Leht's Goh. Leht's Goh!

Hannah et Moi- Starting our year of adventures in Paris!

Bonjour, tout le monde!  (Hello everyone for you anglophones)


I am writing from Hotel Ermitage en France!  I'm in Paris, to be exact.  Just a really quick briefing for those of you who haven't been following my activities... I'll be spending the next seven and a half months in France, working as an "Assistant Etrangere d'Anglais."  I'll be teaching English at a high school, working with students between the ages of 16 and 19 years old, most likely in conversational groups.  My good friend Hannah is also an assistant and will be working with little kids (6-11) in Marseille.  Side note:  to see how adorable little French kids are, you should check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM35grvNkss because she makes me smile even on a bad day.  I'm going to have a hard time not stealing a French baby to bring back to the states!

An Icelandic Lullaby that was on our pillows

Anyway, Hannah and I left the Minneapolis airport at 7pm on Saturday, flew to Reykjavik, Iceland, where we had a (very) brief layover and then boarded a different plane to fly to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.  From there, we went to go get our bags and sent off a couple of quick emails to let our parents know that we had arrived safely :) and then moved on to go get a taxi.  Our taxi driver was quite the character, to say the least!  He's the origin of the blog title... he spoke very little English, but was excited to try it out for us, and his favorite phrase was "Leht's Goh.  Let's Goh!" which he probably said to us 20+ times during our trip.  He took us on a bit of a roundabout trip and we eventually arrived at our hotel, which is in the 20th arrondissement.  (Paris is broken down into arrondissements... kind of like neighborhoods... I'm not sure exactly how!)

La lumiere... triste.

We unloaded our things into our hotel room, which is tiny tiny tiny tiny.  To put things in perspective: when I stand in the bathroom, I can touch both walls at the same time... in the "long" direction.  The short direction is maaaybe 2.5 feet?  Just enough room for the toilet.  When brushing my teeth, the door has to be open because my rear end sticks out the door :)  And the shower?  Don't even get me started.  Hannah's theory on why the French women don't always shave their legs is because they can't reach them, since you barely fit in the shower standing straight up.  Our towels are hand towels- just large enough to cover the essentials ;)  We also have a "suicide balcony" named because... it'd be easy to trip on the ledge and it's a very long fall (though there is a gnome at the bottom that Hannah thinks might save us...), a TV with six stations (three French and three German), two lights that are literally falling off of the wall, and one plugin.  But it's clean and very cheap and very French and we love that we're here!


It's late where we are (seven hours ahead of Madison/Central Time Zone), so I'm going to post this and head to bed.  Updates from our marathon day and hopefully picture posting tomorrow!

Je t'aime.