Douze Septembre:
Traveling to Verdun (half way between Strasbourg and Paris). We got there at night and went straight to our hotels. The hotel was a little odd.
*Fun Fact: In France the showers are in separate rooms then the toilet ... haven’t really figured out why that is but...
needless to say the shower in our room didn’t have a curtain or door - soo while lounging on your bed you could not only, casually flip through the French television channels, you could also watch your roommate lather up ... hmm, we opted out of that and left the room.
The next morning we went to the Verdun battle field which had an amazing view. But it was also really cool because although the battle took place during World War I, there were still indentions in the terrain from where the bombs had exploded nearly 100 years ago!
We also got to go down into the bunkers. (Kelly: the bunkers would have been a place to film Blair witch project part deux, a sequel to our first filming in Ireland.) Anyways it was kind of eerie but very interesting how many rooms and passages there was under ground, I think they said there were about 2000 soldiers who lived down there during the war!

Seize Septembre
My first day of real classes!!
My schedule: Monday/Weds - History of Paris in Art and Architecture, Global Marketing, and Comparative European Political systems. Tuesday/Thurs - Intermediate French I

Dix-sept Septembre:
Bridget gets moved down to beginners French ... best day of my life. I thank god every day this.

Dix-Huit Septembre:
Rachie and I spend three hours performing an intensive search for Ranch Dressing. We located a small American grocery store and quickly infiltrate, confiscating the first bottle of ranch we saw!! Victory.
We then accompany our long awaited treasure (Ranch) with a salami pizza (the French version of pepperoni) and sat under the Eiffel tower and consume! …correction this was the best day of my life.

Dix-neuf Septembre:
Techno Parade aka: epic disaster. It started out great, it was basically a cross between love fest and bay to breakers. For those of you who don't understand, it was a parade of hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Paris dancing to Techno music that blasted from truck-floats. Me being the smart American exchange student decided that she would carry nothing of value on her, except for a small silver digital camera. We danced, we paraded, we even tried to get on one of the floats... when that failed, we didn’t want to give up so we settled for getting/climbing onto a near by phone booth. The view was fantastic but short lived because we were asked maybe 20 minutes later to get down.
... All was well with the day up until I decided innocently to take a picture of all of the people parading when all of the sudden my friends and I were surrounded by 15 guys who snatched my camera and violently ran away with it. I am still bitter. We spent the next two hours trying to converse with the French police.
On the bright side my friend Brittany and I took ourselves out for a juicy/slightly overpriced cheese burger ... not going to lie that cheese burger almost made everything worth it.