A few weeks ago, I was teaching a class about the delights (or lack of them) of English cuisine, this then led to a discussion on different types of gastronomy, Chinese, Italian, Thai. To finish the lesson I asked them, 'if I gave you a hundred euros and the choice to go to ANY restaurant in the whole of Paris, what type of cuisine would you choose?' To my surprise, 90% of them said French.

I always knew Erasmus was going to be mad. But I didn’t quite expect the events of the last few weeks. After the initial stress of moving all my stuff over and realising I had in fact forgotten the last two years of Italian teaching at Bath and was now back to “errr, posso errr avere una *shit what’s the word for stamp* por favour”. Nevertheless I grew some balls, got sorted at uni with an exciting time table of French theatre and Italian journalism and started to really get stuck in. It was when my Italian lecturer added me as a friend on Facebook that I first knew things were going to be a bit different here. Since then we’ve had transport strikes, power cuts, successions of praying Italians chanting down our street and of course have been beeped at walking down the street by anything from policemen to bus drivers.