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Hey Steemit!
So if you haven't caught up with my recent posts, I just finished my Travel Vietnam series last week! It was quite an interesting experience since it was our first time voluntouring, where we taught English to elementary/primary school children in Ho Chi Minh City!
Anyway, now that that's done, we move on to another trip that was actually not too long after that one! I previously mentioned that 2016 was probably our most adventurous year because we signed up for quite a few overseas programmes. The first was voluntouring in Vietnam, and this next one was summer school in Paris!
So way back in January 2016, I recall seeing an email blast that our college (NUS) sent to us, inviting people to apply for their summer school programs. It was a good opportunity to travel and clear modules at the same time; the results of which didn't matter as long you passed, so it seemed like a good deal. I was quite spontaneous at the time and since we didn't really have plans for the upcoming summer, we decided to just apply and see what would happen. As it turns out, there weren't that many other applicants, and both of us got selected! I guess everyone in NUS gets blasted by sooo many emails that not many bother to read them. Well the good news was that we got in and we were heading to a college called HEC Paris!
7 June 2016. Tuesday.
So after months of sorting out paperwork and actually finishing our fourth semester/second year of college, and a mere 2 weeks after we returned from Vietnam, we were off to Paris!
Our flight was around 10ish at night, so we had a second dinner/supper at the world famous Changi Airport before boarding.
We had some vouchers to use, so we figured we'd spend it on some Chinese food at Peach Garden since we weren't gonna be eating it for a couple of weeks.
We coincidentally wore matching plaid shirts that day!
We booked a flight on Turkish Airlines, and it wasn't a direct flight, so we'd be stopping in Istanbul for an hour or so. It was alright though, I'm not really a fan of long flights and the last time I flew to Paris straight (with my family) it was 14 hours! This way, our flights was about 7 and 6 hours respectively so it was more manageable.
It was about 6:30am (I believe Singapore time?) when we landed in Istanbul. The flight was pretty uneventful, we had a meal which was alright, and I think they gave us turkish delights, which wasn't very delightful imo.
We had around an hour so we just chilled in Starbucks trying to get wifi so I could contact my folks and tell them we were doing alright.
Soon enough, it was time to get back on the plane! This time it was a smaller plane, which was quite noisy but I was kinda tired and managed to sleep through it I think.
A few more hours later and we finally arrived in Paris!
So the course that we signed up for in HEC Paris was called Luxury Management, and was an intensive 2-week course. But we booked our flight a week earlier so we had time to relax and explore Paris before the course actually started. We figured we'd be quite busy with school during the 2 weeks and it'd be a waste to fly all the way there without seeing anything.
We booked an Airbnb just outside the main part of Paris for a week and spent the first day settling in, and exploring our area, which I'll go into in the next post because it might be a tad too long if I continue here. Sorry!
Thanks for reading! And I hope you'll join me on this journey!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
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