Day in the Life: Study Abroad Edition

Happy Thursday! I keep telling myself to keep track of a normal, non-travel day for you and forgetting halfway through. But yesterday, I remembered. As fun as the “fun” days are to report, I figured it couldn’t hurt to show you a regular day in the life while I’m studying abroad. It’s definitely different than any when I was in Chicago or even home over the summer. My whole schedule is flip-flopped and my days feel longer and more packed, but I’m mostly in a routine now that I’m 5 weeks in. Took long enough!

5:45am – Wake up. Tiiired. Woke up randomly around midnight and had a hard time going back to sleep so I didn’t have a great night.

6:13am – Get out of bed and brush my teeth and grab my Civ binder. Holy cow, there’s a lot of reading for tomorrow. Grab some grapes and dive into Kant. 

7:10am – I’ve finished two of my three Kant readings and I figure I’ll do the longest one during lunch. Most of us work while we eat. It makes it feel like real UChicago. 

7:25am – Respond to Facebook messages, Instagram DMs, and texts I got during the night. That’s what I get for being six hours ahead of everyone back home. 

7:31am – Get out of bed and stretch and do my hair and makeup. 

7:50am – Go microwave a sweet potato. Eat it with salmon for breakfast.

{Only meal of the day for which I had good lighting, and it’s still not a great picture. I was hungry.}

I’m still slightly hungry so I eat some ham afterward. Chill and read blogs till I need to leave. 

8:37am – Leave my room to go to class. Come straight back because I forgot my sunglasses. 

8:41am – Get outside and realize I totally don’t need my sunglasses. 

8:47am – Hit a grocery store because I realize i forgot my water bottle. Also get a Diet Coke. I tolerate coffee now, and maybe one day I’ll love it. Today is still for Diet Coke.

8:53am – Resume my trip and listening to EconTalk. It’s about David Hume, who I studied some my first year at UChicago, and Adam Smith, who I’ve studied at least a little every year at UChicago. Except this one, I think. Anyway, it was a great podcast. 

9:30am – Get to the UChicago Center in Paris. Chat with classmates and scroll Instagram and Twitter while I wait for class to start. 

9:47am – Class starts as quickly as ever. Our professor is the kind of guy who walked in on day one and started teaching without introducing himself. We aren’t 100% sure how to pronounce his name and no one quite knows how to address him, but I think we all agree he’s excellent as a professor. Today we’re talking all about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and social contract theory.

10:17am – Our professor asks us what the father gets in return for feeding his children. I basically quote the text, saying the satisfaction he feels from them loving him and him loving them. The professor comes back with, “Right, so essentially the father gets nothing, yes?” We all laugh. The point is that a father providing for a child works in a family setting because of that love and self-interest in the other party, but it doesn’t work so well in a king-subject scenario because the king gets pretty much nothing out of being selfless.

10:55am – We get a break. During said break we complain about the fact that we have class this Friday and debate the merits of pencils, pens, and mechanical pencils. Mechanical pencils win by a long shot. 

11:02am – Back to the grind. We talk about the role of religion in Rousseau’s ideal world. Basically, he wants the state to become religion. Eek.

{Ignore that this was taken on my bed. That’s where I read it. Not where class is.}

12:00pm – We somehow finish going over Rousseau early and get to leave. Maybe that’s to make up for having class on Friday. I debate what I’m doing for lunch and end up at the nearby Pret a Manger. I eat lunch on my own about half the time and with friends about half the time, about half from restaurants and half from stuff I packed. Also, yeah, I know there’s Pret a Manger in the US, but of the nearby cafe options, it has one of the better and more versatile selections. I eat chicken and broccoli soup and a little chocolate bar, scroll through social media, and listen to the British students sitting near me. Sounds like they had quite a weekend. Or a Tuesday – it’s not clear.

12:41pm – Decide I should try to finish tomorrow’s reading. Reluctantly open Kant. To be fair, I didn’t hate what I read this morning. Usually, I can sit at Pret without headphones. It’s not distracting to have people talking in French around me, since I can’t understand most of it, but since the British kids are there, I put in my headphones and try to tune in to what Kant’s talking about. Turns out, he was talking about peace and how to maintain it in the world. This is where he gets a little impractical, but I try to stick with it. 

1:08pm – My mom asks if it’s a good time to call. The six-hour time difference is a pain, y’all. I pack up my bag and head outside to talk. Chat about London and ThredUp (I’ve been waiting for months to send them my clothes but they are not accepting).

1:19pm – Hang up and walk back to the center to finish reading with friends. It turns into skimming. Whatever. Eat some turkey I packed in my bag because I’m a little hungry. Overhear a girl in our library assert that Chanel is more #basic than Hermès. Oooookay.

