From Pain au Chocolate to Pannenkoeken

I just realized that today was already the 13th and was completely shocked. I really shouldn’t have been that surprised as I knew it was Canadian thanksgiving which is always mid October, but somehow time has started to absolutely fly by. The past week I had an expose to present on Friday (an expose is a 10-20 minute oral presentation on pretty much any topic, but you need to have a “problematic”, so it is basically a spoken essay) – so my week was a mix of trying to be social while waking up super early to get work done. I also went to Amsterdam this weekend, so mixed into the being social / schoolwork was booking transportation and accommodation in Amsterdam. And apparently I can’t multitask, as I made one of the dumbest mistakes of my life:

I booked the hostel for the wrong night. Now, this doesn’t sound like a terrible mistake but it really was. First off, I was staying in a separate hostel then my friends because they were all booked up, so I was on my own. Secondly, you get around 3 confirmation emails once you booked, and I even called the hostel to confirm. Thirdly, I forgot to print off my bus ticket so I went into a panic the night before knocking on my neighbor’s doors to borrow a printer and then making sure everything was in check – BUT I DIDN’T CHECK MY HOSTEL SLIP. Fourthly, once I tried to check in at the hostel and the mistake was made clear I made the excellent call of getting pancakes and beer instead of looking for a new place to sleep.

When our group returned to their own hostel, it became apparent that they wouldn’t be ale to sneak me in ( they were staying at a very serious, very Christian hostel – kind of at odds with everything else we had experienced of the city), so we started to call every hostel in Amsterdam to see if they had any openings. As it was 2am on a Saturday night, absolutely everything was booked. Eventually I did the only thing left to do- I started to cry until the man at the front desk of the hostel let me sleep in my friend’s bed. It was quite an experience, but at least I was not on a park bench, which seemed like a very probable option for a while.

Day 2 was much less stressful, as we rented bikes and explored the city all day. There is such a different feeling from Paris, everything from the way people dress to the general etiquette when crossing a street is much more relaxed. (In Paris, no rules apply – people generally take a red walk sign to mean, “run for dear life” and cars will usually power straight through the greens). Day 2 was also quite an adventure for far superior reasons, but im not going to write out all the details…there was lots of getting lost on bikes and eating Dutch apple cake(pictured below), with the van Gogh museum and the flower market thrown in. Despite some stressful moments I would say the weekend was a definitive success, and one of the best aspects of the weekend trip was how happy I felt getting back to my apartment. When I was on the metro nearing my stop and again when I was finally in my bed I really felt like I was home. Which is an amazing feeling.

PS – I started a pain au chocolate count for October and lost count already. I feel like this is a bad sign

PPS – my American friends took pity on me for missing out on Canadian thanksgiving so they made an impromptu dinner consisting of chicken that tasted like ham (???), delicious bree with date spread and some weird mystery meat that my friend insisted was pigeon. Yum…

Nuit Blanche

Now that school has officially started, I feel like my life here as actually started as I have a schedule, things to accomplish, and A REAL HOME. The transition from roaming tourist to actual student happened really quickly, as I got some form of weird flu last week that made all the days blend together. It also made moving my suitcases on the metro pretty difficult, as my friend who was helping me also had the flu. (at first we couldn’t figure out how we both got so sick at the same time, but then realized it was probably attributed to the fact that we didn’t have cups in our dorm, so we usually drank out of the same wine bottle. Very sophisticated).

Another exciting development – I REALLY love my apartment. Its located on the edge of the 14th, 6th, and 7th, and as Paris districts are distributed like a snail shell that means not in the center but not too far off either. However, the best part of the apartment is that I have an extra mattress and key, and enough space for someone to come visit me quite comfortably. I had a “party” on Saturday night, and managed to fit 17 people inside the apartment, which I think was fairly impressive. It did get very hot though, and I’m still taking the wine bottles down to recycling in increments so my neighbors don’t think I am a raging alcoholic.

<-- a posed picture on my bed


The reason I had people over on Saturday was to celebrate our first Parisian “Nuit Blanch” which is a kind of all night modern art show all over the city. (They have them in Toronto and Montreal as well, and I’m sure its spreading to other places..) We left the apartment at around midnight to explore, and were amazed by how many people where on the streets. I have honestly never seen Paris that busy, not even on a sunny Saturday. The crazy thing was the mix of people – at first I thought it was all drunk students, but then I realized that there were also families, and old couples, and people by themselves who were really into the art. I didn’t make it out of the Latin quarter (the neighborhood close to my place) because I was not sure I would be able to wait out the first metro at 5 am. (My friend who did said that there was huge spontaneous dance party outside a metro stop at 4:45am as everyone tried to pass the time…)
My favorite “piece of art” that we saw was in Luxembourg gardens. In the middle was the worlds biggest disco ball, suspended from a giant crane and reflecting various lights and lasers all over the garden. It was pretty cool to see, and later I read the program to see the point behind it: to represent the starry sky that can’t be seen from big urban cities.

“Impossible dans les villes de contempler un ciel étoilé: la luminosité des centres urbains occulte le spectacle immemorial de la voute céleste”

All in all things are going well, despite the oral presentations and massive amounts of reading...
A bientot