Child, Day 4-Tuesday

 

Tuesday we were in house from 9 am to 1 p.m., by in house I mean we attended lectures at the beautiful American University of Paris (AUP), in one of the upstairs classrooms. The first speaker we listened to was Jean-Marc Illouz, the senior international correspondent for France 2 TV. The key idea he left us with is that “perceptions are stronger than facts”. No matter how many times you throw a fact at someone or tell them how it really is, if they’ve been trained to think one way all their life that’s how they will continue to think. That is until they go out into the world and experience different cultures and peoples for themselves, this allows them to create their own perceptions and perspectives instead of just accepting whatever was spoon-fed to them through the media. He even went so far as to congratulate all of us on the fact that we had a passport and had used it.

 Following him was Elizabeth Detmeister, the deputy press attaché at the US Embassy in Paris. She did her lecture over “Diplomacy and the Media.” This talk gave us an inside view of what it was like to work for the US Embassy abroad.

Next, was Washburn’s own Professor Maria Stover. Her lecture was over “Media Transformations in Post-Communist Europe: Challenges and Opportunities”. She used many examples from international history such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Czechoslovakia revolution and the Romanian revolution, more recently though she included the 2011 Jasmine revolution in Tunisia. Each of these movements underlies one fact: that media is an agent used for change; sometimes it’s bad sometimes it’s good.

Perhaps one of my favorite speakers from the seminar was Harriet Welty Rochefort; she is the author of the renowned book “Celebrating French Food” in which she writes about…you guessed it ...French food! Along with her two other books “French Toast" and "French Fried” she explores the world of France keeping a log of taboos and the dos and don’ts of the French.  The reason why she wrote her books was all thanks to a Frenchman who stole her heart and whisked her away to Paris, where she quickly found out that there were distinct differences between here and back home. To lay down just a few: the French like to sit and watch people—all day, I think they deliberately make time for it. Another is unlike Americans they work to live, they do not live to work or make money. But the one thing that gets me the most is that they don’t smile, at least not a strangers. You have to join a level of informality before they twitch those lips in your direction. I agree with her when she said you have to be accepting of another culture and not run in to pointing out the stark differences.

After 1 p.m. we were able to explore the city. We made our way to Montmartre -- a picturesque shopping and eating district nestled just beneath Sacre Coueur. The church is breath taking, if ever you wanted to see a stunning basilica simply look atop the tallest hill in Paris and there she rests.  This neighborhood of tourist trap shops is where I found a good portion of my souvenirs for my friends and family, I suggest going even if it’s only for the experience or to say that you were at the tallest point in Paris.