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