1. 2 years ago 

   PARIS, FRANCE

   FIRST FEW HOURS // DAY 1 // DAY 2 // FINAL FEW HOURS

   So I needed some US government paperwork processed at an American embassy pronto relating to my itinerary back once in the States. Hamburg unfortunately stopped providing US citizen services a year or so back, so I either needed to go to Berlin or Paris. Berlin I had already been to, so I decided - given that I had a place to stay in Paris - that I would make a weekend of it in the French capital.

   I was reluctant to spend a significant amount of my remaining time in Germany frolicking about in Paris, but things had to be done. I was however fortunate enough to learn a few important things about Deutschland. Traveling wasn’t really part of the original game-plan, but without traveling I would never have had the experience of going back into Germany. I would never have had the opportunity to miss the language, the people, the culture, the customs.

   Besides a greater appreciation for the Germany identity, I think the most profound realization I had was about the stereotype of German efficiency. For better or worse, such a notion is absolutely true in a lot of ways, but I think an interesting manifestation of the trait is as follows: yes, when it is times to work, it is times to work and nothing else, but when it’s time for Germans to play and be social, Germans always always always look for the quickest way to get from “point A” to “fun.” And that’s the way I’ve seen it.

   Another brief and interesting thing I noticed in Europe is that French people are distinct from German people - perhaps this is not the most politically correct thing to observe, and understandably it gets more complicated when immigrant demographics are considered - but I had never really understood national borders to be anything more than random lines drawn in the sands of Europe. Of course there are historical factors to be considered, but I never knew different European populations to be distinct not just in custom, language, and culture, but also as people; I could actually see that the Germans are on many levels a different people from the French. And so it goes.

   Anyway my time in Paris was rather touristy and quite frankly, I think the pictures speak for themselves.

   The first slideshow presentation includes a brief evening walk to the Place de la Concorde and the surrounding area from Jason’s place. My first full day in Paris was a wild one indeed - the morning saw Jason & I check out the Eiffel Tower in all its brilliance (definitely bigger than Big Ben), then after running about town a bit we went to a spot overlooking the entire city at dusk, and we made our descent, fooling around a bit in the meantime, and had a bit of a photo-shoot at the Louvre (yeah! for night pictures).

   The next morning I headed to the Louvre solo, where disappointingly I came to what turned out to be my favorite wing last, by which time I was just about done, but then we frolicked all about town checking out a variety of districts, including one significantly lower on the social scale than say, most of the Paris I had been seeing; Sunday mass at the Notre Dame Cathedral followed. Before leaving on Monday I did some trademark Sean solo exploration, before finally heading back to Hamburg and ending my fleeting trip in France.

2. Notes

So I, Sean Kesluk, left Los Angeles for a 6 month adventure abroad in Europe and South America. After a few weeks studying the Deutsch in Freiburg, Germany, it's two months up north in Hamburg working for the city's Jewish community center. After a brief foray into Sweden, I'll head South to Buenos Aires for some Spanish classes and volunteer work in a La Boca soup kitchen. After that it's back home to the States and national service with AmeriCorps NCCC. With a month of training at the VA medical campus in Perry Point, MD, it 's off to Baltimore for my first project, two months working for The Samaritan Women, a non-profit renovating a hundred-year-old mansion to use as a transitional home for women in recovery from heroin addiction and human trafficking, in addition to expanding a farm/urban garden to distribute produce to soup kitchens, shelters, and those in nutritional poverty. The second project will see us down in New Orleans, LA doing post-Katrina work with The Phoenix of New Orleans, a non-profit which renovates homes for Lower Mid-City homeowners who can't afford to do so.

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