From Little Swan to Busy Bee

Something that people always warn you about when going abroad is that you probably won’t have much time for yourself to sleep, workout, keep in touch with people, … and, of course, update your blog. Between my classes during the week and traveling every weekend, I regret that I have not had the “me time” that I would like. Here’s what a typical week looks like for an abroad student:

Monday: Classes start up again. Thankfully for me, my first class isn’t until 3:30 pm on Mondays. This gives me some time to catch up on sleep from the weekend and grocery shop for the week. Mondays also include scrambling to complete all of the homework that I didn’t do over the weekend due to traveling. It’s also time to start thinking about travel plans for the next weekend….

Tuesday: My longest day of classes. I start at 11:00 am and go until 6:30 pm.

Wednesday: Only one class today at 12:30 pm, but it’s time to start really thinking about plans for the weekend. Transportation and lodging must be booked by now. I need to start packing and/or doing laundry. Not to mention, the majority of my homework is due on Thursdays, so I’m trying to finish that.

Thursday: Another long day of classes from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. After classes, I’m either packing for the weekend or already off to my weekend destination.

Friday – Sunday: Traveling, site-seeing, walking, eating delicious food and… not sleeping.

Now, I’m not complaining. This little swan loves being a busy bee. However, many things fall through the cracks, namely this blog. I’m going to start working a lot harder to update this blog as quickly as I can… stay tuned for lots of posts! I dated all of them correctly, so they will appear earlier than this post on my blog 🙂

Epernay, France

Did you know that champagne can only be called champagne if it is from the Champagne region of France? Well, I decided I had to taste some of this real champagne, instead of “sparkling wine” like I have had in the states. Thus, my friends and I decided to go taste the stars, also known as champagne tasting.

Since it technically is the off-season for traveling, many of the champagne cellars in Epernay, France were closed for construction or refurbishment to open up again in 2015. We very quickly figured out why not many people travel to go wine tasting during this time of the year. I’m almost positive the weather was around 40 ºF and raining. My girl friend and I decided to wear dresses and sandals because we wanted to look all classy for the champagne tasting experience… that ended up being a terrible decision. I was so cold and my feet were basically numb walking from the train station to champagne cellar. You can’t tell from the picture below, but it was actually raining when we took this picture.

Smiling through the pain 🙂

Our group was so relieved when we finally made it to Champagne Mercier, the French winery where we did our cellar tour and champagne tasting. This winery was the original rights owner to the name Dom Perignon but gave the brand to a different French winery in the 1900s. It is also the best-selling champagne in France! Champagne Mercier first became popular by making the world’s largest wine barrel, filling it with champagne equaling 200,000 bottles, and taking it to Paris for the World Fair. This was the same year that the Eiffel Tower was showcased. Many say that it was overshadowed by only the Eiffel Tower.

In front of the huge barrel!

View of the barrel from the back

We were lucky enough to take a tour of the champagne cellars in the winery. We watched a short video about the winery and then went down into the cellars for our cellar tour. These cellars cover over 18 kilometers long and 30 meters below ground. We took a train around all of the cellars and got to learn more about how champagne is made and aged.

Champagne Mercier!

Dom Perignon on the wall

After the cellar tour, we got to the fun part: champagne tasting. My friends and I got to taste both the Brut and the Rosé. They were both quite delicious, although I think I preferred the Brut.

The Brut!

The Rosé!

Feeling classy with our champagne flutes

I had a fantastic time wine tasting in France and would love to come back and do it when I’m older and can enjoy it with some sunshine!

PARIS, FRANCE

Paris, Je t’aime.

My first glimpse of Le Tour Eiffel!

I had the wonderful opportunity to spend the weekend in Paris with my grandparents!! Before I ever made the decision to study abroad, they happened to have reserved a cruise through France that ended in Paris. Being only a little over an hour outside of Paris, it was so easy to go and see them. Plus, who wouldn’t want to go to Paris?

