hi

Hi all, I’m Marieke, and I am writing this post from my apartment in Paris, where I will be studying all year. I came to Paris for a variety of reasons. My motivation lies more in the act of travel, of living life abroad, than in the culture itself. I don’t consider myself a Francophile, and speak French at a first grade level. That being said, I love the city of Paris, and after spending three months living alone here last summer, I knew that I had to come back and give it another try. Last summer I came to know the city very intimately, and loved the pace and beauty of it. At the time, however, I spoke even less French than I do know, and so my experience of Paris was almost entirely aesthetic. This time around, I want to explore Paris socially, and to get to know the character of its inhabitants. Ultimately, I want to move to Europe, and am thinking of this trip as a preliminary survey, a way of discovering how livable this city would be for me.

I’ve been in France for about two weeks, and have already gotten the chance to do a bit of travel outside of Paris, going on a high-speed train to an island called Ile de Re, about 3 hours south of Paris. Every trip brings with it a set of complications that are mostly pretty benign, and in fact I found that the problems I encountered on this trip were of the same kind that I might run into while shopping at the grocery store…namely those created by the language barrier. But I did have the foresight to bring a couple of books from this class along with me, which got me through a couple of uncomfortable hours stranded at the train station. For this course, I picked Julian Barnes’s “Flaubert’s Parrot,” Julia Child’s “My Life in France,” Edmund White’s “The Flaneur,” Proust’s “Within a Budding Grove,” Henry James’s “The American” and de Boton’s “The Art of Travel.” I’ve been really enjoying these books, particularly “Flaubert’s Parrot” and “The Art of Travel,” and “The Flaneur” had a lot of really illuminating things to say about contemporary Parisian life and culture. I haven’t really fixed on what my concentration will be, so I’m trying to stick with what interests me, and take it as it comes.