Paris

Cold showers, complaints, and a bucket

May 4, 2012

Do you know what is quite possibly the most miserable thing out of all of the things? Cold showers. They are a special kind of torture. My advice for cold-shower-taking is to begin frantic humming before you actually direct the water onto your body. That way, you are already warmed up for the squeal-like noise [...]

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VLOG: Parisian Apartment Diaries, part 2

November 18, 2011

As research paper writing begins to consume my soul, my will to actually type things for this blog is waning. Instead, I spend free time I don’t have tinkering with the layout and recording silly videos. (Admittedly, I’m a little giddy about the product of the layout changes.) Today I bring you a brief look [...]

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This post is as American as pumpkin pie spice

November 10, 2011

Let’s take a breather, shall we? I sat down to start typing and there are a million thoughts, and I couldn’t seem to find the focus to pick one. This is how my entire life feels right now. This is when I start baking. Even though I was only in Budapest for five days, I [...]

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Exhausted, Shirtless, and Freezing: The fun of finalizing my visa continues!

November 1, 2011

I was exhausted, shirtless, and freezing. I stared at the papers spread out on her desk and couldn’t answer questions any more articulately than mumbling because I was afraid I might start crying if I opened my mouth any wider. After the countless hoops I had to jump through to initiate the visa process in [...]

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Google Baking

October 25, 2011

How did travel work before Google Translate? I could wax philosophical about all the profound changes technology and social media are having and the good, bad, and ugly about those implications. But let’s just not, all right? In college I found that the best way to survive mid-terms and finals was with the help of [...]

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Paris Photobooth: Exam Stress Relief

October 13, 2011

Graduate school in Paris has turned out to be a bit heavy on the graduate school and light on the Paris. Papers and exams, it seems, are universal concepts and they followed me here. Or, rather, I chased them here. Because I chose to come here and be a student again. Because I really thought [...]

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Clumsiness Is Not Cute

October 6, 2011

Romantic comedies and Disney have told us so many lies and given us so many misguided expectations that I could easily dedicate an entire blog to breaking these struggles down one by one. Suffice it to say that reality is thoroughly disappointing. I am slapped in the face with the inaccuracy of one particular lie [...]

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Eat it up (if you can)

September 26, 2011

“I lived in Ghana for a semester; Paris will be a breeze.” This is indicative of the simultaneously arrogant and naive things I thought before I came to Paris. When I left for Ghana, I had few expectations other than that everything was going to be really ridiculously different. In truth, things were probably nicer [...]

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VLOG: Parisian Apartment Diaries

September 23, 2011

And now for a vlog update. I present you with a few snippets of my apartment and an overview of the ambiguous terms under which I am being asked to leave this apartment. It’s all very French.

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Get lost. It’s for your own good.

September 21, 2011

Getting lost is a given with travel. You can never really know a city until you have gotten hopelessly lost there. Depending on how adept you are with things like “directions” and “maps,” your formula for reaching that magical place where your number of times lost translates into having an actual sense of your city [...]

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