On my third week

This is the blog where I’m writing about my exchange year in Paris, I’m doing it in English since so many of my friends don’t speak Finnish.

This is the third week now and I’ve managed to survive so far. ;) It’s not very difficult if you speak French, I’ve managed well and everyone has been patient enough to explain me things over and over again when I don’t understand something. I find people really helpful here, I would be quite lost without all the thorough instructions I’ve been getting about how to change bills into coins and how to get a metro ticket.

The thing is here you don’t just go and get a library card or a metro ticket. You honestly need about half a dozen of different kinds of certificates about your logging, your identity, your student status etc. Then you fill out a form and then you post it to some excluded office where they might give you what you are asking in a month or so.

I suppose it is quite difficult to manage a city like this, Paris is actually divided into 20 areas, arrondissements and each of them has its own administration. This means for instance that I cannot borrow book from any other library than the one that is in my own arrondissement. So every arrondissement exists on its own and obviously they have no cooperation what so ever.

Well, so much for the red tape, the only thing that would really get excellent scores here is the metro and public transportation all in all. The metro covers the whole city, plus there’re so called RER trains which are really fast and go all the way to the suburbia of Paris.

By the way, the French seem to love abbreviations, it’s all about RER, RATP, TF, Tlj, Vac scol, RDV and RIB around here. It really is not easy thing to handle for an exchange student who has just arrived. Now I’m getting hang of it and honestly I’m not surprised people prefer speaking about DAB than distributeurs automatiques de billets or about RIB than Relevé d’Identité Bancaire. It takes you so much time to say all the names of things that you’d grow old before you’d finish a sentence.

It’s not been just fighting with bureaucracy for me, I’ve had my walks around the city. I still haven’t seen even the 5 per cent of it all and I’ve been in the city every day. I’ve been to churches and cathedrals, there’s plenty of them to look at. My favourite so far is a small Gothic church L’Eglise de Saint-Séverin in the very heart of Quartier Latin, the Latin Quarter where students dwell.

I’ve also been doing a bit shopping and going out, of course. Possibilities for partying and dining out are inextinguishable, there are so many restaurants and bars around that it would honestly take you a lifetime to visit them all. Tonight I’m going to jazz club, there are plenty of them to look around.

Got to go now, have a RDV, that would be a rendez-vous translated in understandable language. That’s another characteristic phenomenon here, everywhere you go you have to have an appointment, in a bank, at the university etc. So, still have loads to learn, I’ll keep this blog updated. Oh, and please, do add some comments, otherwise I’ll feel a bit lonely.. :(