Home again!

The Glee Club is finally back home, just in time for reading period. The quietness of Princeton suburbia on this winter afternoon makes Paris seem impossibly far away - there are no cobblestones to trip over, no peddlers to dodge, and on the whole there are somehow just fewer things to hear and smell and look at. The long row of wide-windowed shops on Nassau seems almost ridiculously orderly compared to the tumble of boulangeries, crêperies, and other small establishments that compete for space on every street corner in Paris. And Princeton nightlife, which is probably doomed to endless controversy and an equally endless supply of bad beer, seems somehow pale and petty next to the incredible vibrancy of Paris's bars and cafés, which stay open long past midnight on most days of the week.

In a way, it's preposterous to try to get to know a city as old and multifaceted as Paris in just six short days, but nonetheless we did our best to sample it all - often literally. Good food is available everywhere in the city, which was a special pleasure for those of us used to surviving off of dining hall salad or day-old restaurant takeouts from the U-Store. The bakeries and crêperies sprinkled all across the Latin Quarter (where our hotels were located) provided an amazing and inexpensive selection of breakfast, lunch, and snacky foods for us throughout each day. And our dinner a few nights ago at Chez Françoise was fantastic, perhaps the best food we had during the entire trip - a creamy pumpkin soup to start, salmon dressed in a green curry sauce for the main course, and a cup of sweet pineapple and coconut sorbet for the finish. For lunch one day, some of us also visited one of the best-loved falafel joints in the city: L'As du Falafel, a tiny stand nestled into one of the narrow cobblestone streets in the Marais district.

As for the museums and monuments - what can we say that hasn't already been said before and said better by others? As Baron de Pöllnitz wrote more than three centuries ago, "Paris has been described so much and one has heard it talked about so much, that most people know what the city looks like without ever having seen it." All this was true for us too, for who can make it to Princeton without receiving at least a little of the enormous imprint that Paris has left on art and culture in the western world? The Eiffel Tower was perhaps even taller than we imagined, and the motor vehicle traffic around the Arc de Triomphe even more reckless and terrifying than we'd been warned. The few hours we were able to spend inside the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay were both inadequate and deeply satisfying, especially for those of us who came to Paris already having spent countless hours exploring these museums in books or in our imaginations.

All in all, the trip has been spectacular, and I suspect I'm not the only one who misses Paris already. Many of us have returned home with new friends, many fewer euros, a slightly expanded French vocabulary (où est le metro? voilà mon passeport!), and last but certainly not least, a new sense of confidence and cohesiveness as a choir. Rehearsing and performing every night under some of the most beautiful vaulted ceilings in France has had a real and inspiring effect on the way we make music together, which we very much hope to carry with us into our next performance on home turf.

Au revoir, Paris, et bonne nuit! It has been a very good week.

Emily Sung