LIM College

by Mikayla Bunker

Coming to Paris I was expecting ham and cheese sandwiches (croque-monsieur) for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I was also expecting lots and lots of bread.

I normally don’t eat a lot of deli meats at home and especially not ham so I was a little nervous to venture to a country known for using a lot of ham in their dishes. Surprisingly only half of my expectations were true. I think I’ve eaten my body weight in delicious bread and I’m entirely okay with that!

Every restaurant serves bread with each meal, even if you don’t really think you need bread (like if you get a cheeseburger). All the food is amazing, and even the not so good food is better than most of food back in the states, and I would know because I love to eat!

When I began to research Paris before I came here to study at Mod'Art, every webpage that I was looking at said that when you’re traveling to Paris expect to spend between $75-$100 on food every day that you’re in the city. I have to argue a little bit with those numbers because, if you look hard enough, you can find really affordable and delicious places to eat.

A lot of my lunches consisted of a sandwich, drink and some sort of pastry item. (See photo on the left.) I only paid seven euros for the entire meal. The most interesting part of the entire meal was the doughnut because I was expecting a very sweet icing, but it was a light, fluffy doughnut with delicious chocolate icing.

As for dinner, I found some unique challenges. In France the day is based around the meal times and if you miss a particular meal time there’s practically no place to purchase a meal.

For example, my roommate and I were trying to get dinner at five pm one day after class and we, for some reason, could not find anywhere to eat. This was before we knew that you couldn’t get food at specific times.

So we were wandering around and all of the sudden a nice gentleman asked us if we needed help finding something. We of course were at our wits end trying to find food so we asked him if he knew anywhere to get food around us.

His response was, I kid you not, “You’re too early and too late.” Meaning that we were too late for lunch, which ends at four pm, and it’s too early for dinner which can start anywhere between six and seven pm.

We eventually found the cutest little Italian place, which happened to be right down the street from the school building. The pizza there was amazing and I highly suggest it if you do study abroad with this program.

I was actually surprised by the amount of Italian food that I ate while I was here. I was preparing myself, before I came, to see menu items like duck, French onion soup, cheese and croissants.

Of course many of the menus that I have looked at over my days here in France have included those items but, I’ve also seen more cheeseburgers with French fries and spaghetti than anything.

The food lived up to its expectations and I would highly recommend going to France just to try the food! The one suggestion that I would make is to try every different type of food while you’re here. I will be the first to admit that I tend to look for chicken nuggets on the menu, but you can do that when you're back at school at LIM. When you’re here you have to venture out and get something that you never would get back home. Be adventurous and spread your wings!