In my discussion for psychology last week, the instructor told us that one of the articles was not available online and that we’d have to go to the library and find it.  Things in France are never easy… I had no idea where the library was or how the library system works.  So I set aside four hours today to accomplish this task.  Luckily I had made a friend in the class and so I emailed her and she told me what street the library was on.

To put this into perspective, the university is in one arrondissement (think zip code), and the discussion is in another arrondissement, and the library is in yet another arrondissement! Anyway I’m off and métro-ed to the street.  I walked to the library.  I was surprised, the library is open to the public and huge! Upon security screening, I was in! I didn’t see any books on the ground floor so I took an escalator up.  Then I saw books!  This is finally something that makes sense.  Earlier in the day I had looked up the call number from the library website — on a side note, I worked in the Cornell Library for my first semester so I’m pretty familiar with the way big libraries work in America.  I was surprised to see the way this library was set up was much simpler than Cornell’s.  What does this mean?  It was easy to find the section for psychology and the aisle for Freud.  However, after that, all the books have the same number, so I had to literally read the titles for each of the books in order to find the one I needed (at Cornell, no two books have the same call number).  Nonetheless I found it without any problems!

The library was huge, well lit, and a phenomenal place to study.  Also, it stays open until 10pm!! Most libraries here close much earlier than that. I think I’ve just found my new place to study 🙂

TL;DR- So many successes: I found the library I needed to go to, found the psychology section, found the freud section, found the book, found the article!!!