Helloooo I’m writing this while praying the hotel wifi doesn’t blow up 10 times like it usually does.
Study abroad time isn’t real. These have been the fastest, slowest, sweatiest, and definitely most stepful weeks of my life. The first week in Paris is over and it feels so weird to say we’re on our last few days before iSEED ends. During this past week I was able to visit a ton of amazing historical sites and also just walk the streets of Paris, desperately trying to hide my Americanness (isn’t working). The real Paris is definitely similar to what it appears to be from afar. It suffers the same fate as any big city in the summer with streets that are as crowded as they are dirty, but regardless, it is still a beautiful place to be. While I don’t think that I would consider it the ‘city of love’ it is definitely a city that you could be in love in I guess. Regardless, many of the warnings I got before visiting Paris have not really been something I had to worry about. I can proudly say I am yet to get harassed or rob and I hope I can still say that by the end of the week.
The three key things I remember from my week in Paris so far have been visiting the Château de Fontainebleau (and the horror story that came from the trip), seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time, and the annual music festival that happened this past weekend. While so far it has been a balance of basic touristy visits to wandering the streets and trying to see it like a local, I hope to do a few more tours and visit places like the Louvre or the PSG stadium.
Some of the team activities that will shape my memories will definitely be the scavenger hunt that took us all over the city and getting absolutely robbed by the metro police who over the course of today and yesterday charged us €320, hence the title. Even after the losses we’ve taken, everyones kept their head up and have only branded it as “dad lore” which is something I have really appreciated about our iSEED group. While traveling in Europe is mostly a great time, there definitely are some stressful and hard aspects about it, but we’ve stuck together and figured it all out as a team.
This week we began our prototyping phase and while my team got off to a slow start while generating ideas, we were able to eventually lock in and come up with a lot of wild ideas which were then trimmed to a top 5 of sorts. After speaking with the rest of the iSEED group and taking their ideas into consideration, we consolidated a plan of 3 prototypes into a sort of plan A B and C. The questions we still need to answer are related to Yousra’s hand dexterity and we look forward to speaking to her more in detail tomorrow.
Our project will definitely be able to help a lot of people if we are able to make a viable proof of concept and keep it going. The market we are working in is fairly scarce, even though the issue is a definite everyday problem for those with limited motor controls.
So far my highlight has been all of the late night walks or movie nights the guys and I have had. It’s been fun being able to explore the city together and become good friends in the process. This is the main reason for why the study abroad has been such a great experience. The entire group consistently talks about how lucky we got about how well we all get along and I’m excited to go back to Rice having learned and gone through so much with them.