Salut from Paris--December 3, 2004

Things are going well here in the final leg of my stay here in Paris. I can hardly believe it, but I'm coming home three weeks from today. I wanted to delay my stay here to as long as possible before Christmas so now I'm coming back on December 24th at 8pm! While it will be very nice to be home for Christmas, it will also be hard to leave here as I'm just starting to visit here, although I'm very happy with how things have gone and what I have learned. However, I have to admit that my decision to come back does have just a bit to do with the fact that I'm sick of school and can't work here...

The highlights of the past month since I last wrote are that I went to Berlin for a weekend which was very interesting as it is very different from Paris and I even felt kind of at home here when I came back! The connection I had to history there was much more vivid and upfront as it is basically the entire twentieth century all in one city. That was a nice change from Paris which could be thought of as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in one city. I went to a war museum, the Jewish museum, a museum about the Berlin Wall and an art gallery and I also took a really cool walking tour around the city. Since I got back I've played host a couple times, having my cousin Patrick and a friend from Queen's coming to visit and giving me a taste of my life before I was here; it was great to see them and it gave me an excuse to be a tacky tourist. Otherwise, I've been studying absorbing as much culture as I can; the other night I went to an avant-garde theater performance and I've been to tons of museums and readings at Shakespeare and Company and some films as well.

The only disappointment with my stay here so far has been the course I'm taking. I could probably dedicate an entire email talking about how the classes are twice the size as they were advertised to be, the content is also different and is nothing I couldn't learn from a book (ie a grammar book), how the teaching methods are completely outdated with little interaction with students or even attention to teaching methods, and I could even put it into a historical context as the education system dates back to the Napoleonic era, is free and thus has a history of trying to get people to drop out, which was a major reason for the student rebellions in 1968 which resulted in the resignation of the French president the following year, and yet they still failed to create significant change to the system... but I'm having too much of a good time and am too stimulated culturally and intellectually to rant any further.

When I come back I am planning on staying at home for a few weeks for Christmas before looking for work teaching English in China. While I have been here I have taken great efforts and made sacrifices so that I can really feel settled in a new place and not rush everything and I think that as a result I will return eager to do more of what I'm doing, living and experiencing new fascinating places. I'm also looking forward to having a real job and being self-sufficient. I've been doing lots of reading and writing here; I would even say that I've read more books than seen movies, which would definitely be a first, and for the next part of my path I'm planning on reading more and working on my creative writing. I feel I have a lot to say and I've discovered that I get a better experience from reading a book than from seeing a film. It's very exciting to discover all of this and I feel that I've got from this experience here what I was looking for, which was to continue on the same path that I was on before and yet continue to grow and not lose my focus. From this experience I feel stronger, more confident and hungrier to do have more adventures.