Cite Universitaire

I've been in my dorm for one week now, and it is amazing! I'm living at the Cite Internationale Universitaire de Paris, on the southern end of the city. I also learned that my high school French teacher lived here when she was in France, which is a pretty fun connection. My building is in a complex of international dorms built by Rockefeller. The main "student union" building is built to look like the Chateau of  Fontainebleau, since Rockefeller also gave the money for that. So there is a dorm for each country--Fondation Hellenique, Maison de la Tunisie, and so on. The University of Chicago put students in three of the houses: Fondation des Etats-Unis (USA), Maison du Cambodge, and the Maison des Provinces de France (me!). I think my program was so small that they just stuck us where they had room, so we are with all of the French-speaking students at MPF, rather than at the American house. But the rooms are huge with (drum roll please...) private bathrooms!!! I've never had a private bathroom in my life! Also, one of my friends said that our dorm rooms are as big as movies always make them out to be, which is pretty large...

Me in front of the Maison Internationale--the "student union" building

My dorm--la Maison des Provinces de France

My HUGE dorm room

My PRIVATE bathroom

My view

The community kitchen

I think it will be really fun living here, although the drawback is that we have to take the train all the way into central Paris and all the way out to get to class, but that's okay.

The University of Chicago Paris center (which is separate from the Cite Universitaire dorm complex) is pretty nice too. It is just the first and second floors of a couple buildings in a brand new neighborhood on the east side of Paris. It is right by the National Library (la bibliotheque de Francois Mitterand). We are also right next to a Parisian university. I just learned that there are a bunch of University of Paris-es (14 maybe?) and they all have numbers as well as proper names. For example, the university next door is Paris 7, but the University of Denis Diderot.  The Sorbonne, in case you were wondering, is Paris 3 and 4 or something like that. But, even though we are U of C students, we have Paris 7 ID cards. Thus, we have all the resources of real Parisian students--access to all university libraries, cafeterias, and so on. But the best part is we have FREE ACCESS to almost every museum in Paris. Do you know how much money museums cost??!! That means I can go to the Louvre every day! (Well, maybe not every day, since I have homework and stuff...) But isn't that cool?

Our first day at the Paris Center we had cocktails and fancy hors d'oeuvres, then a tour of the neighborhood around the Center. Then we went to different excursions related to our program. My group went to the Musee de Carnavalet--the Paris history museum--and had a guided tour of the prehistoric Paris stuff. I guess they thought it was connected to monkeys or something. I would have much rather been with the European History people who got a tour of the French Revolution section. Oh well. 
 

The neighborhood around the Paris Center

The front door

Our outing to the Musee de Carnavalet