Monday 21 January 2013

What to pack?

I'm in the second week of exams at my home university and have just five days until I leave for Paris. This means, along with panic revising I'm also panic packing.

I'm a frock kinda girl. It's rare to see me in trousers unless I'm lounging around the house; feeling poorly lazy or just plain meh; or at work. Therefore I've packed dresses. Loads of them. Dresses for the cold, dresses for blistering sunshine, dresses for punk gigs and dresses for cycling through the city with a baguette in the basket and the wind in my hair.

I wonder if I could be limiting myself too much with the dresses, but my theory is that with layering, more outfits can be created and of course accessorizing makes all the difference.

What else to bring? Well, as a vegetarian, and a lazy one at that, food. I know it seems disingenuous when moving to the culinary capital of the world to bring Asda veg sausage packet mix but days in university will be long and time to prepare a meal in the evenings will be short. France is not a country in which it easy to be a vegetarian. The convenience foods such as Quorn or Linda McCartney's simply do not exist there. To eat a healthy meat free diet, you have to go back to the old school, and cooking properly, from scratch and being creative. I've packed a vegan cookbook to give me ideas (as vege mince doesn't exist for easy spag bol) and lots of these packet mix thing to keep me going whilst I get settled into a routine of cooking properly and shopping sensibly and getting my head around where to go for good value.

Tea bags. Terribly English of me I know but I can rarely stand coffee and have found that foreign teas taste...wrong. Even if they're PG Tips or Tetley's and marked as 'British Blend', somehow the just don't taste quite right. It could be the water, or different ways of processing milk, I'm not sure. But, by bringing British tea bags from home at least I can eliminate the tea blend as a possible cause.

Also, Marmite. Marmite turns bread and butter into a sandwich. Long days at uni will mean packing a sarnie, as having attempted to buy sandwiches in France before, I know that finding one without meat or animal rennet will be a struggle. I don't hold out much hope for uni Restos either. I'll certainly have a look, but in my experience vege provisions tend to be uninspiring and monotonous.

I must do a check to make sure I have all the documents I might possibly need. For registering at the university and opening bank accounts and such. Must dig out my birth certificate. And get a load of passport photos for student registration etc.

Of course I'm a little paranoid that I might forget something, as it's bound to happen but I guess I'll have to deal with that when it comes.

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