Welcome! Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! - Albus Dumbledore

My first day of school at Les Cordeliers had me relating to Mr Harry Potter and his first entering Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  Les Cordeliers was once a monastery built in the 1200s, and it still retains many castle-like features: stone walls, spiral staircases, courtyards and towers, ect, ect...

This magic-school setting is enhanced by the characters present; the teachers are called “professors” here, and command a lot more respect from the students than the ones back home, I’m finding.  I’m just waiting for a grumpy janitor to turn up with a cat!

And then there is of course the sensation of having stepped into a different world; a hidden realm, if you will.  Everyone is speaking a foreign language, wearing different clothes, and they all seem to have an internal GPS installed to navigate around the baffling school grounds (while I stand with my mouth open and totally lost until someone takes pity on me and leads me to class *merci, Jean-Baptiste!*  Seriously, how did anyone make it to class on time in the HP books?!?)  Even the atmosphere seems changed, as if the very air is charged with some alien energy!

I know most of it is all in my head.  I really don’t care, cause starting my new year of school here is such a rush and this is going to be great!  And when Marina told me I could leave school for the village during lunch hour, my newly-formed Hogwarts half was squealing “Hogsmead trip. Every.  Day.”