the beginning...

Alright, so I arrived in Heidelberg, Germany around 7:30 pm, 2 hours late, without luggage....wandered about for a while because I couldn't find Liz...because she was waiting for me inside. Germany was fun but relatively uneventful. It was cool to be there, but strange to be in a place where I didn't know the language.
Arriving by train on Thursday evening, I took the 7 from Gare de l'Est and schlepped my luggage to the hotel.
As a group, we didn't have to meet until Friday, but I started to meet some people in my program right away, the first of which being my roommate, Christie. She, her friend, Catherine, and I went to the MICEFA office before our meeting to start our housing search. It ended up that Catherine and I really hit it off and started looking for apartments together.
We found a super cute one in the 13th, but in the time we waited for Catherine to talk to her parents about it, another pair of girls in MICEFA had already taken it.
As we continued to look for housing, Catherine came to the realization that she hated it here. She loved Paris during the day, but was emotional, upset and sick in the evenings. She went home already.
Crazy.
Our French class started Tuesday and we've actually been given a ridic amount of homework, especially considering that most of us are moving this weekend. I move into my house tomorrow. I was placed in Intermediate II (there's beginner, int I, int II and advanced)
While we do a lot of other stuff in class, Mme DuParc will just follow anything that comes up in class and give us a vocab lesson. It's actually super helpful. For example, since we all were looking for housing, she asked us what questions we should ask our potential landlord. Extremely helpful vocab review/lesson. Also, she gave us a lot of dos and donts about french université.
I changed my mind and will now be attending Paris 8 where I can take euro studies, FLE and other international studies courses. I think we'll have about a week between this french class and when classes start...maybe I'll plan a trip?
Everything is such a whirlwind but things are really starting to settle down now, with my housing, etc. I'm getting adjusted very well. Also, I introduced my roommate to falafels (real ones, not Harrison ones) and she loves them, so I'll always have someone to share this with haha.

Some pics:
first off, I'm a total nerd
second, this fountain is frozen