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We left Reims on Friday, and spent Friday night, Saturday, and this morning in Paris.
Ellen got some 72 hour cold back in Reims that's already cleared up, it never really stopped us from going out and having fun. The weather everwhere we've gone has been mostly the same: sunny some days, cloudy most days, slight chance of rain, good chance of sprinkling mist. We spent two nights in a 20 euro a night hotel room on the fourth floor with no lift, with a bathroom down the hall and a €2.50 shower. It was nice, though, but in reality hostels are better and cheaper (with at least a bathroom in the room, free showers, and breakfast included).
We spent all day Saturday walking around the city hitting all the major tourist sites: Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, Champs Elysées, L'Arc de Triomphe, and the Tour Eiffel. My first impression of Paris had been that the city was like most of the others we've seen, only more crowded and much louder, faster, and cramped. When we got to the Champs Elysées all of that changed, and I was overwhelmed by the grandeur and exuberance evoked by all of monuments along the Seine, not to mention the vast amount of space created by giant parks and plazas. Ellen and I both became very introspective as the sun set and everything began to light up. Standing at the Egyptian obelisk (stolen by Napoleon) which sits at the opposite end of the Champs Elysées from L'Arc de Triomphe, with all the major thoroughfares of Paris stretching out from that point, I felt like I was at the center of the world, in the capitol of the world, and nothing could ever be grander or more important than that very spot where I stood. Like when people note that at the North Pole, every direction you go is South, standing in the Place de la Concorde felt as though moving any direction away from it would mean moving away from the center of civilization. After seeing that, nothing was really amazing, only just appropriate. There was a military ceremony happening at the base of the L'Arc, so we couldn't go near it, but it was neat to see the army all dressed up in their different regalia. The city center is so immense that it takes twice, or three times as long to walk a city block; so Ellen and I walked our butts off doing that circuit. Thank god for the metro.
It was an exhausting day, so we had dinner at a relatively cheap Italian restaurant. Afterwards, a French guy about our age bummed a cigarette from us, we started talking to him in broken English and broken French. He invited us to go hang out with a bunch of his friends at a big two story house right near our hotel. So we spent a few hours hanging out with a dozen French college students, drinking vodka and lychee juice, smoking cigarettes, and talking about life. It was awesome. I've noticed that there's an understanding that if a French person makes the effort to speak English, then I'm obligated to try to speak French. I've really lost a lot of what I learned in school, having nobody to practice speaking French with, but it's also surprising how many words just pop back into my mind right at the time I need them. Unfortunately, I never could really understand spoken French, so it's difficult to learn by listening to others. I have only a little trouble with most written French, and only where the essential word is some noun that I've never heard of, like "voie" meaning "train platform."
We're heading to Tournan-en-Brie--the suburb where the school is located--today on the RER regional metro, and for the next four weeks we'll be about an hour outside of Paris.
EDIT: We got to school. Tournan-en-Brie is in the middle of pretty much nowhere, but it's quaint. The school is beautiful, the woman who runs it is nice, there's equally three Brits, three Americans, and one other student who we've not met yet. More to come.