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| Living room |
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| Dining room / living room |
This week I finally got around to putting up my pictures and stuff on my walls and taking pictures of the house and my room! The house is beautiful! It's located just north of the center city, which is on the other side of town from my university. Besides that, you can basically walk everywhere, and it doesn't take too long for me to walk or run to the center city from here, maybe half an hour of walking. And once you're in the center city, nothing is too too far away! The house is along the Quais, which are a great place to run, since they go along the brim of the whole city.
There's also a grand parc and a great public park near me, and of course many little boulangeries, specialty grocery stores, marchés, and little boutiques. So here's where I'm living (very comfortably!) for the next few months. The living room is joined with the dining room in a huge open space, which leads out to a patio in the back that has a little pool (I have yet to swim in it!) and deck.
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| Back patio |
This week continued to be hectic and confusing with classes, and I still haven't completely chosen all of them even though our registration is due Tuesday! In all I'll have tried out 12 different courses to finally decide on 7. My schedule is super unbalanced and front-loaded at the moment, so basically I kill myself on Mondays and Tuesdays with 6 hours of class but then only have 1 class on Wednesday and Thursday and nothing on Friday! Yesterday there was another general strike, this time about the debate over raising the retirement age. This country cannot exist without its strikes! Come on people, you already have a government-mandated 35-hour work week, most everything is closed on Sundays as the day of rest, and a lot of things are still closed on Mondays too. Is it really going to kill you to raise the retirement age two years from 60 to 62?!
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| Strikers |
France already has one of the youngest retirement ages in the developed world! Anyway, public transportation was extremely dysfunctional and it took FOREVER to get wherever you needed to go, which was super frustrating. The buses basically weren't running at all, and the trams were only running one for every three that normally runs - meaning you could wait up to 20 minutes at a station when you would normally have to only wait around 5 minutes between trams!
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| Room view from the patio |
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| My room |
The weather has finally started to cool down, which is especially good because the cold will kill all the mosquitos, which are absolutely awful here! One morning this week I woke up with 15 bites on my face. Yes, I counted them all because they were extremely visible (and extremely attractive, of course). This weekend if it's nice Karina, Amanda and I hope to do some day trips! Maybe to the beach, Biarritz, the Pays-Basque, Spain...who knows! That's definitely one of the most convenient things about Europe - you can just hop on a train and be in another country and culture in just a few hours, and it's not that expensive at all!
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| My desk |
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