Hello friends!
It’s been a while since I have written in this blog… a lot has happened since my last post, but one thing stayed the same – we are still in a pandemic! It’s funny to think back to a time when this was not our reality, but we have to learn to live with it, which is why I decided to go for an Erasmus+ student exchange. I moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France at the beginning of January and after three weeks, I finally got around to writing something. If you don’t know what Erasmus+ is, here’s a quick explanation: Erasmus+ connects universities all over Europe, so students from partner universities can do an exchange for a semester or a year. I will be in France for about five months, studying at SciencesPo Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
My first couple of weeks here have been full of exploring both Saint-Germain as well as Paris, which is about a 40-minute train ride away. When I first got here, I thought to myself “Am I insane? Why would I move to a country where I can’t speak the language even a little bit?” (learning it on Duolingo for a month doesn’t really count), but luckily people seem to speak English, or if not speak it, at least understand some of it. Although, when I was coming here from the airport a girl did try asking me for directions and when I asked if she spoke English, she waved her hand exasperatedly and walked off to find someone else. So I guess not everyone, but so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
Now, we all know some stereotypes about France and pastries/bread, so here are my thoughts: yes, they do eat a lot of baguettes. I’ve probably seen someone walking on the street with a baguette almost every day. One day on the way to school, I saw someone’s broken bag on the ground and there were four baguettes coming out of it. Croissants are delicious and I definitely prefer them over baguettes, however the real (pleasant) surprise has been crêpes. You can get a Nutella crêpe in Paris for 2.50€ and they are a delicious little snack! You can also eat salty crêpes (also known as galettes?) with ham and cheese for a meal, and while they are more expensive, they are still delicious.
One of our first activities was visiting the Versailles castle, which was truly majestic, extraordinary, stunning, incredible *insert all the adjectives*. It’s just so big and there are so many little details in the rooms and it’s truly a little overwhelming to think that kings used to live there. We also had a fun little challenge to take funny pictures in the rooms of our choice and we had a lot of fun with that. I don’t think words can really describe the castle, so I will add pictures instead.
I think that’s enough for one post, so I want to bring out one last thing that I’ve noticed in France (and thought is a little odd): in (perhaps fancy?) parks the tops of trees have been cut in a straight line, so they are all the exact same hight. I don’t know how to explain it better and I also don’t have any good pictures of it, but I am very confused by it. I will try to get a picture of it for my next post and until then, I would like to finish with a meme we made at Versailles:
À bientôt!
adventures in... 