I remember when I was a kid, my mother and I were driving down Highway 101 through San Francisco. I watched the houses slide by. After living in small towns most of my life it seemed pretty exciting to see those double story, candy-colored houses all smooshed together. I told my mom that I would live there someday. Well, a good ten years later or so I did end up in San Francisco and had a great time of it for about seven years.

So, I did that. What next? Recently I’ve had the good fortune to travel to Europe a couple times and became pretty addicted to the excitement of foreign languages, exotic food and strange nightclubs where they play music light years better than American clubs. So, when I learned that Foothill/De Anza offers a trip to Paris in spring, I called my mom up in Colorado and I said, “I’m going to Pairs.”

Of course, it’s never as easy as that. With a little over a $4,000 price tag, the trip was anything but certain at first. How could I manage to get that much money together living here of all places? In Inflation Valley? I had to hold on to a full time school schedule, hold on to my apartment, hold on to a job and last, but not least, hold on to my sanity

I managed it all in bits and pieces, with the help of friends and family, my brief employment at the coffee shop in the Campus Center, and especially Cindy Castillo and others in the financial aid center like Debbie and Hector, whose last names I never learned. They helped me wade through the piles of paperwork that inevitably come when you want to get money out of institutions.

Now, a couple thousand dollars in debt and happy about it, I’m about a week away from my plane flight and staring at a pile of dirty laundry, a messy room and an empty suitcase. Let’s hear it for procrastination!

Well, it’s not like I’ve had all the time in the world since the beginning of the quarter to pack. Art Turmelle and John Swensson, the instructors who plan this Paris study abroad program have been keeping us busy with class meetings and travel orientations before we leave. Students are required to keep a load of 12 units while overseas and, just like any class, those units begin at the start of the quarter.

Don’t think you have to know French in order to take the classes offered in Paris, either. Most of those going seem to speak little to know French and are simply interested in the kind of experience you can only get by studying in a foreign country. Some students are taking English literature and writing classes in order to fill GE requirements. Others, like me, are trying to immerse themselves in a foreign language. I’ve signed up for French 3 and French 13A, a conversation class, plus a Humanities 1A class.

Classes have met at Foothill’s Middlefield Campus in Palo Alto and at the main Foothill Campus in Los Altos. If you ever need to get to the Middlefield Campus and don’t drive, I would say give yourself a couple hours to get there. It’s located at 4000 Middlefield around the corner from San Antonio.The buses are annoyingly slow and the connection at San Antonio Shopping Center is spotty at best. Besides traditional classes on Middlefield, we’ve had two meeting at Foothill. Neither were mandatory, but were intended to give us an idea of French culture.

The first, an hour-long study on the French influence on classical music was taught by Elizabeth Barkley. This woman is a great teacher. Hands down she is one of the most animated, funny, energetic and talented instructors I’ve been in class with. Even when she suddenly put the microphone in my face, making all the German composers I’d ever heard of flee my paralyzed mind, I could forgive her because she obviously has passion for music that carries into everything she does. When she sat at the piano and played snippets of Chopin and Beethoven for us it left us with a taste of something extraordinary. By all means, if you have the opportunity to take Barkley’s class, do it.

Our other meeting at Foothill found us watching “La Section Anderson,” or “The Anderson Platoon” a documentary directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer a veteran of the Indochina war. in “La Section Anderson” he returns to Vietnam during the height of the fighting in 1966. We only saw the first part of it, but it’s a powerful look at the lives of the soldiers in this platoon. It emphasized how much American culture pervades the soldiers’ behaviors even as they fight, live and die in the jungle..Hopefully, Swensson told us, we’ll have a chance to meet Schoendoerffer while we’re in Paris.

Though most of the 54 students going on the trip attended those two special meetings, my classes are pretty small. There are three of us in the conversation class and about 7 of us in the French 3 class. If I wasn’t so scared about trying to get by in Paris on the scant vocabulary I know, I would find this comforting. I suppose if I can make it from my plane to the front steps of my hostel I’ll be doing well.

I’m staying at a hostel, which is basically a residence hall that sleeps four to six or more per room in bunk beds, the first couple nights I’m in Paris because I opted not to take the group flight that most of the other students are taking. It’s much cheaper, about $13 a night, to stay in a hostel than in even a one star hotel, so that works really well for my budget. Once all together on the 26th, though, we’ll be in an international dorm living situation. Boy, it’ll be just like going to school at a four year university, I imagine! A tiny amount of personal space and a shared bathroom just down the hall. Who cares, though? After all, I’ll be in Paris! I don’t plan on spending any significant amount of time in my room.

Next week, expect to here about the plane flight, the hostel and the Pairisians. Can I actually figure out the Metro? Which nightclub will I decide to visit first? Is French cheese better than Californian? And, finally, how much wine can an American drink after an 11 hour plane flight and still find his way back to his hostel?