Welcome to my France Study Abroad 2006 Trip Reports web site. This is an archive of the photographic reports I sent out to various friends and family members while I was studying architecture in Europe for a semester, as part of USC's study abroad program. During the Fall 2006 semester, I spent about four months in Europe, studying architecture and urbanism. We were headquartered in a small city called Saintes, in the central west of France, about an hour and a half north of Bordeaux. Classes and design studio primarily took place there, but we also had three official field trips to Paris and the Netherlands, Berlin and Paris again, and Barcelona and Spain to study architecture firsthand. Furthermore, we made a couple of side excursions when we managed to find some free time.

I heavily recommend studying abroad to any student of any major. It is a life-altering experience, allowing scholars to immerse themselves in fresh, new cultures and experience a different way of thinking and living. It broadens horizons and shares diversity. And it's probably the best time anyone can have in a lifetime, because it is also spending time with friends and colleagues and sharing the experience together.

Please be warned that this is a very graphics-intensive site. To keep things simple, reports have been organized according to location, and I have placed every photo full size on each page. In some cases, this means over a hundred photos on one page, each 800 pixels wide. Naturally, this will take a while to load, so please be patient. This is an archive, and as such, I have not bothered to make slick thumbnails or delineate photos according to what days they were taken, and so forth. Just sit back, grab a coffee, and enjoy the photos.

Also note that this site is best viewed on Mozilla Firefox browser at a resolution of at least 1024x768. Some pages may not display correctly on Internet Explorer.