J-1

    J-1......month. This is how much time I have left until I get back to Paris for winter break. I'm not counting the days, but as my come back appraoches, I'm longing more and more to come back to the city where I was born, a city of love, a city of desir, a city of vices. It's a normal feeling, I'm sure you all experienced it at one point or another.
    I didn't talk a lot of my experience of living in a new country with another culture. Obviously there are several issues there. I wouldn't say that my experience is a bad experience, I absolutely don't regret coming here, it made me think a lot obout myself and about things that I always thought were normal or natural. But I won't say that it changed me completely, actually it hasn't changed me much I just know myself better.
    I would say that the main issue of my coming here is the fact that I always lived in Paris, which is a big city, whereas here I am living on a campus that is several miles from a rather small city. The problem is that I miss a point of comparison from the same living environment back in France, which prevent me of really appreciate the differencies between the two culture. Leaving in a big city like New York city, San Fransisco or Los Angeles would permit me to fully appreaciate these differencies. However what I did learn by living here is that I would much rather live in a big city than in a city like Lansing, or smaller. It is for those two reasons that I would like to find a internship in a big city for next summer, I'm so exited by the idea of living in New York during the summer! And of course you will all be invited to come and visit me!
    Back to my experience, another problem is that I don't have a car here. The fact that I'm not in a big city increases the fact that everything is so far apart in the US. So if I want to go to a movie, I can only access one movie theater by bus, where they play only 3-4 movies. I can't access the bigger movie theaters where more movies that I would like to see are playing. It's the same with bars and restaurant. However I must admit that the bus network is pretty efficient if you want to move around the campus (you can walk but it takes a lot longer) and to certain specific areas (like the mall and the  supermarket). 
    Another issue is that I may be on a campus of 45,000 students, but I live in the graduate and international students dorm. That means that most of my neighbors are Asian who would not even answer my cheerful but insure "hello!"(pronounce it "Ello!"). Moreover, in my classes, most of the students are in fact internationnal students, it seems like American don't really like graduate studies. I can understand that when I see the price of studies here. An American told me that he hunged his bachelor diploma (it corresponds to 4 years of study after high school) because it was worth 180,000$. You don't need to buy paintings, just buy diplomas!
    The fact that we are a group of 10 french coming from the same school doesn't help either to go and try to make new friends. The easy way is too stick together, and althought I tried not to do that in the beginning, it's not easy when you always have to make the first move to know people and call them times and times again to stay in contact. It happened to me with a couple of americans, I don't know if I just fell on the bad persons, or if it's the way americans are, but at a certain point you just give up, and take the easy way.
    Well after all that you must feel that I'm having a really bad time here... That's not the case. I'm rather negative here, but as I said, it made me discover more about myself, and I still think that it's a great experience and that everybody should try it at least once in his life. Well I'm still here for at least one year, and I'm glad that I'll have the chance to discover more about myself and americans. Plus I always find ways to entertain myself...
    In conclusion, I'm coming back to Paris for three weeks, be ready to partyyyyyyyyyyyy! Here wii go!