Weekend in Paris

One thing that I love about London is that living here gives me the opportunity to travel to other places. Going to Paris for a weekend is feasible. I left Thursday night right after classes and took the Eurostar to Paris and come back yesterday, Sunday. It was amazing. I really enjoyed the city. The only bad thing about the trip was the fact that I speak absolutely no French. There were a few times that my friend and I got lost not being able to read signs. Once I got used to the language gap though, and began to recognize the area that my hostel was in, it got a bit easier. It was great to be able to spend some time in the city though, I went to the Eiffel tower twice, once at night and the other just before sunset. I also got to go to the Arc de Triumph and all the other major attractions in the city (I can't spell any of them so I'm not even going to try). The city was dirty especially compared to London, but not as bad as I was expecting it to be. But the streets make less sense than London. I would love to go back though and see more of the city and some of the things that I missed. I did get to go to Versailles though. The gardens were huge and well maintained. It was nice to get out of the city, it actually felt like a holiday and not just another day of running around the city. Going away for a bit definitely made me happy to get back to London and relax. The city really has become like home and I'm going to be sad to leave it in just a few weeks. Finals are coming up along with the last papers for all my classes and I'm trying to fit in everything that I haven't done yet. Tomorrow I'm going to go see The Phantom of the Opera!!! I'm excited for it, it was the one musical that I had to see while I was here. I've loved every bit of time that I've spent here, even the going to class part because my profs have so much knowledge to share and Martin seems to know everything about the history of England. Which brings me to one thing that I want to share about the program. I know that for me and a few of the other people not from UO didn't really know what to expect about the program going into it, so I wanted to explain some of the things that I know I had questions about. The program is small, there are two groups that make up the program, the kids going for a semster and those going for a quarter. All of them stay with host families unless they decide otherwise. All of the students at the centre are American and you don't take classes with any British students, however the majority of the professors are Britsh (we have a visiting prof teaching two of our courses). Part of the program is going on excursions. Some of these are in the individul courses so for Art History our classes are often at the museum. Other excursions are for the program so for me, all of the quarter students would go together somewhere, like on Friday when we go to Bathe. But there is a lot of free time to do homework, or explore the city or go away on weekend trips to places. It's a great program that lets students learn a lot.