Guest post from Rebecca, who's seen more of Paris than me

Salut everyone. I'm writing this from London, where my friend Rebecca Leung (Olin '12) and I are visiting.

Rebecca came to visit me in Paris last Thursday. We left for London this Thursday. She'll be leaving from London to Israel, where she is studying away, Monday. I will then continue exploring England by visiting Nottingham, Bath, and Oxford.

You might ask "how do  you have time to travel so much?". Answer: "It's spring break already for me!*"


*technically it's the "vacances d'hiver"

For this post, I'll simply cross post Rebecca's post from her blog here.

Read on to find out about ice skating on the Eiffel Tower (no joke!)

Stone soup

I’m going to try to post more often now, so here’s a relatively short post for you.

My romance with France is over*

After the conference last week, I’m beginning to suffer from “study away novelty wearoff”. A friend who was studying at Babson from Austria told me about it a month into his study away experience. He was beginning to miss his home, and even though he really liked Babson, the novelty was beginning to wear off.

The cycle of study away

That’s probably where I’m was at earlier this week. No longer is it exciting just to talk and meet new people. All the sites in Paris just seem like another tourist destination. People are friendly but of course aren’t as close as friends at home.

However, a good dose of sickness and physics got me over that slump this weekend. I studied semiconductor physics for 4 days straight (while resting from being sick). Now ready to visit England the next week and a half for winter vacation and finish (already!) off my last month at Polytechnique

*My choice of wording was solely based on the rhyme

Read on about Stone soup!

Volunteering for a conference of 1000 students

Where is Steven? (this is part of the list of volunteers)

TThis is my first post in over a week! What’s happened since then?

·        I passed the 1 month mark at Polytechnique

·        It’s the new Lunar New Year. Rabbit for the Chinese, and as I learned, Cat for the Vietnamese. 新年快乐。

·        I volunteered for the Rencontre Nationale des Chrétien en Grande Ecole (see below)

First some random observations to get you warmed up.

A French party, organist, museum, and melted cheese

I’ve been very busy the past week, so this blog entry will be short on words (relatively speaking). Hopefully I can make that up with pictures! Here's one to start:

Manuel (Germany) and I went to the Église de St. Sulpice

A French party...

25%: Random thoughts

I’m 25% thru my study away experience already! I haven’t done anything too crazy the last week*, so I’ll share again some random thoughts

* Actually, at the time of completion of this post I have, but there’s so much to write that I will split this post into two.

Spiral learning, shopping, and consumption

A few thoughts from the past week:

The world is flat (and very multilingual)

The world is flat...

And trilingual

The past 3 days, I’ve been hanging around Paris, doing the whole tourist thing (Louvre, Notre Dame,…) with some of my friends in PEI (Programme Echange International). I’m not going to talk about it, because its nothing new. I’ll talk about how international my experience in France has been.

How to feel at home in 1 week

Today marks the 1-week mark for me in France! I finally have the time to write again. It’s only been 3 days since my last post, but it’s felt like forever, simply because so much has happened in the past week! To give you an idea, my 190-page journal is now at page 31 after 1 week. I’ll be needing a lot more of these journals!

Here’s what I’ve been up to the past week:

Fromage, more cheese, and spiral learning

(Note: this post is one day late! I'm already at Ecole Polytechnique, but I'll get to that when I have time to write, just pretend it's Jan 2)

After all the things that happened yesterday, today couldn’t be crazier right? Wrong!

The market: a lesson in the gazillion types of French cheeses

After breakfast, Marie, the mother of my host family, took me to the local outdoor market. There was an outdoor stall for cheese (une fromagerie), and stalls for veggies, meat, and the rest.

Marie carrying the groceries

Bonne anneé from France!

Happy new year from France! I had quite the experience in the last 48 hours. I got to Paris, stayed with a family friend, went to a new year's party, and had a tour of a picturesque town in France