I am a Ph.D. student spending the year in Paris to work on my dissertation. I set up this blog to communicate with the folks back home, so you can check in and read about what I'm doing without actually having to send me an email and ask me.

The first entry is about my flight to Paris:

Monday, September 25: Arrival in Paris at 8:30 AM, after a bumpy flight during which I got very little sleep. I was in the very last row, on the aisle, sitting next to another student who had purchased a ticket through STA Travel. The last row was good because we were close to the lavatory, but we had to listen to this one flight attendant’s constant complaining about how she was on probation. I never could figure out why she was on probation, but it sounded like the easiest way to land on probation was to be late for work. We also ended up having to wait for our meals. I chose the beef, but the pasta looked like a much better choice. My seatmate, a recent graduate of Truman State College in Missouri, was on his way to Strasbourg where he is going to spend the year teaching English. I hope he has fun. I told him my story about going to English class at a middle school in Brittany when I studied in Angers ten years ago. Maybe you don’t know this story. I was talking to this group of three 12-year-old French girls, and the first thing they asked me was, “Do you know any drag queens?” When I was 19, I did not know any drag queens. The girls were very disappointed, but they proceeded to show me what appeared to be drag queen trading cards. In telling the story to my seatmate, I theorized that the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert had probably come out just before I went to France in 1995-1996. According to imdb.com, my theory was correct. But it was still kind of bizarre, because why were 12-year-old French girls collecting drag queen trading cards? Were they even allowed to watch that movie? Later that day, I led the school assembly in singing “Imagine,” and my fellow Americans joined in for the Notre Dame Victory March. It was all very surreal. Anyway, my seatmate was a little bit freaked out by the story of the drag queen trading cards. While I expect there are some drag queens in Missouri, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know any of them.

I watched The Family Stone as my main in-flight movie. We had individual video screens and could choose from seven channels. For a while I watched the French language programming, which was about Senegal. There was a woman who talked about Senegalese identity being part French, part religious, and part something specifically Senegalese. It made me think of Emily and cultural intelligibility. Another in-flight movie option was Poseidon, which the woman in front of me chose to watch. I wasn’t really interested in watching a disaster movie about a boat while flying in a plane. (Of course, I did watch Speed on a moving bus once, which definitely made it much more exciting.) But when they restarted the movies, I watched a few minutes of the beginning of Poseidon. The dialogue was terrible, but not quite bad enough to be campy. And Stacy Ferguson (Fergie of the Black-Eyed Peas, formerly of Kids Incorporated and Wild Orchid) sang something that was not “The Morning After,” at which point I was done with Poseidon.

The rest of the flight was fairly uneventful. When we landed, I just waited for everyone else to leave, because I was in the last row. That was actually kind of nice, because I didn’t feel any rush to get off the plane. I showed my passport to a policeman, who stamped it and sent me on my way to baggage claim. I had so much luggage. And it was so heavy. But there are free carts in Charles de Gaulle, so that was cool. I paid an obscene amount of money for a taxi to my new apartment. The driver said that it was unusual for an American to speak French at all, let alone as well as I did. I’m sure he said it just so I would give him a nice tip. It worked.

When I got to the building there was a number keypad on the front door, and no buzzers. Laura had not warned me about this. So I waited outside for a few minutes and thought about just yelling “Laura.” But then some guy came out of the building and held the door for me. I dragged my luggage in and eventually got up to the “première étage,” which means first floor but really means second floor because the French start numbering the floors with 0. This is one fabulous apartment...

I think I will end there for now and try to post this. More later…