One of my classmates looked out the window on the train ride to Tianjin and said that he’d heard a rumor that half of the world’s supply of cranes were in China’s growing cities. The number of cranes I’ve seen so far in both Beijing and (especially) Tianjin does not make me doubt that.

Tianjin is like a lot of Chinese cities in that it could be called “up and coming”. While there was a lot to do there, most of the buildings weren’t really finished yet. This seems to be a general trend in Chinese cities – there is a lot of construction, and if you came back in five years, the city would probably look completely different. Everywhere, Chinese cities are growing and morphing.

One example is the city of Chongqing, that used to just be a city in the Sichuan province. Now, if you look at a map of China, Chongqing is its own municipality, just like Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai – it is no longer part of a larger province, but an area with borders in its own right.

Therefore, the architecture was probably the most interesting thing in Tianjin. We spent most of our time walking around the various Western concessions, looking at buildings filled with European architecture and city planning. Now these buildings have been given different purposes, with many of them now housing major banks. The former Italian concession, on the other hand, has been turned into a tourist trap of Western restaurants and wine bars, sort of like a Little Italy in the States.

But that didn’t mean that there were foreigners there. In fact, I didn’t see a single Westerner outside of our group when we were in Tianjin. Tianjin has had a complicated past with the West, and for good reason. The concessions represent many painful memories for the Chinese. One building in particular, a Catholic church now covered in scaffolding, was the site of a violent protest against the French presence in Tianjin.

Today, most foreigners in Tianjin live outside the downtown area. The concessions are now part of the city, embraced by the Chinese. It is interesting to see that most of the European buildings are being kept, while the traditional Chinese courtyard-style buildings are being replaced.

Maybe this is a step in the direction of international diplomacy or forgiving the West. Maybe it isn’t. In any case, it makes Tianjin an interesting place to walk around for anyone remotely interested in architecture.

Each day as I ride the metro all over Paris- with increasing agility although I always, always fumble over the manual door handles- I have been reading Hemingway’s novel about Paris, A Moveable Feast. The book, which recounts the day to day activities of Hemingway’s life as a 25 year old writer scraping to get by in the City of Light, has been thrilling and enlightening to read.

Hem, as his friends seem to have called him, dedicates each short chapter to something small and simple about Paris. The first, for example, is called “A Good Café on the Place St-Michel” and describes the conditions in which he liked to write, the lighting in the café, the beautiful passersby, and the empty, almost-sad feeling he would get after he finished writing a good story. His stories about mundane aspects of life and his strikingly simple prose (something, I have learned through the book, which he worked tremendously hard to achieve, often eliminating every unnecessary word in his works, phrase by phrase, attempting to make the “truest sentence” he could) is somehow enthralling and I find myself eagerly turning the page to discover whether he’d get coffee with or without cream or if he would go to the horse races or straight home after lunch.

More than that, though, I have found so much in this little book that I can relate to. As depicted in Midnight in Paris, Hemingway would often stop by the famous writer Gertrude Stein’s apartment to talk about his writing or the works of his friends, who happened to be some of the most well-known artists of all time- Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot (whom he called “Major Eliot” for some reason) and Pablo Picasso. The apartment was on 27 rue de Fleurus, directly across the street from my program offices here. Each day as I walk to my phonetics class or to the amazing boulangerie down the street, I literally take the same path that Hemingway and countless other American legends walked down.

Even without the nerdy, literary star-struck feeling I get while reading A Moveable Feast, each day I am coming to understand more the feelings Hemingway had while he was writing this book. He speaks often of hunger. Not only his literal hunger which was made more evident by each warm, welcoming café whose sparkling patisseries in the windows seem almost too perfect to eat, but also a hunger of a deeper, more complex nature. Paris is so beautiful and yet in some ways so unattainable that one almost always feels as if you will never get enough, or never fully digest it.

But for now, I’m happy with the little movable feast I’ve been consuming, walking down the rue de Fleurus with a perpetual smile on my face, Hemingway in hand.

