Welcome Back!

It was a quick two weeks in Atlanta before I came back to Paris, but it was amazing! So great to see my family and friends, have time to relax and not think about anything stressful (although maybe I should have done a little schoolwork..). I ate some delivious food, did almost everything on my at-home to-do list, brought practically a whole suitcase of american food and supplies back here with me, wonderful. I already miss home-- going back halfway through definitely made it more difficult to come back to Paris, but I'm really glad that I did it and I'm glad to be back here too-- even if it is 23 degrees F!

Yep, I landed to snow-covered fields at sunrise on Monday, and had a surprisingly flawless entry back into France and trip to my apartment. That's where the flaws ended though. I walked into my apartment to an awful smell; I thought maybe someone had left something in the garbage or something so I made my way into the kitchen where the smell was overwhelming. I noticed when I tried to turn the light on that it wasn't working...the maid had turned all the power off after we left, without telling us. That left tons of food and frozen meats to rot for two weeks, creating a disgusting moldy soup in my freezer. Gross! Well, I right away started cleaning the whole thing out, throwing out everything (and making sure the kitchen window was open when I needed to take a breath...). I cleaned the whole thing out with kitchen cleaner, but the smell was still horrid. When Ashley got in a few hours later we spent the rest of the night bleach cleaning the whole fridge/freezer until I finally gave into exhaustion and jet lag around 6. Gotta love the apartment drama, it just never ends :-P

Paris is officially freezing this whole week. Snow on Monday, a high of 23F today with roads and sidewalks all iced up (literally, it was like ice skating to school this morning before the salt guys came), and not a high about 36 for the next week. I brought long underware, jackets, boots, scarves, gloves from home, but its still not even remotely warm enough to be outside. How do people do it? I should just invest in a pair of ski pants and be the most fashionable person out there. 

In good news however, I just finished up my last assignment for one of my classes! I only have a few things left to work on, and only three more weeks in the semester! Ah I just realized I never updated about my registration fiasco for next semester...

So I flew back to Atlanta arriving Wednesday the 17th, and registration was 9am Paris time on the 18th. I was planning to just wake up at 3am to do it at home but, lo and behold, Comcast decided to have an outage in the whole region the early hours of the 18th! If you remember back to September, Sciences Po registration is hell. Everyone in the school goes online at the exact same time and registers for any class they can get ahold of...and EVERYTHING is full in the first 5 minutes! And no supplementary/late registration or add/drop period. So of course I was freaking out that I couldn't get online, and it was 3am so there was nowhere I could go. I ended up having to use several cell phones (since our phones were down too) to call Ashley (in ATL) and Samantha (in France), have them register for any classes that were not full already, and then transfer them into my account. It was horribly stressful, and I only ended up with two classes after by obligatory French class! In the end it turned out ok though-- although I didn't get any of the cool classes I wanted (World of Wine in France, Political Introduction to Climate Change, etc), I got two good ones that should be interesting:

-Comportements Politiques de la France et l'Europe

-Questions of Sustainable Development.

Those two plus my french language class put me in the clear at 12 GT hours, the minimum. I also have no classes on Fridays, which in addition to my super-light schedule means that I'll have a lot of chances to travel! Although it seems I won't be profiting as much from Sciences-Po as I had hoped, at least I can profit from the rest of my time here!

Ok, back to work. Almost done!!