Second Week

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2005 – MONDAY SEPTEMBER 19, 2005

Well, the holiday’s over – school is not going to be a walk in the park. Orientation was Monday morning, where my Tri-Continental group met the other 30 or so MBA candidates who will be studying solely at ENPC’s Paris campus for the next year or two, and began class as a group. The class was Problem Solving and Business Communication, which I hope will get a little more exciting as we progress. We worked in groups for a large chunk of class time, and (just my luck) I was called upon to present my group’s ideas on an overhead projector in front of the class. It went relatively well, all things considered, so I avoided an embarrassing catastrophe on the first day of class.

In Team Building and Leadership, our next class, we all got to analyze ourselves on Tuesday to see what types of leaders we are and how we handle certain situations. The class was very interesting and hands-on, and I helped in leading a six-man team to victory in an index-card tower-building contest (definitely one of those “not whether you win, but how you play the game” exercises, but that didn’t stop us all from being at least a little bit smug about beating everyone). That night our program director brought us all out for one last night on the town courtesy of Temple University, and we ate gigantic bowls of pasta (even by gluttonous American standards) in a ritzy part of town. Afterwards, a large group of us took over a bar called Footsie, which posts all of its drink prices on flat-screen televisions all over the bar, and the prices fluctuate according to supply and demand. As a bunch of business students, we were fascinated by it, yelling and buying rounds whenever things changed in our favor. Unfortunately, the obvious consequence occurred, and I made my first true “American Idiot” mistake: a couple of girls came up and started dancing with a few of us, and I, enjoying myself thoroughly and speaking slowly, loudly, and deliberately (joking, of course), said “Will-you-please-come-back-to-the-United-States-with-me?!” Based on the dirty looks I received in return, I knew I had botched something up, but one particular girl’s response (“WE’RE FROM DALLAS!”) put me in my place for the evening. Lesson learned: I now know not to make any hasty judgments about anyone that I meet over here...

The next day we continued the Leadership class, and afterwards I ended up taking the Metro up to Montmartre around sunset to get some pictures and check out the neighborhood. The weather was great, so I decided to start walking around, and before I knew it, I’d walked all the way from Sacre-Coeur to the Arc de Triomphe and back to my neighborhood, a total distance of about 8 or 9 miles. After the next day’s classes and a school-sponsored cocktail welcome reception, we were forced to hit the town again, this time at another underground cave-like bar called Chez Georges, which specializes in cheap wine, great Yiddish music, and an open invitation for the patrons to dance on the bar. In the melee, some French girls we were talking to ended up getting in a near-fistfight with some other French girls, which is always exciting, but we had to split after that. A few of us finished out the night drinking wine in a bar called Birdland (no jazz, though, oddly enough) with the cat-scratched and bruised French girls until about 4 a.m.

Early morning class on Friday was, of course, a joy to wake up to, but I survived and before I knew it, was back out on the town, this time meeting my group and going to a student bar called the Frog and the Princess, where I spent the night hanging out with a great group of Danish girls (the “Danish Bikini Team,” no less), who speak better English than most citizens of the United States. On Saturday, a group of us met at The Great Canadian, which has college football on satellite TV, and ALMOST watched Miami lose to Clemson. No bar in Paris covered the FSU-Boston College game, so the Danish Bikini Team and a small group of us headed to an Irish bar for the rest of the night. Sunday was very relaxed; I went to Auchan, the Parisian version of Wal-Mart, to buy an iron and some towels, and met some buddies for some cheap-but-awful Greek food in the Latin Quarter for dinner. Monday, after class and getting the good news about the bar exam, I went out and hurt myself along with most of my class, who all looked pretty rough this morning (Tuesday). I’m definitely going to get some sleep tonight.

At this point, I realize that it sounds like all I do is party and blow away money – however, I’ve been cooking a large majority of my meals at my place, scouring the city for the cheapest drinking establishments available when I’m forced out into the city by my wicked and mean-spirited friends at night (J), and generally living a very frugal existence, but I’m loving every second of it here. School is just about to start putting a gigantic dent in my social life, as we began Business Statistics yesterday and we’re looking at Intro to Finance, Business Economics and Financial Accounting in the not-too-distant future. I’ve added a few more pictures to the links on the right, but I hope to have lots more in the next couple of days when I get some of the pictures off my friends’ cameras.