Yesterday I witnessed two opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of Spanish people’s views on foreigners. For the most part, people have been really nice to me (although they tend to be nicer when I’m with my host mom). However, there is a fair amount of, if not racism, then stereotyping, in Spain. When I was on my way to the Parque del Retiro (http://the195.com/northwestern/2012/01/22/madrid-trumps-new-york-city/), two women got on the bus. It seemed one of them knew a woman sitting near myself, so I moved to the window seat in case she wanted to sit near her friend. The first woman sat in the seat behind her friend and the second woman to get on the bus sat behind me. As soon as I moved over, the first woman began saying, loudly, a whirlwind of phrases about Spain and what is normal here. Her refrain was always, “¡Estamos en España! ¡Aquí, usamos la boca, no la fuerza!” (“We’re in Spain! Here, we use our mouths, not force!”). Her rant lasted about 5 minutes, until she got off the bus. I could understand her words, but I was still confused as to why she was saying it because I hadn’t seen anything that could provoke such a reaction. I couldn’t tell if the woman was addressing me, or the woman behind me, so after she got off, I asked. It turns out that the woman behind me was Latin American and that the rant was aimed at her for waving her arm to flag down the bus (something I have seen many Spaniards do). A friend later told me that there are many immigrants from Latin America in Spain, and they aren’t always treated with respect. In fact, they are more often confronted with discrimination. The public broadside of this woman stands in stark contrast to the genial grandpa who sat and talked to me for 40 minutes in a Starbucks later that day because I was sitting alone, waiting for a friend.

I am definitely treated differently in Spain. As a novelty, almost. Everywhere I go, the question lingers, “¿De dónde eres?” – “Where are you from?” Even if no one asks, I know people are thinking about it, from the cashier at a local café, to the two kids in the park, the security guard in the department store, and the people in my apartment building. The grandpa at Starbucks happily announced for everyone who was wondering,“¡Es americana!” (“She’s American!”). We’ll see how my first day of classes with Spanish students and professors goes tomorrow… hopefully they’ll remember my name and not just my country of origin.

The other day at dinner I told my host-mom about the babysitting job I just acquired, watching a set of Franco American twins nearby in our swanky neighborhood, the 16th arrondissement– comparable to the Upper East Side in New York. She smiled and told me what a great idea it was and how good it would be to earn some cash while I’m here.

Then, she got very serious. The smile almost always illuminates the strong, Peruvian features of her bronzed face was completely dispelled. “Ma-eve,” she said solemnly (the French have a lot of trouble with my name and always pronounce it in two, broken syllables, like a GPS would). “Ma-eve, you need to take our your nose ring. Here, Ça ce n’est pas marche,” she told me. She went on for several minutes about the stereotypes of people like me, with piercings and tattoos, and how in this neighborhood they will often be publicly scoffed at. Her husband seconded the notion later that day and when I told him I would buy a small stud to replace my silver ring, he exclaimed “Do it, do it” almost urgently.

Since the conversation I have become more wary of stares on the subway (and there have been several) and of the conservative nature of much French clothing. Earrings, in my neighborhood, are looked down upon and pretty much everywhere, necklines don’t brave past the collarbone.

So, at least in the 16th, it seems as if I’m better off wearing J-Crew than my original thrift store ensembles (I’m still wondering about my neon green running shorts). But more than that, the conversation has made me wonder what other social cues I’m blissfully ignorant of while I hum on the metro in my cheetah print boots. Stay tuned while I find out this quarter, one way or another.

This wasn’t completely true for me, since there are four other Northwestern students here at IES with me. That made some things a lot easier, but still. Beijing is a little tricky to navigate, and some of the mandatory orientation lectures get old regardless of what program they are for.

However, orientation also had some insanely awesome things for us to do. At Northwestern we mostly just had our little Essential NU programs where we would be told not to binge drink, have sex safely, be aware of diversity, and something else that I have long since forgotten.

Here at IES we had Mystery Beijing and Mystery Haidian, and I am proud to say that my partner for Mystery Beijing and I successfully finished our task, and even prouder to say that my group for Mystery Haidian owned the competition.

