Les Autres Étudiants

Okay, so just a brief run-down of the people I've met here:

Nicole Brown & Suzie Brothman were my two roommates at the hotel we stayed in for the first two nights. Suzie is also a junior, is from Wrenthem, Mass (what up Wrentham Outlets!) and goes to Quinnipiac -- she knows Sarah Kaufman. She's in the same grammar class as me as well and is living in an apartment here with another girl (who I'll get to). Nicole is a sophomore from Long Island and goes to Marist College. She's also doing a homestay with an older couple who are apparently in their 60s or 70s but seem a lot younger and are very active, etc.

Allison Varley is from a suburb of Chicago and goes to Austin College (not in Austin), Texas. She is ALSO doing a homestay, but really it's not that common, I think there are only 4 of us total.

Nickole Marchant is from Gloucester, Mass and goes to Salem State in Mass as well. She lives in the dorms here (le Cité Universitaire) along with most of the other people in my program. She wears a coat that I almost bought once and it makes me wish I owned it, but phew good thing I don't because it would look a little ridiculous if there were two people in a tour group with a mustard-colored pea coat.

Melanie Wurmer is from Guatemala City, Guatemala and goes to school in Georgia. So she's bilingual (on her way to being trilingual) which is awesome, but she went to an American school in Guatemala and so she speaks English really well and you can hardly detect an accent. I wouldn't have known she was from Guatemala if she didn't say so or I didn't hear her speaking a million miles a minute in Spanish on the phone to her parents. She also lives in the dorms and had a pretty bad experience with the room she got placed in. (think of Kramer's apartment in Seinfeld when that neon sign for the fried chicken place was right outside his window?)

Andrea Cook is also from Massachusetts (though I don't remember where.. woops). She goes to UMass Amherst and is a music major there. It sounds really intense and so good thing I never got awesome at the drums and tried to major in music.. at UMass anyway. At Stonehill it would have probably been okay since the music program is basically non-existent. Anyway, she lives in the dorms, too, but has a corner room, which functions much the same way having a corner office does, in that it's bigger and cooler.

Tyren Barker is, again, from Massachusetts.. somewhere Northish I think, and also goes to UMass Amherst. She is the only other person doing a homestay and I think her host family is just one older woman. I actually haven't seen her that much outside of API-arranged activities.

Allie Loscutoff (I might have just butchered that and I could cross-reference with facebook, but that will take too much effort -- although probably less effort in actuality than this parenthetical note has taken) is AGAIN from Massachusetts and AGAIN goes to UMass, but she lived in California for a couple years and she lived in the French Alps last year for like 5 months as an Au Pair. She is 22 and an art major and she always is off doing her own thing which is cool. She lives with Suzie in their apartment. She is just as obsessed with Moleskine notebooks (maybe more) as I am, but probably puts them to better use than I do.

That's all for the girls.......

Now for the boys:

Alex Hornbeck is from Towson, Maryland, right outside of Baltimore and he, once again, goes to UMass Amherst (API loves UMass). He's a journalism major and I think maybe English, but then again maybe the two are just connected at Umass (Journalism is a part of the communications major at stonehill so I don't know). He listens to good music and gets to go to a lot of shows for free because he has a radio show at umass's radio station and so that makes me jealous. I would exploit him if that perk carried over to Europe, too. Unfortunately, I don't think it does so I'll just have to pay to see bands (woo Hot Chip March 17th).

Stephen Kessinger is from somewhere in Massachusetts (wow massachusetts is getting boring) and goes to UVM. He doesn't know Caitlin, woomp wooomp. He has a french alter ego and drinks a lot of espressos. He is really sarcastic and it's funny.

Josh Fried (Freed, not fried like fried chicken) is from Oklahama and goes to the University of Oklahoma but he hates Oklahoma and his parents are from New York and he spent this past summer in New York and loves New York, so he's cool.

Jamal Noshahi is from Stonehill. He's a sophomore and so I didn't really know him before coming here, but it's nice to have a somewhat familiar face. I don't really see him too often though because his girlfriend (a junior from Stonehill) is also in Paris but with a different program.

Anyway, now I must meet some of the above people for dinner, but there ya go, a brief detailing of all other twelve API Paris Sorbonne Spring '08 members.

Hon Hon Hon.