A Paris: Day 1- Wednesday 8 June, written on the 9th

I suppose my getting over here wasn't as easy as it could have been, but at least we're not in the eighteenth century or anything, which neither makes sense nor makes me feel much better. My first flight to Philadelphia was mostly fine, but my Paris flight was cancelled. I took a last-minute one to Frankfurt, whereupon my arrival I [mostly accidentally] passed out on a metal bench at an untimely moment and missed my Paris connection. They took pity on me and didn't charge me for a new one, and I got into Paris around eleven in the morning, only three hours after originally planned. My suitcase, stuck in Germany, I asked to have delivered to the school that evening.

Making my way to my host family's flat, I met Madame Laloux, an American ex-patriot, her very Parisian children Hugo and Heloise, and the American student I was kicking out of her/my room, Cora. I passed out again for five hours and then walked the two miles or so to the school, passing the gare [train station] I'd come in on, getting slightly turned around in the Mouffetard/Monge area, somehow not able to believe I was back. I'm writing this on day two, and I don't know, last time my being here was indescribably real, but now I can't seem to process that I'm here.

I waited almost two hours and my suitcase was not delivered, but took a familiar route back as a sort of consolation, up the Boulevard Saint Michel, past the Jardin du Luxembourg, Pantheon, and familiar main street shops of the student district, past an unlit but not deserted Notre Dame, seeing the Hotel de Ville and familiar bridges and large objects along the Seine, walking with the French, Germans and indistinct foreigners like myself in the neon of cafe signs sheltering small parties of friends, the clouds above orange with reflected light, and it just still didn't seem real.

Charles de Gaulle airport RER stop