1:37pm – Text Susie because I loathe blog commenting on my phone and wanted to say hi after I read her post.

1:52pm – Call my dad to talk on his way to work. Chat about Kant and sports.

2:09pm – Get an email from the company I booked skydiving next weekend through saying that they raised the (already high) price by 90 euro. Um, no. Text my dad to ask what I should do, like a real adult.

2:15pm – French class. We have a quiz on ordering (at a bakery) and school supplies. And then we talk about (masculine, feminine, plural, definite, and indefinite) articles for an hour. 

3:17pm – Head to the tram to go back to the Cité. 

3:26pm – Get on the tram. Talk to fellow Civ classmates about our annoyance at class on Friday. I know, we sound ridiculous. However, we’ve had to make up three days in various ways over the span of two and a half weeks. First, all of our classes are 15 minutes longer than usual to make up for the fact that we have a 4-day weekend next week. Second, we had class last Friday to make up for the fact that last Wednesday was a national holiday that none of us celebrate. Third, we have class this Friday to make up for the fact that instead of assigning us an essay for the final, we have an in-class final and consequently can’t have class that day. None of those things are our fault. 😛

3:48pm – Arrive back in my room. Debate my plan for the evening. Decide I need to figure out skydiving. Also decide I’m cold and want soup, so I heat up butternut squash soup and assume that will get me through till after spinning. This theory is incorrect and the soup makes me want more food, and I go on to eat more grapes and more turkey. And a lot of Brussels sprouts I roasted this weekend. Welp, there’s a random dinner at 4:00.

While I eat, I search for better skydiving options and quickly find one that is cheaper than the original price of the one I was going to do. Not much cheaper, but still. And they didn’t randomly raise the price by like 25% because “it’s the low season”. I Facebook message the company just to make sure that they’ll do it as long as the weather is good (some companies have a minimum number of people they need to book to send a plane up). They say yes, so I email the other company back and ask for a refund. They say they’ll do that and they’re sorry. I book with the new company.

4:50pm – I start reading for Friday. There’s a lot of material and I’m really not sure when I’ll plow through all of it, since we’re busy for most of the afternoon and evening tomorrow. I don’t make it very far, anyway, but I know it was about the purpose and aims of the Third Estate in France, which I generally remember from high school. Good enough for now.

5:30pm – Change for spin. Bundle up. Be slightly concerned about whether I have appropriate Alps attire. Consider shopping this weekend.

5:41 pm – Leave. After two public transit issues in the last three days, I’m leaving too early, but I’m okay with it. Listen to The Federalist Radio Hour on taxes from Tuesday. I started it this morning and wasn’t paying attention, so I restart it. I like it more when I pay attention.

6:17pm – Get to Dynamo, put my stuff in a locker, and adjust my bike. Holy crap, it was so low. I’m not that tall, but whoever was on it had to be almost a foot shorter than me.

{This was taken outside. How is it so dark at 6:00pm?}

6:30pm – Class starts. It’s still a little bit of a challenge to follow everything in French, but I do alright. I know what “left” and “right” are, and I can just watch what other people are doing for anything else.

7:15 pm – Class ends. Everyone claps at the end of cycling classes here. Is that common? They don’t do that at CycleBar. I head back to the metro, get off at the next station, and head to Marks & Spencer in the station. I like cottage cheese and nowhere else sells it. Also, they have good fruit. I grab cottage cheese, fruit, and some pre-cooked chicken (I need to find some time to cook the fresh chicken I just bought…), and head to the checkout. The credit card machine is a mess, and I wait for them to try to fix it for a while, but then I concede and pay cash. Which means I should probably get more cash, because that kind of thing happens way too often here. I love credit cards.

7:48pm – It’s late and I waited too long for them to try to fix the machine. Whatever. I hop on the RER back to the Cité and start typing this up on my phone.

7:58pm – I get back to the Cité station and dodge a bus and a tram with several other people. I’m still alive, no worries.

8:05pm – Hop in the shower.

8:15pm – Get out and remember to put away my groceries. Eat a container of cottage cheese, some of my on-sale berries and grapes (I’m weirdly obsessed with grapes right now), and some dried apricots. Oh, and some of this insane Paleo granola I got in London. I never want it to end. Write and format this.

10:09pm – Bed. I love bed. I mean, I hate this bed because it’s tiny and not comfortable, but I love the idea of bed.

11ish – Actually fall asleep. It doesn’t usually take so long, but sleep is harder when you’re a little sniffly.

Your turn:

Pens, pencils, or mechanical pencils?

What foods are you loving lately? Cottage cheese, soup, grapes, chicken, and sweet potatoes. And always chocolate.