One of the reasons why I fell in love so quickly with the idea of studying abroad in Italy is that you can’t help but run into a unique, charming town every 50 kilometers or so (say that in your Rick Steves’ voice). I mentioned this in my last post about planning day trips, but Milan has a geographic location that lends itself well to easy journeys around Northern Italy.

I have officially been abroad for over a month, and can say that other than contracting a form of the Italian flu/common cold combination, I am having the time of my life. Pro Tip: load up on vitamins and sleep while being abroad. Just because you're in a different country doesn't mean that your body stops needed the essentials. While studying abroad is clearly a time to pursue academic interests and remain healthy (still working on this), it is also a time to see the world.

Last weekend, we set out on our Great Wall of China trip. We left Beijing at around 10 in the morning, and we drove around 3 hours until we reached the Great Wall at Jinshanling. The day was beautiful, not particularly hot at the beginning, but it surely was when we started going up the stairs later on. We all had so much fun taking pictures and exploring that part of the Great Wall that had been restored. There was a woman trying to sell basically anything (T-shirts, water, food, tissues…).

My love and I are celebrating 1 month together.

As I mentioned briefly in my last blog post, many of the questions I had about academics and such were not really answered until over the summer, when I was filling out a bunch of online forms for IES Abroad. I thought that it might be helpful for anyone who might be interested in the Paris French Studies program for me to provide some more specific information about academics. Here is a photo of the master schedule of when all of the courses at the IES Abroad Center meet:

So far, IES Abroad is proving to be a very good program provider, and the Paris French Studies program is extremely well organized. I thought that orientation was very helpful, although I thought that it kind of lasted longer than it needed to. I feel like most of the questions I had about studying abroad and the program itself, such as questions about housing and courses, were really not answered until I was in the midst of filling out a ton of online forms for IES Abroad.

So far, I have been loving Paris and studying abroad here! I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport the morning of Monday, September 5th, after taking an overnight Air France flight from Washington Dulles. It’s hard to believe that I’ve already been here for over three weeks! The first place that program participants go after arriving is their housing assignment, so I took a taxi to my homestay.

So almost everyone in my program made the 6 hour bus ride to Munich for Oktoberfest. Every guy had a pair of lederhosen and all the girls had a dirndl, so we were really making sure we did this whole thing right. I had the luck of knowing a guy who had traditional Bavarian lederhosen and he let me borrow them for the weekend. So that was pretty awesome. For everyone who is not familiar with lederhosen, it literally translates to leather pants. These leather pants can be really expensive.

I’ve almost finished my third week of classes in Nantes, and so far they’re going pretty well. On my first day I found out that the literature course I was really excited about got canceled due to the fact that only two students were interested, so I ended up in French Poetry at the Turn of the Century instead.