images that I had seen in textbooks and cheesy videos for years in class were right there in front of me, coming to life.

By all accounts I should have been tired, waking up at 5 am the day before for my 11 hour, 1 pm flight, then arriving in Paris around 10 am and spending the day exploring and in awe (I was awake for 30 something hours, I normally can't even pull an all-nighter because my brain goes into zombie mode around 21 hours of no sleep). But I still wanted more, still wanted to get as much as I could out of the city on my first day, so I walked the one mile from my place at 93 Boulevard Saint Michel to Notre Dame.

I got there and as it was too late to really do anything other than just look at it, so that's what I did. Just stood there and stared at it for a couple minutes, trying to comprehend that yes, it was that Notre Dame, and that I was really there, in Paris. Once I realized there was nothing more for me to do there, I headed back home, taking my time and looking at all the closed up shops and the few late night cafés that were open.

In that one day, I didn't really do much at all. But it was that day that made it all real. And now, a year later, as I wait on emails and paperwork and all of the other fun things that go along with trying to secure employment in another country, it's so bizarre to look back and think about how at the time, I had no idea how big of an impact those five weeks in Paris had on my life, or how much that first day would remain in my memory, even all this time later.