Being a typical tourist with Le Louvre 🙂

I spent Saturday afternoon exploring Paris on my own, checking out the Le Tour Eiffel and Le Louvre. My grandparents already had a tour of Versailles scheduled. However, I got to meet up with them that evening. It was just my birthday, so they came bearing gifts of wine from the Burgundy region of France (Shh.. don’t tell my parents 😉 and chocolate. We had a lovely dinner where I got to try escargot for the first time! Unfortunately, my phone had died and I forgot my camera, so I don’t have any pictures to show for it. After dinner, we walked back to their hotel past the Seine river and saw the Eiffel Tower light up at night… so sparkly!

Sparklyyy

On Sunday, we went to Le Louvre. That place is huge!! I think there are over 100 rooms on each floor and 5 floors in total. I heard some statistic that it would take you days to see everything in the entire museum. Of course, we saw the Mona Lisa, but only after pushing our way through lots and lots of tourists. I took a picture of the tourists for fun. Afterwards, we went to go see La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris (The Notre Dame Cathedral): very big and very old! Finally, we went on a riverboat tour of La Seine. We got very luck that it didn’t rain while we were on the boat. It had been on-and-off raining all day. It was nice to sit down and see all of the sites.

My grandparents and me in front of Le Louvre

La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

I had a wonderful weekend in Paris and was so lucky to have been able to spend it with my grandparents. I had no idea that they had never been to France or Paris before that trip. I felt so honored to be able to join them for that! I will be back to Paris soon.

Fête de la Mirabelle

After a long day of traveling on Friday, I decided to “take it easy” on Saturday. My original plan had been to travel to Strasbourg for another day trip, but the thought of a 1.5 hour train ride and lots of walking did not seem fun. Instead, I decided to go into downtown Metz for the finale of the Fête de la Mirabelle. This is a two-week festival celebrating a small plum, called the Mirabelle. The festival votes on a queen and princes. It includes a carnival, parades, markets and performances.

Mirabelle Market

This Saturday we went to the open-air market. There were over 100 vendors selling all sorts of things! There were lots of stations selling crafts, jewelery, porcelain, pottery and embroidery. However, my personal favorite part were all of the food vendors. There was all the French food that one could ever hope for: baguettes, cheese, macaroons, sausage, crepes, waffles, chocolate, pastries, wine, liquor and beer! Needless to say, I didn’t eat very much before coming to the market. I did some cheese tasting, liquor tasting (who knew that was a thing?), Mirabelle pound cake tasting… and many more! I also ended up buying a couple of things to try with my friends. We had Mirabelle macaroons, Mirabelle pie and Mirabelle beer. It was all so delicious.

We then went next door to the market to a children’s carnival. It looked like so much fun! There were so many bouncy houses, slides, and small rides. There was even a Merry-Go-Round with Dumbo on it! We wanted to go on the rides but figured that we were too big and were too afraid to try and ask the workers in French. Yet another reason why I need to learn French ASAP. Did I mention that I accidentally ate baking soda instead of sugar the other day because I couldn’t read the label? Yeah, that happened…

L’Americain

After the market, We walked around downtown Metz for a while. It is so much more fun when there are actually people there. We did some more window shopping and went into a French chocolate store. It was very hard to resist all of the delicious looking chocolate. Then we had dinner at this Kebab place called Snack. Yep, it has no official name, just Snack. It also seems like Kebab places are everywhere in Europe! I had Kebabs when I was in Luxembourg, so I didn’t really want to eat Kebabs again. Instead, I ordered “L’Americain”, which is basically just a cheeseburger and fries. It was only 5€!! Unheard of!!

Finally, we went to the Le Grand Soir de la Mirablle (The big night!!). There was a live electo/pop/rock concert, acrobatic performance by Voála Project and fireworks!! It was all so cool. The music was also all in American, which I thought was very funny. It seems as though all of the French people like to listen to English music even though they don’t know what the words are saying. For example, One Direction was playing in the grocery store when I went the other day. I obviously wasn’t complaining.

