"In many ways, walking through the streets of the city felt like constantly meandering through a museum."
During my time studying abroad in Paris, I enjoyed a feeling of freedom and discovery that I had previously only felt through reading books. In many ways, walking through the streets of the city felt like constantly meandering through a museum.
In my Art Humanities class, I was able to visit the Sainte-Chapelle. Being there, in that nearly eight hundred year old place of worship with people and tourists from all over the world, reminded me of art’s power to unify and my own appreciation of humanity’s tendency to gather in places and feel a collective sense of awe.
On the days I did not have class, the city stretched out before me as if it were daring me not to find something interesting. I explored crêperies and bookstores with new friends. I paid less than three euro to take a train into a medieval French village that looked like something out of Beauty and the Beast. I read a collection of short stories in the park and watched the Eiffel Tower light up while listening to Billie Holiday. I watched a French film in a Parisian cinema. I visited the Musée de l’Orangerie for free with my student card and felt incomprehensibly small as I saw Claude Monet’s famous water lilies with my very own eyes.
As an aspiring writer, I was thrilled to visit a city that was home to some of the most influential writers in history. Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin. I had hoped that being in such a literary place would inspire my own writing, and it did. Being in a place of so much possibility and experience and memory made me realize that writing is my way of leaving something in my wake. It may not be a Gothic church or a monument or even be read by anyone else, but it is a piece of me living outside my body, and for that I can be proud.
My France and the African Diaspora class was an amazing part of the study abroad experience. Before the class, I had not known much of France’s history. In this class, I learned that, yes, France can be a place of opportunity and beauty, but it also has a flawed, complex history. One that should be discussed and remembered as it affects the current living, breathing city I had the pleasure of visiting for over a month.
Before the Global Learning Scholarship, Paris was a place of dreams. Not just because of how beautiful and romantic the city seemed but because of how far out of reach it was to me. Far away across the sea in Europe, a continent I had never stepped foot on. Châteaux and pâtisseries and a sparkling midnight Eiffel Tower were only accessible to me through Pinterest boards. Now that I have been there myself, Paris still feels like a place of dreams, but it is also a very real, incredibly cherished memory
