Mon Début

Ok.  I'm a little new at this blogging thing so you'll have to bare with me.  Sure, I've written in many a journal and scribbled thoughts on scraps of paper, but I've never publicly aired by thoughts for everyone to read.  In fact, I don't even know if I'll stick with this thing and it's only Day 1.  You see, I've started many many journals and diaries but I've never really stuck with them.  I wrote in one journal for about a solid month 2 summers ago.  It was impressive at the time, but looking back on it it is quite boring considering that the only reason I wrote in that notebook at the time was because I was bored out of my mind working at a temp job that barely required any brain waves to complete.  But, I digress....
Here's the deal:  I'm in Paris, France (duh) for all of June and the first week of July.  Four of those weeks will be spent taking classes at La Sorbonne and the last week will be spent traversing through the rest of France with Mom and Kristie (hooray!).
Today is only my second day in Paris, even though it feels like forever with the time changes and the plane flight.  I'm pretty sure that being awake for almost 30 hours will do that to you.
My trip here was....dramatic.  I was scheduled to leave Norfolk at 2:35 PM and arrive in JFK at 4 PM, allowing me a one hour lay over before my flight to Paris at 5 PM and of course that did not happen.  My fight was almost an hour late because of an undisclosed problem.  The plane wasn't actually at the gate until our scheduled departure time and then with cleaning and the wonderful chattiness of our flight attendant we didn't leave for another 45 minutes.  She was talking about everything but mainly just herself.  She was a former Seattle SeaHawks cheerleader, her daughter thinks she has the best job in the world (maybe, but her performance on the job is definitely in question), and she had the most comfortable three-inch heals on from Nine West.  Definitely unnecessary conversations while I was freaking out about making my connecting flight in JFK.  Who even knew when the next flight to Paris was?  Well, thankfully our flight made record time to New York, however, Fate was still having fun torturing me.  Basically, everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.  Once we landed in JFK with 25 minutes before my next flight left, we sat on the runway because there weren't any gates open.  It was at this point that I almost yelled out to the captain, "Oh yeah, I know a flight that's leaving soon, MINE", but thankfully I refrained.  Another outburst almost occurred when once we pulled into the first open gate no one came down to bring the bridge to the plane.  They had forgotten about us and I was stuck on a hot airplane with the annoying flight attendant.  This was for about 10 minutes.  I kept checking my watch and gaping at how quickly time was melting away.  As soon as the cabin door was open I bolted to the bridge snatched my carry-on in a flash and was bolting up the world's longest bridge to the terminal of the airport, but when I reached my gate for AA44 to Paris no one was there.  I then proceeded to stand there in front of the empty gate awkwardly crying because I was so out of breath from the physical exertion.  I had been so close and had just missed it.  My watch said that it was 5 o'clock exactly.
Thank my lucky stars that two airport workers were walking by at that moment and took pity on me.  One of them ran into the closed doors at the gate and came back momentarily telling me to run because the plane hadn't left yet.  I again bolted down another bridge to only squeeze into the cabin door as they were closing it.  I had made it!  I fumbled to my seat and settled down for my long 7 hour flight.  And so begins my great Parisian adventure!!