After a week of running around Paris and trying to cram every last hour of my vacation with new sights, I’m ready to start the school year. It feels strange to have registered for spring classes at Penn State before I’ve even started my fall program, but so it goes (also, midnight scheduling in State College means its now 6am here). 

I moved into my apartment in Montparnasse yesterday. It’s much larger than I expected, with cute courtyards, two desks, a sizable bathroom, and a cute little kitchen. I’ve posted a few pictures, along with photos from last week, on Facebook. My apartment building houses a few IES students, but it’s mostly filled with Parisians. While I’m missing out on the benefits of a homestay and having a roommate, I’m excited to try out this new level of independence. I’ve also heard that many homestays here are not as culturally fulfilling as students would hope – the stories I’ve heard largely make them sound like simple business transactions between a renter and landlord. While this is by no means a generalization, I’m kind of glad to avoid a situation like that (and I like the freedom of cooking for myself and staying up at odd hours).

A few days ago I went to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, near Notre Dame. Besides being a famous English-language store and a haven for expats and hopeful writers, it’s an important site for literary history. In the 1920s it was owned by Sylvia Beach, who was in large part responsible for the first publishing of James Joyce’s Ulysses. She arranged for its publication in France because many companies in the UK and the US wouldn’t print it for fear of obscenity charges. And there were quite a few court cases against it later. But Shakespeare and Company is an amazing place to see – it’s small and unassuming, literally stuffed and bursting with books in shelves from the floors to the ceiling. If you go upstairs, you can see the small spaces where writers and students come to read, create, and sleep – typewriters nestled among stacks of books, small cots tucked in dusty corners. It was beautiful. They also hold workshops for all kinds of writing, so I would love to attend a few this fall (although I’ll be hugely intimidated). It might give me some things to write about for my poetry blog for IES.

I also sought out the Cafe de Flore, a small place in the Latin Quarter on Boulevard St. Germain where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would hang out and write. Sartre actually wrote much of Being and Nothingness there. I didn’t sit down to have a coffee, because it seemed to be playing host to a different clientele (of businessmen) at the time. Maybe I’ll go back, once this city feels a little more like home and a little less unreal.

Location: 119 Boulevard Brune, Paris, France