THERE’S a lot to learn if you will be studying abroad even for just a semester or so. Think of Baby Jane. She studies French in a university in Maine. Now that she is a senior, she’s president of the French club in the university that she is studying. For that, she has been granted an all-expense paid semester in a student exchange program to Paris for one semester. I don’t need to mention to you that Baby Jane is a full academic scholar at the university that she is enrolled in.

And her counterpart, Jean-Robert, is an English major at the University of Paris. He is also granted one semester to study in Maine. And now the lives of these two strangers have unfolded as each has experienced what a few may see as a coming-of-age experience. The experience of being abroad for the first time is surely exhilarating as one will be entangled and entrapped in a community of strange-speaking tongues. But for these two people, it will be hardly a struggle because they have already known a second language.

And so Baby Jane arrives here in Paris amidst the sparkling lights at the Charles de Gaulle International Airport. The school year here – just like in the United States starts in September right after summer. When she first arrived here, she was introduced to a lot of French friends whom she immediately got acquainted with because of her fluency in the French language already. They toured her around town in such known places as the Louvre, the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, the Shakespearean Library and everything else in between.

In fact, she was envied by lots of friends back home in Maine who were drooling over her picture at one of the Eiffel Tower guided tours. They want to go to France across the Atlantic as soon as possible already. Baby Jane found most of her friends as highly intellectual but very forthcoming and hospitable. They even shared a cramped flat with her in the middle of Paris and Baby Jane has to endure going to the laundry all by herself. It’s a hard knock life here in Paris but she surely enjoyed the heck out of it.

Crime is never a problem here so the girls do partying every weekend. In fact, one weekend, they trooped all the way to Palma de Mallorca in Spain just to have some fun. It was one weekend that she never enjoyed back home in Maine, Baby Jane now recalls. Now that it’s Christmastime, Paris is abuzz with dazzling Christmas lights in the whole city. And Baby Jane is definitely enjoying it as well as the Eiffel Tower is transformed to a gigantic Christmas tree. As a Catholic herself, religious services at the Notre Dame Cathedral and the relatively smaller but more solemn Shrine of the Miraculous Medal erected by the Blessed Catherine Laboure.

Baby Jane has also tasted various French foods in its entire splendor at the cafeteria in the American University of Paris. Among the delicacies she has already tasted include the famed bouillabaisse.