Cory Goldman, NU in Paris, Fall 2014
In just two shorts weeks, I’ll be boarding a plane from the city of love to the city of brotherly love, as I leave Paris and fly to Philadelphia to catch a connecting flight back to my home in Tampa. I truly can not comprehend that this program is coming to a close, and that I’ll be back to speaking English, having ice in my drinks, and seeing my family so soon.
It feels like just a few days ago that I was driving past the Eiffel Tower for the first time as I arrived in Paris via a cab from the airport. I’ve changed so much since then. I was once perpetually lost in a confusing city, unable to ask for directions because I didn’t speak the language, eating vending machine food for lunch every day because I was too nervous to walk into a boulangerie, and trying to visit every tourist destination just to say that I had.
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point over the past few months I started to feel comfortable. I stopped worrying about my terrible French skills, I started walking into bakeries and ordering without thinking twice, and suddenly I knew exactly how to navigate the metro to get to any two points in the city. The Louvre stopped being The Louvre and started being a traffic jam on the way home from class, fresh croissants stopped being a delicacy and became just a normal part of my diet, and the winding streets of Paris seemed to unwind before me. Now that I’m faced with the reality of going home, I’m coming to the realization that Paris feels just as much like home as anywhere else does.
A picture I took at the top of the Notre Dame looking out over Paris