... Just in case you weren't quite sure you were in Paris!
The apartment is great, really spacious, with stunning views, and only a 15 minute walk from Sciences Po, so it's a perfect location while I do the welcome week and hunt for somewhere more permanent to live. However it is ridiculously hot in Paris at the moment and finding somewhere to live is proving rather difficult so that's not so perfect.
Anyway, yesterday was the first day of the welcome programme. I arrived in the morning and there was coffee and croissants and then we had talks by the director of Sciences Po, the dean, and various other student societies. The 'directeur', Frédéric Mion, was so suave and cool and charming in his speech, and he is apparently very popular with students which I can completely understand! He just seemed so much more 'with-it' than the Vice Chancellor of Warwick, our dear old Nige Thrifty, the contrast was ridiculous. So that first introduction to Sciences Po impressed me because if its run by someone who seems so cool it must be a cool place to study.
The rest of the day we spent in our groups having a campus tour, because there are several different buildings in the similar area which make up Sciences Po. It's hard to explain quite how in the middle of the city it is, but as an example, there is literally a Paul Smith shop on the corner of the Sciences Po main 27 rue Saint-Guillaume building, and a Louboutin just round the corner in the next road. It's right off of the boulevard Saint-Germain and so it is completely in the heart of Paris which is amazing. It does make me wander if i'm going to ever switch out of travel mode and into study mode but we will see. The buildings are the same beautiful old architecture that just characterises Paris and is such a stark contrast to the ugly concrete 1960s buildings that make up most of Warwick. Sciences Po doesn't have its on sports facilities like Warwick, there's way less student societies (and no cheerleading squads) but it has working wifi which is about the only similarity to Warwick. I think it will be interesting to see how the academics differ/are the same once I start my lectures on Monday 31st August.
Below shows the 'campus' map and also the entrance to their main building:
Before the welcome programme started I didn't really know what to expect, I knew there would obviously be lots of international students and so I wasn't really surprised when everyone was speaking to each other in English. Everyone is so friendly though and it's amazing how far people have come compared to my 2 hour train journey from London. There are lots of australians/americans here on exchange and although we're all native english speakers we have all come to Paris with the same goal of learning french, we're all going to be studying in french, it's just difficult to enforce french amongst ourselves. Hopefully as we start lectures we will meet some actual french people but so far the only new word I have learnt is "arvo" which is Australian for afternoon!
I don't have anymore activities as part of the welcome programme this week so i'm going to continue searching for an apartment with mum and we did a bit of exploring the Montparnasse area this morning which I'll blog about in the next post. This evening I'm going to meet up with some of the girls I met yesterday and I think our plan is to sit somewhere along the Seine and drink wine. We're basically already Parisian.
P.S. IF YOU KNOW ANYONE WITH A SPARE ROOM TO RENT IN PARIS N'HESITEZ PAS A ME CONTACER. SVP.
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