France, Take Two: Metro Adventures

Paris has proven to be a very small world. Yesterday, I had plans to meet my American friend Rachael at our favorite cafe (my friendship with Rachael is one of those "small world" moments too, because how often do you end up sitting next to someone on an airplane who has everything in common with you and who will also be staying in a foreign country for the exact same amount of time?). Anyway, she and I were coming from opposite directions, and I switched lines so that I could get on the 10, which is the stop closest to the cafe so that I could meet her. Small world moment number 1: The Paris Metro is made up of MANY metro lines, each of which has MANY trains that arrive one right after another every four minutes or so all day long, so it's really something when, two stops after I get on, Rachael gets on MY car and takes the seat directly facing me without even realizing that it's me whom she's about to sit down across from. So we were laughing about that for a while, when she introduced me to her new American friend Elizabeth, whom she had just met that morning at church. Small world moment number 2: After asking each other what part of the States we were each from, it turns out that of all the schools she could be a student at, Elizabeth is currently a PhD student at UCI, in the History department, so of course we've had a bunch of professors in common, and she evens knows one of my really good undergrad friends. UCI has 25,000 students, and the population of Paris is a bit bigger than UCI's , so HOW COOL IS THAT?

I'm constantly amazed by how wonderful Paris is, and I especially love knowing that it's a place where I'm bound to run into other foreigners who are here because they feel the same way.

And I've been busy exploring: