Paris Apartments and Meeting Classmates
The best and worst thing about CEA’s housing arrangements is the fact that the apartments are scattered across Paris. Students on other dialogues might get to live in the same building as all of their classmates. But our apartments are located in multiple arrondissements (districts), giving each group of students its own corner of Paris. My apartment is located in the sixth arrondissement, in a quiet courtyard off of a bustling main road. The surrounding area is full of small restaurants, cafes, and shops, but it is not excessively touristy—far more French is heard than English and there is a notable lack of cameras craning for a view of the Eiffel Tower.
One of CEA’s main goals is to get us students living “like locals.” Much of our orientation focused on dressing, looking, and acting like Parisians. Some tips: Don’t smile, don’t speak English, say “bonjour madame” or “bonjour monsieur” to start a conversation, don’t show too much skin. The housing helps facilitate this goal by blending us in to local culture and avoiding the creation of a large building of “the American exchange students.” I think that this is, overall, a pretty good idea. The people in our neighborhood are generally encouraging when I stumble through French; the knee-jerk “switch to English” reaction that I was dreading is thankfully absent. I can already feel myself getting more confident with the language because of this, and I know that this would not be possible were I part of a huge group with other Americans.
However, this arrangement does have some drawbacks. Namely, it makes it difficult to arrange plans and hang out with students that live in different apartments. At the moment, most of the people in our group lack a working phone, and even once all phones are activated, we will undoubtably hoard our texts and data. This, combined with the fact that we don’t all live together, means that I’ve mostly been hanging out with my roommates outside of CEA functions. It’s not that we haven’t had fun: we’ve walked for miles around our neighborhood, we’ve tackled a French grocery store, we’ve gotten dreadfully lost, and we’ve even started to explore different parts of the city. But I do wish that it was easier to communicate with other members of our school. Hopefully, we will all figure something out as the program goes on, and I can explore the neighborhoods that other students call home.