I’m also pretty sure there are no regulations or restrictions for fireworks in France. I was scared for my life on a couple of different occasions. There were fireworks shooting off from behind the stage AND on the sides of the crowds. First of all, I could feel ash falling on my face during the performance. It also smelled like a million matches were just blown out. I have never been able to smell fireworks before because I don’t think I’ve ever been that close to the launch point before. As we were leaving a little early, the finale fireworks went off, so we stopped to watch them in the parking lot. I kid you not when I say some red fireworks dropped and hit the ground maybe 50 feet away from me. Some people were even standing about 15 feet away from where they bounced and dropped and didn’t even seem phased. It was quite confusing.

The acrobats were pretty! They were all harnessed into the cables hanging from a structure on the crane. They performed some pretty cool stunts with un-clipping and re-clipping their cables in different formations. They also threw confetti and streamers. However, after seeing the Cirque du Soleil, this all seemed pretty safe to me. I was able to take a lot of really cool pictures:

Fireworks and confetti!

Love this photo with the crowd

Right over my head 😮

All in all, it was a really awesome performance and very fun to see in my own little French backyard!

Exploring Downtown Metz

On our first day in Metz, GTL bussed us into downtown Metz so that we could explore the city that we will be living in for the next 4 months. Downtown Metz is so beautiful, especially compared the suburb life in Metz Technopôle, where GTL is located. The first pictures were taken at Cathédrale Saint-Étienne, a Roman catholic cathedral named after Saint Stephen. It has the largest expanse of stained glass in the world! Who knew that such a world renowned landmark was in my no-name French city.

Cathédrale Saint-Étienne

Cathédrale Saint-Étienne

Cathédrale Saint-Étienne Crucifix

Some of the stained glass in Cathédrale Saint-Étienne

Michel Ney statue

Les Mis

I love the buildings here!

“Take the time otherwise it will take you”

Hidden Carousels

Le Temple Protestant

Traveling to Metz

I’m pretty sure everything that could have gone wrong with my travel, did go wrong. My original plan was to travel from San Francisco to Chicago to London to Luxembourg and then catch a free shuttle provided by GTL to get to Metz. Most of that did not even happen (thanks American Airlines and British Airways).

First of all, my first flight to Chicago was delayed by about 40 minutes to the point where I was worried about making my flight to London. Thankfully, I found out the flight to London was delayed by 45 minutes giving me the time to make that next flight. In the end my flight to London ended up being delayed by about 2 hours, so I was pretty sure I was going to miss my last flight to Luxembourg. Thankfully, I was able to meet up with 3 other GTL students who were on my last 2 flights, so I didn’t have to go through this travel misery on my own.

On a happier note, the person next to me on my flight overseas never showed up! I was so happy to have an aisle seat and a free seat next to me! So happy that I took a selfie 🙂

As expected, my delayed flight to London caused me to miss my flight to Luxembourg. When I got off the plane, the travel assistants told me that the next flight to Luxembourg was full and they would have to put me in a hotel overnight in London and fly me out the next morning. Unfortunately, I needed to be in Metz that night to check into my dorm and attend orientation and classes the next day. The only solution was to re-route to Paris, take the TGV from the airport to Lorainne and then a shuttle to Metz and a taxi to GTL campus. So… that’s what we did! The whole process took about 8 extra hours. Yay for over 24 hours of traveling!

After finally arriving to the Paris CDG airport, I was so happy and relieved!! … Until my two checked bags never showed up. Apparently, the airline messed up my re-routing and thought my final destination was still Luxembourg so they sent my bags to Luxembourg on the flight that I wasn’t allowed on. Getting on the TGV was another endeavor to go through. The TGV is much different than the Caltrain haha. You actually have an assigned seat in an assigned section. In this case, I was so excited to not to have to carry around my luggage. The scenery of the French countryside was the light at the end of the tunnel after a long day of traveling:

On the TGV from Paris to Lorraine

After getting to Lorraine, we took a shuttle to the Metz train station and then a taxi to our GTL dorm. This was a little more challenging since none of the employees spoke English, but we made it!! Shout out to GTL for having pizza waiting for us.

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Current Motto: “Keep calm and make it to Metz.”