Un esprit à l'etranger

I’ve been absolutely swamped since I arrived in Paris. I have been naively trying to live a normal life (cook for myself, work out, go out, read, etc.) in addition to getting settled in a new city. But there really aren’t enough hours in the day to do this. In…

I remember how reluctant I was to buy furniture when I finally moved into my own place in San Diego. Until then, I’d always lived with roommates, and they’d furnished the common area. I only owned a bed, some clothes, a cheap bookcase, and desk that Mike had given me…

If you have a smartphone and want to stay in touch, download an application called WhatsApp. It’s a free web-based texting program. Because it is web-based, it allows you to send texts internationally to anyone who has WhatsApp (which I do). WhatsApp imports your phone contacts automatically, and my account…

It has always bothered me when I hear people claim a little too readily that they’ve “lived” in a foreign country. I knew a guy in San Diego who would refer to the time he “lived” in Colombia, when the truth was that he spent 11 weeks there on a…

The traffic circle that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe, known as the Place Charles de Gaulle, ties together 12 twelve city streets. It goes without saying that it is a busy intersection. In fact, as anyone who has driven through it can attest, “busy” is an enormous understatement. The chaos…

When I was a junior at Virginia Tech, I signed up for an Ancient Philosophy course. I had a lot of big questions at the time, and I suspected I might find some answers in the cobwebs and browned pages of old books – somewhere in the body of knowledge…

I started work on Monday, the day after I arrived. It was definitely a case of “hitting the ground running,” but I really didn’t need much more time to get settled, seeing as I was just staying in a hotel room for the first couple weeks. My office is in…

I have been in Paris now for exactly one month, and I’ve been badly negligent in documenting my experiences here – mostly because I have been extremely busy getting settled at work and at home. But I’ve been (thankfully) prodded by a few people to start writing, so I am…

When I lived in San Diego, I used to meet foreigners regularly – in bars, at the beach, through friends, etc. Some of them were just passing through on a tour of California, but others were there for a year or more, studying English at one of San Diego’s several language schools.…