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Back to school shopping... |
For many French students, the rentrée is upon us, the return from a month of sun-soaked beaches and exotic getaways. Instead of suntan lotion and salt water, the nostalgia-inducing smell of freshly sharpened pencils and new erasers fills the air as school kids trade in their teenybopper magazines for textbooks and Victor Hugo.
Freakishly, my program at the Sorbonne doesn’t start until October, so I get another month of Tiger Beat, but I can still sense the back-to-school mayhem. It’s a snap back into reality that, “Hey, Bryan, you’re a student, too.” Gone is my summer of traipsing around Italy and picnicking in the Butte Chaumont. Fortunately, the student life isn’t all bad in Paris. I’ve realized that I’ve adopted a few habits that, at my age, can only be justified by having a student ID card. Being a student can erase all sorts of sins – sins that I’m in no rush to have forgiven.
For example, only as a student can I justify drinking wine out of mugs and water out of old juice bottles. Normal adults, at my age, with their jobs and incomes usually invest in wine glasses and water goblets. I have some wine glasses, with the Ikea price stickers still attached. I’m in no rush to use (read: break) them. And water glasses in Paris are always so tiny, so I opt for the liter glass bottle that once contained orange juice. Not only is it good for the environment to reuse it, but it’s keeping my kidney’s working fulltime. Don’t get lazy on me, guys.