Bonjour tout le monde

Bonjour from beautiful Paris!

After a long flight and being up for 30 hours, I finally made it. When I got to the airport I was really grateful to see that both of my massively, overstuffed bags made it to France. Sadly though, my adventure started off with the bad news of the Packer's loss. Great season though. Soon after getting to the airport, I met Dainelle, the program manager for KEI. She is just shy of 50 and beyond adorable. She greeted me with two bisus (the French style of kisses) and a "large" espresso. We soon met one of my other roommates/my only other program mate. Danielle arranged for travel to our apartment and we all took off. Danielle has already set up a dinner date so we can go over to her apartment and have dinner and wine. It's so nice to be able to have home cooked meals while I'm here. She said she has a twin brother who lives in Strausburg, Germany and said we would go to his house this semester and tour the town! I'm really excited for that since Germany was on my "must see" list. She also offered to take me to the ballet and American films

So far we've just had orientation and learned to use the metro (way easy)! :D Today in orientation we had a group meeting where we talk about some of the basic and learned where to get really good travel deals. We broke into small groups and my group had a talk about homesickness and adjusting to life in Paris. Tomorrow my group is going to le Tour Eiffle.

Today I went to the grocery store & Mon prix (my price in English). Mon Prix is like a Target with a grocery store so that was really good. It's nice because it's close to us. It seems like everything is though. At the grocery store, I was looking for some cheese and crackers and I saw that they sold Laughing Cow Cheese in bulk! It made me think of my sister who is obsessed with it! It made me smile so naturally I bought some for a euro. There is a nice little flower market less then a block away so I'm hoping that I can get some fresh flowers every now and then.

At the American Business School (ABS) there are about 3,000 students. 150 of them are international (mainly all American) students so it is a smaller school and campus. Everyone so far seems really nice for the most part but I expected this. I'm looking forward to the weekend because by then we should all be a bit more settled and time adjusted.

Our apartment is pretty nice. There are three bedrooms for 4 girls but my room is one with two beds. I'm okay with this because its a big room. All three of the rooms have there own balconies which is just beautiful! Such a nice luxury!

FUN PARIS FACT: Prostitution is legal but pimping is not. Apparently on the French taxes, you can declare prostitution as your official job. We learned this today during orientation along with the main locations of where the prostitutes hang out.

I'll try and keep this updated often. More so for my own sake so I can keep track of all the things I do and how I change.

Love-
ABN