David Rauch is a Northern Star employee studying abroad. “An American In Paris” will chronicle his studies and adventures in France.

We met for the train from Paris to Strasbourg at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

It was a program-provided trip — everything paid. That got even those who were out until 4 a.m. the night before to drag themselves out into the cold Paris morning, leaves falling and crunching quickly in the cold wind, to the distant train station, with a pastry and espresso in hand.

Because the trip was through the program, we traveled with the disapproving eye from the faculty and under the guise of learning about French/German culture.

It was to be an educational trip, Strasbourg being pivotal in European legislation. It must have been the mission of a select few of my friends and I to undermine that learning process, to speak so much English, to miss guided tours, to wear backward baseball caps in the nicest restaurants and to be unapologetically American together.

After arriving in the early afternoon, my friends and I set off for the supermarket to start the day with some local beer in the half hour before the guided tour began. We missed the tour inevitably but decided instead to have our own.

The first bar we visited was very calm and French, reserved in the beginning and eventually embracing you if you tried to learn the French word for “Another round, please” or could sing along to the Queen song playing loudly at 2 p.m.

Wandering more, we found the circular metro center and established ourselves at a quiet Irish pub that was dark and dusty except for the blaring midday sun creeping through the thick, old windows.

Across the street, we found a very friendly bar where I was able to play a glistening black piano right around sunset. A feeble old man got up to dance a little jig for the pretty girls of the program. It seems the language barrier can be broken — if there’s a will there’s a way — by old French men who like to schmooze the young American girls. A soccer match between Scotland and France began on the big-screen television, and the reactions were typically animated, fight songs probably coursing from every bar in town.

We ran off to a more reserved German beer bar and watched more of the game until we finally had to head off for dinner — provided by the program. This one we wouldn’t miss. We stumbled past a giant, dramatic Gothic church without noticing and crawled up a flight of stairs to a very classy room for a proper French dinner. The condition of the meal was to speak only French, and we spoke loudly, quickly, informally, and smothered in thick, French slang while our four or five course meal was served. I can’t remember how many.

We were used to getting looks from French servers by now.

Afterward, we wandered by chance to a stylish bar, finally nighttime and jumping, blaring ‘50s and ‘60s American music, feeling exhausted already. Some of us — myself included — hobbled home to finish off the last of the hidden bottles in the hostel rooms while others were out at disco clubs until 4 a.m.

It was wonderful to be loud. Drinking seems to be one way to coax the people out of their cultural snail shells to mix.

This was, in fact, my first bar crawl. And while it wasn’t on the syllabus, I’m glad to say that to bar crawl and have a blistering good time on a Saturday night transcends all cultural boundaries: American, French, Irish, German, rich, poor, experienced or a novice of the whole thing.

Cheers to that.

Au revoir,

David

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