Mysteries Beijing and Haidian are the scavenger hunt activities that the IES staff puts on for its students during the last two days of orientation. The first round is Mystery Beijing, where you and a partner are given five hours to find a place in Beijing that they give to you in Chinese, whereas Mystery Haidian involves a larger group, four hours, and a list of many things with various points all around the Haidian district, where Beijing Foreign Studies University is.

The whole point of the activity was that you had to ask Chinese people for directions and had to use public transportation at least once.

Being forced to go to places such as the Yonghegong Lama Temple in Beijing, roughly an hour away once we figured out where a subway stop was, and into random locations such as a Chinese traditional medicine clinic and a massage parlor in Haidian helped me and the rest of my group members get over our fear of using our broken Chinese with the people in Beijing. Once you get over the first person staring at you because you said, “oops, I forgot my cat,” instead of “oops, I forgot my hat,” makes the next person’s stares not seem quite as bad.

Plus, since my group totally beasted the Mystery Haidian competition, we are getting a free fancy dinner out of it, which makes the hour we spent getting Peking duck and a demonstration of how to eat it totally worth it.

My host-family is also ideal. My host-mom is an incredible Peruvian woman who has had every job you could think of– professor, social worker, Spanish teacher–and now she is working on opening up a nursery as she has noticed a lack of early childcare in her neighborhood. She is unceasingly patient with my butchered French and consistently upbeat and cheerful. We have spent three dinners together talking for over an hour about everything from politics to Woody Allen. Her husband, too, is genial and sarcastic and has a knowledge of the States which is really helpful for mutual understandings.  They have two daughters, Aoud, 15, and Laura, 20. They are both sweet, though a little shy, and their French is much too fast for me at this point. However, I got to hear all of them interact yesterday at dinner, and the parts that I did catch (very few) were hilarious (they made a place setting at the table for their Chihuahua, Applebee, and sat him in a chair) and I can tell that all of them are kind, fun-loving people.

Though speaking entirely in French is extremely difficult and tiring, I have been nothing but reassured and comforted by this city. In or out of my host-family, people have treated me with patience and kindness. The first night I got back from school, for example, I walked off the metro and couldn’t remember which direction I needed to go to return to the apartment. After wandering a bit, I decided to ask a couple walking, who directed me happily. Another, older, couple was nearby and volunteered their directions as well. More sure of where I was going now, I began to walk and then paused for a second at the corner where I thought I should turn. Then, from behind me, I heard the voices of the older couple inviting me to follow them as they lived only one apartment down from me. Thus, I walked home with the pair, who were very kind and practiced their English with me, and they didn’t even snicker when I mistakenly exclaimed “I was so lucky to meet us!”  in my embarrassing French.

I could go on and on about strangers who have been kind to me thus far, though I don’t think I will because to do so only highlights the multitude of clueless moments I have had so far. Whether it be the woman working at the Metro who literally came out of her office to help me add money to my card, or the man in the phone company who listened for about five minutes while I recited my e-mail address using the letters of the French alphabet, I’ve only been encouraged to keep trying.

So, that is what I’ll do. Even when it’s hard, even when it’s embarrassing, even when my tongue literally hurts from talking from the back of my throat like the French, I know that my efforts will pay off when I’m able to speak to these kind Parisians with full understanding.  Until then, I’m eternally grateful for the warm welcome they’re giving me.

Most nights I have had pounding headaches forcing me to turn in as early as nine o’clock. On my way home I stare at the pharmacy across the street, just thinking of the possible drugs that lay inside waiting to kill this pain. Rush hour will not permit me to reach that promise land. I feel like Frogger, the PlayStation version, and there is a goofy ten-year-old waiting to press the forward arrow as soon as the next car comes just to hear the squishing noise. Instead I lower my head and continue on my path home.

On this particular evening I was still processing a conversation I had with a friend earlier that day via email that was instead making me more curious to see what was behind the dark corners.

This is where I introduce the first wise man.

