Arriving in Paris

I'm finally all settled in my dorm room, at a residence called Jean-Sarrailh in the SMACK middle PARIS with a view that includes the tip of the Eiffel tower (find it on the picture below)! And I swear I just saw it glittering for a while but now it is just illuminated in solid light. Shame on me because the feeling of being utterly exhausted in amazement (that's exactly what I felt, I felt like my senses were wayyyyyyyyy too lacking to take everything in) is wearing off. Looking outside my window, it looks like any other city I've been in before but that feeling could wear off too... fingers crossed!

My first impression of Paris was that the sun shone brighter in this part of the world. lol but in a sense, it really did cause it was snowing pretty hard when I left Ottawa and pretty much cloudless when I started my day over here. Moving over here didn't not come with hardships!!! My two luggages were extremely hard to transport, especially up and down the escalators at the airports! At one point, I got stuck at the top and people were running into me and we all started screaming! And this lady said ''MADAME! C'est très dangeureux ça!'' Well no duh, I didn't plan to do that. Plus, I sat on a cookie during the flight so I was walking around with a brown stain on my butt until I got to the hostel. My taxi driver was hilarious and he tried to help me as much as possible but it made the situation worse. He left me on the wrong side of the river after searching the neighbourhood free of charge and the only way I could get to the other side was to cross a massive bridge that had a million stairs leading up to it. !/$%@@¤¢ On the other side, there were Chinese people playing ping pong and I thought it was very cute =)

My hostel was great. I'd recommend it anyone who comes to Paris for a visit, it was clean...and among other things but I was very glad it was clean. I was surprise to meet quite a few very brave ladies traveling all by themselves. *allll my single ladies oh oh oh* See pictures below! I was still a bit shy talking to some people though, especially Amercan girls who are bursting in their confidence and who seem to not have any flaws. It's a good and a bad thing.

A few words on Parisians: they are not all anal and blaming! They won't come and give you a kiss and a hug on the street but it's a different, more contained kind of nice. At the 19ème, where my hostel was, many people would stare and smile or say hi and this one person actually stopped and talked to me. Did I have a ''noobie'' sign across my forehead or what??? How did I get on their radar? My coat is pretty puffy and I have a winter tuque, so that might be the problem.

So after surviving the culture shock, embarassing situations, fish-out-of-water situations and a mariage proposal on the plane from a very religious Muslim person o.O, I am still alive and well! I still worry about my course registration, and money issues and starvation issues to the point I can't sleep but I know I need to chill. One of the reasons why I came to Paris is to learn to LET GO and so I'll be working on it!!!!!!

That's it for the first post of my trip! I'll try to update once a day but we all know how lazy I am, so I wouldn't count on it mwhahahahha Keep coming back!