I have more tales of Paris for you. But first, my apartment. Yes, I found one at long last, down a little side street, through a blue door and up three flights of winding wooden stairs. My big windows are open, and I can see my closest café over the wrought iron grating. The building is old, creaky, terribly cute. But I’ve spent very little time in it, and I’ll tell you why.

First of all, when I moved in, there was no electricity. It took my roommate and I four days to figure out how to turn it on. I had to make a French bank account and register with the Parisian power company. My landlady translated the rapid-fire French, hitting buttons on our meter, and we jumped for joy when the lights turned on. But in those first few unplugged days, it wasn’t much use staying in the dark. So I spent my time out in the city.

Many of those hours were devoted to class registration. I’m used to Hunter College’s online schedule builder, where every class is a few clicks away, but in France, it is the strangest analog process. I went to visit the cinema department office at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and waited in line to speak with the secretary. When I sat down at her desk, she handed me a big booklet, probably half an inch thick, full of course descriptions. I flipped through, marking down a few that sounded cool - French Films of the 60s and 70s, the History of Costume and Set Design. The secretary took my form and filed it, then made me a paper copy. It couldn’t have been more different from New York.

I’m sure college always used to work this way. French universities are just reluctant to adopt the new digital ways. Our study abroad advisors joke that France is stuck somewhere around 1952, but there’s so many other eras at work here. These 19th-century buildings are hiding Roman ruins in their courtyards. And right in the middle of the Place de la Concorde – a giant public square in the city center – there’s a brand new “Rugby Village” sprawled out over the cobblestones.

I didn’t know this when I planned my study abroad, but France is hosting the Rugby World Cup this fall and there’s infrastructure everywhere. The American embassy sent us all an email last week about it, warning of protests and frenzied tourists. I was skeptical until we went out Friday night and heard the cheers roaring out of every café we passed. The TVs were all tuned into the same game, it was like the whole city was in the audience.

A group of us wound up in a strange French rendition of an Irish pub, and rugby fans had overtaken the place. I don’t know the first thing about the sport, but by the end of the night, I’d heard enough explanations to figure it out. And I remember leaving to find the Fontaine des Innocents, built during the Renaissance in the 1500s, right across the way.

Paris is full to bursting. So much has been written about it, all these layers of past under the clamoring present. Even now that my lights turn on, and classes are about to start, the clamor is the place to be.