Ooh, wow, so this is my first day here
My name is Julian Joiris. I’m a student in the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, City University of New York, Center of the Universe. I’m a Creative Writing major, but not the pretentious sort, mostly. I’m a Pol Sci and French double-minor. This is my fun and exciting Official Macaulay Honors College Study Abroad Blog. Per the Honors College Opportunities Fund guidelines, I am documenting my semester in Paris for Posterity. I have it from a reliable source that Posterity is quite flattered and really wishes more people would do this sort of thing, even when their funding wasn’t contingent on it.
Over the next five months, I will probably go through sizable periods of short and/or boring posts, complain about trivial matters, make jokes that no one else thinks are funny, and otherwise grow as a person. Hey, I think it sounds like fun.
So far I have done very little in Paris.
My flight from JFK to Heathrow was largely uneventful. Some suspense was provided by pondering when the poor fellow in the next seat, who had some sort of stomach virus, would get up to go to the bathroom; or wondering how many times the captain would interrupt my in-flight entertainment for some breaking news about how, yes, we were still headed for London.
Aforesaid in-flight entertainment consisted of reading the first half of Watchmen, and watching Hellboy II: The Golden Army and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. That last gem was truly idiotic, though it gets points for an appealingly stylized esthetic. By sheer coincidence, I’d watched Ryan Vs. Dorkman (both of them) last night. These films contain all of the best parts of The Clone Wars–id est, “Whee! Lightsabers! Color! Crash! ZhooOOOoom!”–while improving on the acting and plot. Hellboy was very pretty and decently amusing, and Watchmen is so far every bit as brilliant a deconstruction of the superhero genre as I’d been led to believe. Which is good, because it won a bunch of awards and stuff.
Heathrow to Charles de Gaul was even less eventful. Whoever designed the signage at CDG apparently decided it would be great fun to put signs for the RER about every thirty feet for a long stretch, then have them completely disappear in another area, resuming again at some random point down the line. Once the ticket was purchased, it was just a matter of sitting on trains and getting on and off at the right stops and reading subway maps and locating platforms and all that other stuff New Yorkers can do in their sleep.
The Hotel Marena, where we’re staying before our official moving-into-places thing, is nice, and I suppose I’ll upload pictures in the coming weeks. I had fun walking around Paris and trying to get places without having to consult my map every two minutes. While I’ve gotten pretty good at getting a feel for the contours of the routes I have to take, I fail consistently at identifying street names, primarily because some sadistic city planner decided the best way to label streets was with tiny, grimy little signs high up on badly-lit walls, preferably at least ten feet from the nearest intersection.
I have nothing else to report, and nothing to do right now but succumb to jet lag.