He said, “Forgot your professional life for a moment and realize the opportunities you have to travel and explore.” Now he was not telling me to forget what I was there for in totality, but to understand the uniqueness of my situation. So instead of going up stairs and talking to everyone in my skype-book, I went to the dining area and joined two of the hotel workers and a resident and literally eat cake.

The loaf was laced with cinnamon and oozed honey. The smell of sugar turned in the air. I sat on my hand to fight the urge to reach over and grab another piece. My mind never processed his name, but his smile will always linger. He was a round man of sixty seven years traveling as a product consultant from Mexico. He did not look wealthy, but told me he was working his vacation and was making about $2000 a week for his work. We talked for about an hour as he showed me pictures of his ten month old son and his thirty five-year-old wife.  I asked why he had children so late and he just laughed and said, “Una vida sin amor y ilusión, es una vida sin sentimiento” (A life without love and hope is a life without feeling). The love for his children and the hopes he has for their future is what keeps him going.

His words sunk into my mind and would not let go. I thought of him as I watched a clown the next morning play with a blind baby at the children’s hospital with a squeaky toy. I thought of him as another clown let a little boy in a wheel chair, due to his entire left leg being covered in burns, chase him around the burn unit. I have since then passed on what he said to others because it really forces you to have a different outlook on the forms of love and hope. Love does not always have to be between people and hope does not always have to be the end result. One can determine the forms they take in their life, but we can all agree that with them life is just that much more worth living.

The film’s protagonist, Gil Pender, is a romantic, wishy-washy writer engaged to a domineering California princess who is visiting the city with his soon-to-be in-laws. Through the magic of the city (and Woody Allen’s screenwriting), Gil travels back in time to Paris in the 1920s, chats with Hemingway about the “movable feast” around him, falls out of love with his fiancé, and falls in love with the city.

Most of my winter break has been consumed with my anxieties about Paris. I know next to nothing about the city, have no clue about how life goes on in Europe (how do I call people or withdraw cash from the ATM?) and feel as if I speak the language like a French Neanderthal.

In a very Northwestern-esque way, I began break with the notion of “studying” for Paris. I rented 3 French films, 7 guide books, and attempted to read everything every famous author ever wrote about France. But every attempt to study for studying abroad left me more panicked, more anxious and more aware of everything I don’t know.

Then, suddenly, it hit me: that’s the point. The idea of study abroad, at least in my mind, is to expand your mind, to test your limits and to learn a great deal through life experiences in a foreign place. Though I’m sure the first few weeks will be tough, I think the best way to prepare myself is not to try to cram French history, culture and grammar through my post-finals brain but instead to embrace my not-knowing. As long as I show up willing and eager to learn, with a smile on my face and a French dictionary in my hand, I think I’ll get by (besides, I have the lyrics to Lady Marmalade memorized- doesn’t that count for something?).

So, my idea of molding myself into the perfect Parisian in three weeks has been discarded. Instead of coming to Paris as a rough clay sculpture, in the need of some retouching and polish, it seems like I’ll get there as a lump. But, all the better, á mon avie, for what better a sculptor than dear Paris, one of the most beautiful places in the world?

So, here I am, with 13 days until I say au revoir to the US. I’m sure there are plenty of panic attacks to come, but I think my first midnight in Paris will make it all worth it.

This does not worry me because I am from St. Louis, MO, the most dangerous city in the United States. Those from St.L know that there is a large amount of sarcasm in that statement. These statistics do not scare me.

In the days leading up to my departure I have tried to pinpoint my fear, or, more honestly, admit to myself the reason for my fear. I am scared of not living up to everyone’s expectations. My dream of being a Spanish journalist will be put to the test in its rawest form this quarter. I will have no other Americans to talk to, no host family and no Spanish classes. It will be just me and my language. The language that I have made such imperative part of my future and identity.

I will be working with one of the largest newspaper websites in San Salvador, doing multimedia work. Alone. I don’t know how I will ever successfully transfer everything Medill has taught me to another country, but I will. I will continue to tell myself the same thing I have been saying to everyone.

“It will all get done. I have no choice but to go at this point.”