Aside from the food, I loved the Cité Universitaire, with its vast parklike grounds and its thirty-seven different houses sponsored by thirty-seven different countries. I liked to walk past the fields of students playing soccer, the students chatting each other up, the men pretending they were students to try to hit on young women, and study the houses each country had built. We had everything from a sedate neo-Gothic to something that strongly resembled a bomb shelter. As the architecture suggested, the place hosted a lot of oddball cultures: French, Moroccan, Danish, Canadian. There were even some Americans who, taken out of their element, are about the strangest creatures on the globe. I tried to hang out with them at first, but when they caught me speaking French with the natives, they considered me a snob and a traitor to class, country, and above all, language, and pelted me with the half-eaten pastries they always had in one hand. Okay, I made that up about being pelted with pastries. Still, no Europeans ever nibbled on delicious pastries in the Métro. How come I was the only American who noticed, realized eating in public was considered barbaric here, and stopped doing it? I’m rarely considered a paragon of perception and sensitivity to others, so come on, how hard could it be?

Anyway, rumors of roaches surrounded the Fondation des États-Unis, so I ended up living in the Maison du Canada. There, students also tended to hang out in large groups dissing the French, but at least we did it in French, so those obnoxious Frenchmen could understand us. The Canadian house made me pay extra rent to live there, though, which was downright rude. Did they have any idea how much of my tax money went to pay for their nuclear shield or to subsidize businesses that destroyed their ozone layer?

I hadn’t figured out how to make calls from my room yet, mostly because it involved putting down a hard cash deposit, and I had spent my last bit of cash at a really nice chocolate shop that didn’t take credit cards. My sister could call in, though, and a week or so later she caught me, huddled under my rough, orange, dorm-issue blanket, clutching my teddy bear for warmth. The dorm hadn’t turned the radiators on yet; for some reason they thought it didn’t get cold enough until November. “Where have you been?” she said. “Did some old lady stab you with an umbrella? I was starting to worry.”