Weekend at Mont St-Michel

Over the weekend I got to go to Mont St-Michel and it was quite an experience!!! All of the exchange students from the Paris region got to go, and we are certainly an energetic group! We roughed the dangerous conditions and walked through the quicksand, the river that came up past our knees, and the winds - but it couldn't have been better! We spent about 3 hours walking but enjoyed ourselves the whole way.

After our journey, we had a traditional dinner of the region and got to listen to live traditional music.

The weekend was filled with fun and laughter... it's so great to be an exchange student. I'm still amazed at how lucky I am. I never could have seen myself doing all of these things, but here I am. Wow! Sometimes that's all I can think to say. There is no way for me to express everything that I am thinking, feeling, and absorbing here.

It's been a month and one week since I arrived, and some days it feels like I've been here an eternity, but usually I just can't believe how much I have done in such a short amount of time. I keep meeting great people, learning more and more French (and more and more slang), and starting to realize just how much has been placed before me. It's overwhelming and exhilerating at the same time. I sometimes look around at all of the people on the Métro and wonder what exactly they're doing in Paris. Studying, working, following a lover, escaping another life? But it essentially comes down to the same thing - we're all just living our lives and the rest doesn't really matter in the end. People here are the same as people anywhere else. There are, of course, the cultural differences, but in the end, none of us are really all that different. I love it, though. We're all doing the same thing, just taking our own route to get to the same place in the end. But, as I've always been told, "It's about the journey, not the destination."