I'm Here!

I've been here for a week now, and to quote the noted rapper, record producer, and entrepreneur Shawn Carter (colloquially known as Jay-Z): this shit weird. Not so much weird as in the sense that it's a weird place to be, but that I'm actually back here, finally, after planning my way back here pretty much nonstop since last summer. What's made it even better is that my best friend Hilary was able to visit me for my first four days, so I was able to do all of the big touristy things without feeling too weird about visiting them all again. But now she's gone ( :( ) and I have time to sit and collect my thoughts about various subjects. So here they are, in no particular order of importance.

Work: So far, my job has been great. For those of you who don't know, my job consists of picking up my host family's child from school in the afternoons, taking them home, playing with them for a while, and giving them a bath (and occasionally taking them to school in the mornings when the parents can't). For a young child, they're super well-behaved (and adorable), and especially compared to other au pair jobs where the job description also includes spending otherwise free time during the day cleaning up around the house and such, it's great. Also, there's something magical about taking a little kid outside and watching them smile and giggle when they see a rainbow in the sky that just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Food: I knew from last time about how great the food is here, and last time I was mostly living off of street food or those 10€ 3 course, touristy meals down off Rue Mouffetard or the Saint Michel/Saint Germain de Près intersection. But now that I'm living with a family and actually eating normal meals, holy crap, food is even better. I always thought that the whole "French people sit down and have long, multi course meals" thing was saved for special occasions, but nope. It's an everyday thing. Each night when we sit down to have dinner, we have a small appetizer (which is actually called an entrée here and still confuses me), then the main course, then cheese, then dessert (with lots of good bread in between). Everything has been amazing so far, and I've developed a small obsession with Comté cheese.

On Hilary's last night here, we got to go to Pomze, a restaurant that bases everything on their menu off of apples. I love apples, so I was super excited to go there, and it was SO GOOD. Everything looked really cool and I wanted to take pictures, but it was a more upscale place, and as I was playing the part of the good little Parisienne, I refrained from Instagramming everything they put in front of me. I had duck for the first time, and it was really good. I was expecting something chicken-like, but it ended up looking and tasting similar to steak. We had cider pairings for our meal, and while I'm normally not the biggest cider fan due to its sweetness, I had a great cider paired with my duck which was much more dry than sweet, but sadly they never told us the names of the ciders.

Beer: I've had two beers since I've gotten here. The first was a Kronenbourg 1664 which is like the Budweiser of France, and it has a taste that I can only describe as bad Simpler Times lager (and that's already terrible). But I drank it all to be polite, which I still think deserves a gold star sticker or a standing ovation or something like that. The second was some bitter English ale style of thing from a microbrewery that almost tasted like a watered down IPA and cost 7€ for a pint. If I was back home, I could have bought two Sculpins with that money.

On a slightly better note, I found a beer store that sells beers from Green Flash, Lost Abbey, Port Brewing, AleSmith, and The Bruery. Everything is super expensive though, between 25€ and 35€ for a large bottle, which is actually a good price considering that they had to send the beers 5,000 miles away and just shipping one bottle over would probably cost just as much, if not more, but I can't quite yet justify paying that much for the beer. The lack of Stone and Ballast Point also makes the three bottles of beer that I brought over here with me that much more special.

Wine: They have lots of wine here. I don't know that much about wine yet, but I know that I like it. And that they give me a lot of it.

Weather: I'm adjusting much better to the cold than I thought I would be (it's not even that cold outside, per se, but coming from San Diego where last year we had maybe three weeks of clouds and rain as our "winter", I can't help but at least refer to it as cold). My friend Laura who spent a year in Paris a few years ago and also coming from San Diego advised that I try to get used to not immediately wearing a ton of jackets and scarves to deal with this weather because it's only going to get colder, and I've been getting by pretty well so far. I also love being able to walk outside and actually feel like it's fall. I did have to buy a new pair of pants though, because I realized it would be nice to have more than two pairs that I could wear.

Cultural adjustments: Most things are going pretty well so far in regard to blending in. Luckily I remember most things that I picked up on last summer, so avoiding coming across as a dumb American on the métro and at restaurants and on streets seems to be working (our waitress at Pomze the other night even assumed that I was Parisian after asking my friend where she was from in the US). But there are still little things that I've forgotten, like bringing your own shopping bags to stores, which caused a giant holdup in the line the other day at the store when I got to the bagging area, only to realize that if I needed a bag I had to have bought one from the other side of the register ahead of time, which kind of pissed off the cashier and the people behind me (in my defense, the Franprix by my old place last summer just gave you bags so I'd forgotten about that).

Living situation: I've only been here a week, but my new home already feels like a home. I was a bit unsure about my placement at first, because a) I'm in Nanterre (a suburb nearby Paris) and not in the city itself, and b) I'm living with my host family. I've heard that a lot of times living with a family makes it harder to go out and have fun and enjoy being a young 20-something in Paris, and that combined with more of a need to rely on using the somewhat limited public transportation in the suburbs, I'd be a lot more restricted in terms of what I can do, and although I haven't really tried going out-out yet, my family has told me all about the various things that their previous au pair would do when going out with regards to getting back safely late at night, or staying with friends on nights out, and my host mom has shown me a lot of places that are good for going out to, so a lot of that fear is gone.

My family is also just super welcoming and accepting, and I really feel like I'm a member of their family, not just hired help. There's still a bit of a (self-imposed) language barrier, as although they speak English, they've mostly been speaking to me in French, so I've tried to only speak to them in French, but I'm still not confident enough to fully say everything that I want to say, but hopefully that will improve soon (especially when I start my classes next week).