In case you were wondering, freshman orientation parties are EXACTLY the same everywhere

...the only difference in France being, of course, that the alcohol is provided as part of the event, haha. Well, and the other difference being that the alcohol was actually rather classy. Clearly we were not at your average American freshmen party, seeing as that the wine of choice was real dessert wine, of both red and white varieties: porto and muscat. Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore.

But before we ever got to the party, we obviously had to pre-game. I started with the ever-so-girly French invention (beer purists beware), beer with a flavor syrup. This time around the flavor of choice was strawberry:


You can appreciate my drink's pinkness in comparison to all the others, here:


From there, we went over to the "new student" dance party, held in the gym of the school. Obviously. If we're going to pretend to be 18 again, where else could the party be???


Complete with the ridiculous stage thingy in the middle:


And by "ridiculous," of course I mean that I ended up there, hahaha. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First it all started with innocent hanging out in the gym, with Emily (from Oxford), Ben (from Princeton), and Niamh (also NYU):


This is one of my favorite pics from the evening:


Along with this one (the new addition on the right is Basia, from Warsaw, Poland):


But then things proceeded in their natural course and Mehammed (Columbia) and I ended up on that dopey stage...this is my real favorite pic from the evening, haha:


From there we joined up with Jason (Classics at Princeton):


As you can see, the expat contingent was kind of grouped together. We did indeed meet some nice French people, but again...they're very young. Friendly, but young. Plus we're nerds, we were actually talking about surrealist literature, Greek epic poetry, 19th century realist novels and the like at this thing. hahaha.