First Days in France

The last week has been a blur! And it all began exactly a week ago...

Departing Madison!
Exactly one week ago, on Friday the 11th of January, my mom, stepdad, brother and I took off on a perilous journey to Chicago. Here (after 4 hours of perilous driving) we stayed the night in a Hotel eating delicious junk food that yours truly brought along ;) The next morning, at the deadly hour of 8am, we left for the airport. After a tearful goodbye (I lie, I demanded no tears whatsoever!) I was on the plane to Boston!

Boston
Once arriving in Boston, my super awesome coordinaters Alison, Kary, and Nate prepared myself and the eight other students participating in CIEE for our trip. Throughout our two days in Boston, my companions (Melinda, Lucia, Olimpia, Ben, Aidan, Isabel and Hope) and I underwent a serious frenchification (Obviously that's a real word. I'm a professional.) which included an, ahem, terrifyingly indepth  description of Culture shock, a french proficiency test, and many, many teambuilding activities. Woo!

The Planes
The first plane we took was from Boston to Dublin. If you're not freaking out, then  you must not have heard that last part - DUBLIN, we landed in DUBLIN! As 1/4 Irish (And as my Dad has constantly reminded me, this is a thing to be proud of!) this greatly excited me as "Ireland is my hoooooomeland!" Well, not quite, but it excited me quite a bit given my boundless admiration for the Emerald Isle.
From Dublin, we continued on to Paris, arriving at around 7 in the morning, after a night of (wide awake) flights. Our ragtag group of French enthusiastes celebrated robustly, but little did we know that we would have to continue staying awake to avoid jet lag. For 48 hours. Ouch.

First Days in France
For the next 5.5 days, our mini-congregation hung out in the absolutely ravishing city of Lille. Seiously, this city embodies the romance of France like no other.


This is one of the less beautiful sidestreets of Lille - still ridiculously winsome! The reason I 'don't have pictures of the most beautiful streets? Well, I was a little busy dropping my jaw...

A view of Lille's center through a stone archway of an ancient church dedicated to the soldiers who died in battle (my rough french could not discern which battle the plaque signified)

A ferris wheel currently located at Lille's center! Throughout the week, we saw the dismantling of this monster.

A local grocery where Melinda (Hey, there she is in the picture! What a coincidence...) and I bought our first baguette, jar of "confiture" (jam), and random clementine. We were vastly excited that the clerk actually talked to us in French, rather than switching to English - obviously that means that we sound like natural French people! We later found out that he couldn't speak English, meaning that he most likely did not think we were French... We'll still count it as a win.

Finally, this is the hostel we stayed at in Lille. It's super hip (you have no idea. They had a giant antique stage light as a centerpiece on a wooden table and weathered metal slabs as wall art! It was intensely hit) and the people were so nice and talked to us in French even though we were stringing together sentences like "I would your to give the money? By- oops - for a rooms?"