First Ariving

I arrived in Paris with most of the class on July 1st after, what was for me, an extremely easy and quick feeling overnight flight. My seat was comfortable, I had plenty of room, and I was even able to get some sleep! Maybe about 3 hours. Even so, I was still extremely tired, and I was begrudgingly expecting to soon be making a difficult trip to City University. However, this was not the case! The RER, the French metro system, was able to take us directly from the airport to our dorms without even needing to change trains. It was my first taste of the French public transit system and I was already hooked. Though on this train as I left the airport and traveled to Cité Uni I was met with my first culture shock, the heat and lack of AC. The airport was air conditioned but the train, and the rest of my day was not. I had in my hubris before my journey thought that I would be prepared for French heat. I grew up in Virginia, I had dealt with days far hotter than projected during my trip and I had done so well being outside and active, plus France isn’t nearly as humid as back home. But, what I failed to consider, was that even on these hottest of days, even in the worst of heat waves after I exerted myself I retreated to the cooling embrace of air-conditioned space. With that ability to retreat I know now that I had never truly experienced heat. I know now that I had not known the truly inescapable, omnipresent, suffocating breadth of heat.

My first full night in France, July 1st to 2nd, this fact would be, for all intents and purposes, baked, into me. But before that I first had to get my room assignment. The other UMW students and I arrived at Cité Uni only 30 minutes before our projected meeting with Seth, who would be our class’s handler while we were on campus, and who would be showing us around our first day here. As such, the other Mary Washington students and I trudged our way to our designated meeting point, exhausted, hot, and not a little dehydrated. Despite this our class pulled through and dragged ourselves and not an insignificant amount of our worldly possessions to our assigned dorm building, Norway House, or as I should say Maison de Norvège. Here, with some struggle we obtained our rooms and means of accessing them, as well as important information.

Following this our crew of students, now clearly in the deepest throes of exhaustion brought on by cross-oceanic travel, were then given a tour of the dorms. The tour was well informative and useful, but the heat and exhaustion were now reaching a breaking point and as it wrapped up I and I think most other of our class shambled away to our respective quarters to gather ourselves and adjust to our new surroundings. It was here that I was able to change out of my airport clothes and take a cold shower. Of course normally a shower would be nothing of note, but here after nearly 22 hours of travel and being thrown into the midst of a blanketing heat, this shower may have been the best shower I’d ever taken. It was like a web of tensions released as I washed away not just the grime of traveling but the heavy and draining heat that I only realized in absence was suffocating my whole being. Stepping out of that shower felt like waking up from an 8 hour perfect night’s sleep.

With this newfound energy I got dinner at the dining hall on campus, which I was charged almost 3 times the advertised price for likely due to my terrible French skills and my inability to express that I was in fact a student. Concluding dinner, I attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate a fan of any kind. I didn’t search very thoroughly, in hindsight, I didn’t really even know where to look. After blindly searching and as stores were closing and I was forced to return to my dorm without any means to cool down at night and, as I would soon find out, without my water bottle which had likely been lost during the flight. As I returned from my pathetic attempt to locate a fan, I was comforted by the fact that buildings in France are designed for heat, and even without AC, good airflow through my room should be more than fine because it should be prioritized in any good design. Besides, it was going from 102 to the lower 90s that night, so how bad could it be.

The answer was very bad. Despite the large casement windows that occupy the majority of my room exterior-facing wall a lack of transom in my room seemed to create a block of stagnant air that prevented any airflow from penetrating its invisible barrier. Even as wind rustled leaves outside I sat that night in a muggy pool of still, hot air and tried my best to get some sleep. As I lay there, I wondered if I had made a mistake coming, if I could withstand a month here, if this, my first trip out of the United States, being a whole month was a bridge too far and if I was in over my head. As I swirled in my worries and in my hot bed I did my best to slowly drift off to sleep, a sleep that couldn’t come soon enough.

By the next morning I woke up in a similar mood to when I had fallen asleep, which was not helped by the inhospitable climate of my dorm room. Inspite of this, a relatively restful night had left me in much more optimistic, if not still shaky disposition. Our first class meeting was at 9:30 so I got up early, got ready, and headed onto campus to explore my surroundings before class started. Though still hot, the breeze that was all but missing from my living space rushed around me as I walked like the most powerful environment crippling AC America has to offer. As it did, and as I walked, It really hit me that I was in Paris! That the trip I had been planning and looking forward to for so long was finally here! This considerablly improved my disposition and allowed me to reflect on how I now get why complaining about international travel is so universal and understandable.

Once at the MUSFA meeting, I was also able to hear more about there first day and how they were equally unsuccessful in obtaining a fan the night before. With this knowledge, as the meeting wrapped up a group of students and I banded together to try and alleviate our fanless condition by going to a mall before our next class event later that day. This trip was ulimently unscessesful in obtaining room fans for our group, as the day we looked was on the tail end of a weeks long heat wave and practically all remaining fans were selling at extreme premiums. Even so, the trip overall was not a failure, as what we did find was hand fans and many of the nessesities that we had not packed and still needed to buy. The hand fan I got was a game changer. Just having the ability to move air around made a world of difference and really helped me to better acclimate to the climate.

Following our mall excursion, we met at a cafe near the Denfert-Rochereau RER station. Here, I had my first real meal in Paris, and it was incredible. I had a salad, fires, an actually cold drink, and a parfet of desserts which were all incredible. By the end of the meal, all my worries and concerns that made me feel so miserable the night before were gone; replaced with the optimistic enthusiasm that had driven me to come on this trip in the first place. I had truly felt grounded again and confident that I wouldn’t just enjoy Paris, but love it. And as I write this, roughly 10 days into my trip, I can confidently say that I have!