It’s my one-month anniversary of living in Paris!

Things I’ve gotten used to:

• Not having a job
• Becoming the least-traveled, least-cultured person in any given situation
• Watching movies in English with French subtitles
• Using the pedestrian crosswalks bravely, ie: walking out into traffic, 99.9% sure that they’ll stop (they always do!)
• Staying up until 4am every day
• Eating fresh-baked bread and going food shopping several times a week
• Thinking in Euros rather than USD
• Making my own coffee every day instead of buying to-go
• Living in a small apartment (28 sq meters at most) with my boyfriend
• Hearing French all the time, looking at advertisements in French, etc.
• Heating up water in a kettle
• Drinking unfiltered tap water
• Seeing boobs on TV and magazine coversThings I haven’t gotten used to:
• The fact that this is really my life
• What day of the week it is on any given day
• Not having 90% of my shoe collection here
• The fact that the Paris streets are really, really, really not a grid at all. At all.
• The metric system
• Not having a good computer desk/table (we keep promising to fix that)

Things I haven’t done in (at least) a month:

• Eat a burrito (or anything mexican-ish)
• Use my debit card to pay for a purchase in-person
• Lift weights
• Ride a bike
• Buy beer to keep at home (just wine)

Things I’ve done that I’m very happy about:

• Had a few interactions in French that actually worked
• Figured out my way home after the last metro closed (I had only been here a little over a week!)
• Jogged outside on a regular basis
• Figured out how to bypass a big section of the lines at the Louvre
• Made a lot of incredible new friends
• Had language exchange meetings (and more are lined up!)

Things we’ve figured out together, of which I’m oddly proud:

• How to use a french laundromat (who knew it would be so different?)
• How to take the RER line out of Paris into the suburbs
• How to use the pocket streetmap books to navigate ourselves
• How to weigh and tag produce ourselves using the machine at the grocery store

Things I’ve outright failed to figure out, of which I’m very ashamed:

• How to set up my voice mail on my cell phone
• How to use the weird oven-like appliance that everyone swears works like a real oven
• How to send money to someone’s bank account through the post office (thanks, Mom)