#sciences po.

[frenchsteve]

Dernière balade à Paris.

Il faut faire ses adieux à la France !

Et pour les faire correctement, rien de mieux qu’une balade suivie d’une expo dans Paris. Première étape, le musée des Arts décoratifs avec beaucoup de meubles, l’expo “la mécanique des dessous” et tout et tout ! Beaucoup de marche à travers les étages du palais du Louvres et ses 9 étages. Heureusement qu’il y avait des sièges confortables et d'un magnifique design retro pour s’assoir. Ensuite impossible de ne pas dire un au revoir à la France sans passer par Angelina, temple de la sucrerie et du chocolat chaud. Si vous ne connaissez pas, alors vous n’êtes pas vraiment parisien si ? Déluge de sucre, refuge des amoureux, (TJD coucou). Cette maison typiquement parisienne vous promettra plus de cacao dans votre chocolat que vous ne pourrez en rêver, un Mont-Blanc fantastique, de la bonne crème entière (pour pas que le chocolat soit trop écoeurant hein) et une crème de marron fantastique. Vous découvrirez alors une merveilleuse meringue croustillante de pâtisseries formidables qui contrebalanceront peut-être les prix exorbitants, la couche de touristes coincés, et les tables du début du siècle... (qui vous poussent à adopter le maintien du début du siècle) Ce chocolat vaut largement un mal de dos !

  Pour finir la journée et digérer toute cette crème de marron, promenade dans la cour du Conseil d’Etat et ses grandes collones, on profite une dernière fois des jardins parisiens et de l’intimité de ses allées de platanes basses qui rappellent celles de la place des Vosges. J’ai bien profité de ma dernière journée à Paris, le départ c’est pour dans 6 jours maintenant ! Alors fini de se reposer, il va falloir commencer ce qui va s’avérer surement être la source de bien des problèmes, la valise ! Prochain post... On fait les valises, empile les vêtements, recharge les appareils électroniques et on décroche les posters du mur. Etape suivante ? Le vol ! Dire que dimanche prochain je serai de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique, en train de manger différemment bien sur. La semaine s’annonce bien mouvementée, je vous tiens au courant amigos...

[tea-without-milk-blog]

Ticking The List

That’s the thing about Paris – you can quickly get used to the fact that you have a world of culture at your feet everyday. There’s historical significance down to the métro stops and sidewalks here, and one really needs to make a point about not letting that aspect slip into part of the everyday banal.

This week, in order to celebrate the closing of our course work for our Sciences Po. semester abroad, Kristen and I took ourselves to Les Invalides. Les Invalides, in particular, is a place we passed daily for about the first two weeks of our time in Paris, as it was the nearest metro stop to get to our destination of the American Church of Paris – a place we frequented daily in the hopes of finding an apartment on their well-known, daily-updated bulletin board. While our countless visits to the church’s information board proved fruitless in the end, the walk past Les Invalides grand building made our walk all the more pleasant in those first hot, hot days of summery Paris. And so, of course, we placed it on our list of things to see during our exchange.

Yet, with time, Les Invalides somehow fell to the bottom off our never-ending scribbles of museums, aspirational travels and hopeful festivals, as, for us at least, it was not necessarily a must-see in Paris. The massive structure acts as a museum and monument relating to the military history of France – not exactly crowd-drawing material when you have the Eiffel tower and Champs-Élysées across the Left bank. Still, the drawing card for this French nugget of history is that Les Invalides is the burial site for some of France’s war heroes - most notably, the Napoleon Bonaparte. 

That, and the fact that we have the luxury of really giving Paris a thorough combing during our time here, was enough to attract Kristen and myself to pay a visit and our respects to the 334 year-old building yesterday.

With just under a month to lap up all that our Parisian dream promised (and delivered on), it has come to that time for us – time to tick off our final few must-sees and do’s before our imminent departure.

And it felt good to finally see the building – that has become sort of a motif for the start of our time abroad - and appreciate it. It’s comforting to know that Les Invalides was here well before we were, and will stay, with its gold-leafed dome glimmering on, well after we leave.

[tea-without-milk-blog]

10 Weeks (and Halfway)

At some point, I’m not quite sure when exactly, the summer heat diminished, rain started sprinkling the days and I brought a red coat in Amsterdam.

At some point, I’m not quite sure when exactly, I stopped going out every single day to sightsee, and had to stay inside to work on my Masters thesis.

And at some point, I replaced buying Ladurée macaroons with homemade soup, as my 21-week semester abroad turned into a 10-week countdown, and eating a croissant everyday just wasn't going to happen.

And as always, as with most individuals I know, I am incessantly fascinated with the concept of time. In my moments of elation, there it goes, whooshing past me, so speedily I can practically hear the hands of the clock turning in my ears. And in times of missage or cloudiness, time stares at me, steadfast, watching my every move and making me uncomfortable. Ten weeks in and I’m halfway between having seen all I want to see and being ready to come home – sounds about right when I put it like that.

The motif of being halfway relates to my larger place in life as well. My 5-year stint as a student is swiftly coming to a close, as I submit my Masters thesis in April next year and with that, I will begin an untrodden career path. There should be a Humanities FAM course on how to prepare for the next stage of my life. I don’t even know how to sign a cheque and the thought of paying taxes still scares me. What’s a 401k used for and do I need one? Sometimes I Google the term ‘important adult stuff’, in the hopes they’ll be some guide out there, and I am always disappointed with my results linking me to sites about ‘management skills’ and ‘child care’.  I find comfort in the fact that I am an epic parallel parker. 

It’s not quite a quarter-life crisis – more of a quarter-life awareness that I’m experiencing. There’s this sadness in the reality that friends will part, Jammie stair-days are few and far in-between, and that having no courses on Friday is soon to be a fond memory. Having always been incredibly uneasy with uncertainty, this next era of my life is asking me to come to terms with the unknown.

And back in Paris, the fact that I have 10 weeks to go until returning to my most beloved summer time in South Africa leaves me feeling bewildered. I have the want to shout: “But I still have SO MUCH I WANT TO DO!” (queue the desire to go to the Bibliothèque nationale, to visit the Grand Palais, to see Champagne, and to go sit in a coffee shop and read Being and Nothingness).

Simultaneously, I am coming to accept that this period of my life was always going to be limited, and that returning home will have its own happiness and new adventures. And of course, a part of me has already begun making a list of things I want to do upon my return, naturally including finally trying a Sunrise Roti (the fact I've never had one is abominable, I know), going to Llandudno for the day, smoking a pipe (an aspiration I’ve concocted in my head at some arbitrary point in time) with my good friend Brett and talking life, braaing (I never braai, but I hope the invitations to braais flood my Facebook events), and celebrating New Years in some non-descript coastal village with my friends while drinking too much of everything.

Ultimately, the bitter-sweetness of living abroad is indulgent and oh-so-fleeting. You have to make the most of it, and still be realistic. As our bursaries finally came through, Kristen and I saw few better uses than to book a 9-day trip to Budapest and Prague with some newly made friends from Brazil and Korea - as you do. The need to travel is innately buried in me, and feeding the love for it seemingly only makes me hungrier (haha, yes yes, and so I decided to go to Hungary).

Until my return, I have 10 weeks. And I still have SO much I want to see. I am definitely not ready to come home yet. But I realise that travel, essentially, is just a condensed form of our lives - 

fit in as much as you can, accept you’ll never see it all, and make time for who and what you want most.