Walking, Climbing Stairs, More Walking, More Climbing Stairs...

Sorry I didn't post yesterday, I know most of you went into shock without being able to know what I did. It shouldn't happen again.

I think when they rebuilt Paris there was an obsession with stairs. I don't really mind walking that much but all these stairs are KILLING me. I have to come up about 5 flights of stairs just to get out of the metro. I'm permanently out of breath. No wonder these French women stay so tiny!! It wouldn't matter what they ate as long as they take the metro twice a day.

Yesterday I went shopping on the Champs-Elysees (there should be an accent but I'm not opening up Microsoft Word to get one) with Taylor. There really are a ton of stores, too bad I can't afford most of them. There's a Louis Vitton store that appears to be multiple stories and takes up a street corner! I didn't even bother to go in there and get depressed hahahaha. They also have huge Gucci and Chanel stores which I also walked right by.

I found a lot of stuff at Zara that I liked but theres so many sales going on in Paris right now that it's hard to find stuff in your size. I noticed that the French sizes are different too. Everything runs smaller. For example, if you're a small in the U.S, you'd probably be a medium here. And if you're a DD cup in bras in the US you're probably DDD here. I guess it's because they want to create the illusion that even though theyre small they have big boobs. I give them props for that.

I found a coat that I'm obsessed with and have to have, yet they only had it in a small (while obviously I am an xsmall). I'm not giving up hope - I know there are tons of Zara stores around Paris and I will go to every single one until I find it. First, I'll look online of course.

I'm noticing that there really isnt that much of a difference between Parisian and American styles it's just that the French women always look like they're ready for a party. The only thing I've noticed thats a little different is that the French women wear tights (with shorts, a skirt, or a dress) with ankle boots a lot. I know girls in American do too but the way they put things together is interesting. And everyone wears heels. ALL THE TIME. I envy their ability to get around all day and not want to cut off their feet by the end of it. There's a school by my apartment and even the 13 year old girls are wearing heels. Hopefully by May I will have picked up that talent.

After shopping our friends Stephen and Kirsten met up and we went to the statue for Saint Michel and then Notre Dame. Its absolutely gorgeous! But what else is new? Everything here is amazing. I can't even begin to phathom how they built all of these things without modern technology. It's all so detailed!

I had to have walked at least 6 miles yesterday. I walked from 10am to 9pm with only taking an hour break for lunch and an hour break for dinner. I wanted to die this morning. It felt like I spent 8 hours doing aerobics. By the time I leave Paris I'll be ripped from the waste down. Maybe I'll become a leg model, who knows what the future holds.

Today I went to the Louvre again with a couple people from the ISA group. This time I actually made it in! hahaha This is another one of those buildings that I just don't understand how it was built. It's huge, and no details were spared. I saw the Mona Lisa - it's a lot smaller in real life than I pictured it would be. We also saw some of the Egyptian art and Roman I believe. The ceilings for one part of it were amazing. Apparently they were in someone's house before that (Anne of Austria maybe? I don't remember) but they were gorgeous. We're obviously going to go back, we only went to one section today and I don't even think we saw everything inside of that. I heard somewhere that if you spent 3 minutes looking at every picture or statue in the Louvre it would take 5 years to see everything. I have a feeling I'll be back quite a bit!

I took about a million pictures, none of which you'll get to see until I can figure out my camera situation. I decided I'm going to buy a converter since I found a place to get one but everything is closed on Sundays. It's definitely a little frustrating but I also think it's nice. The only place open on my street today was a bread store and then the metro station and anything else that was open closed before 6. There weren't really that many people out today either.

Tomorrow is the first day of school which should be sufficiently awkward. It'll be fun to see who is in my classes and finally meet some french students but the way the school is run is really weird. Every week they change the classroom you're in for each class and they can be in different buildings all within a 10minute walk. I don't know how to describe it... it's not like Eastern, where all the buildings are right on campus it's like you have to go down the block and around the corner to a completely different street and its a completely different building. They could have at least made them look the same or put a sign outside that says "Affiliate of ABS" but they don't. I think they could make a lot of things easier but don't bother to. And it doesnt help that Paris doesn't find it necessary to make addresses visable or even make sense (the building next to my apartment building is the exact same number and street. How does that make sense? How does the mailman figure out which mail is for which building?).

It'll also be like going back to highschool. The school doesn't allow food or drinks in the classrooms and you can't get up to go to the bathroom without asking. This will take some getting used to. If I'm bored in class I always get up to go to the bathroom to kill some time, but I guess I'll have to stop that habit. They also said some teachers have a laptop policy which is annoying because I specifically bought a netbook to bring to class because I'm much faster typer than I am a writer. Now I have to go out and buy notebooks, which are different than American notebooks. This girl Julie in my group went to buy some and all the french notebooks are graph paper notebooks, they dont have any with just plain lines. It'll save me the trouble of having to make the difficult decison of college ruled or wide ruled, but it'll be weird to get used to writing on graph paper all day long. Again, just one thing that seems to be more difficult than it has to be.

So for now, I'm going to eat dinner then look up train tickets to Italy and Switzerland. I think we're going to go somewhere this weekend and I'm very excited!