Moni's Blog

School is school, even in Paris

Malheuresement, i seem to have lost my cable for uploading pictures from my camera to my computer. So, while i search for a new one, i'm afraid i won't be able to add any new pictures to the site. Hopefully i'll find one soon. Still, since i should be writing my first paper, i'll take a few minutes to tell you guys about my week.
The two highlights of this week (the things i would have pictures of to post, if i could) were Tuesday afternoon, when Malkah and i walked from the Arc de Triomphe to La Defense, and Wednesday, when we had a "sortie" to Saint-Chappelle.
Alors...Tuesday:
Tuesday afternoon we didn't have french class, so Malkah and i decided to go on a long walk. We took the metro to the Arc de Triomphe, and walked Northwest out into the suburbs to La Defense, a large corporate center filled with modern art, including an arch that is theoretically a modernization of the other arches in Paris (they all line up). I think it's kind of an interesting statement about the French that in the Napoleonic era they built an arch dedicated to triumph, and post WWII they've built one dedicated to defense.
They day was absolutely lovely...we walked up the Avenue Grand Armée, past a flea market selling beautiful but certainly MAD expensive antiques, out into Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of Paris' nice suburbs, as opposed to Paris' inner-city style suburbs. We had a really nice "promenade," not hurrying, but taking our time to inspect shop windows and modern sculptures. Just as we arrived at La Defense clouds started rolling in, and a flash thunderstorm started just as we were ready to catch the metro back to the city. By the time we made it back to the center of paris, the storm had passed. We met Adelle and Sarah in the Latin Quarter, and found a cafe (kinda touristy) on the Place de la Sorbonne to sit and do our homework.
Wednesday we went to Sainte-Chappelle, which was gorgeous. It's a chapel dating to the third century, that used to be the private chapel of the monarchs of France. There's an upper chapel and a lower one, and the upper is known as the "chapel of a thousand windows," because it has stained glass all around that's creates basically an incredibly beautiful glass comic book of the Bible, with a few scenes from early Christian history tossed in for good measure. The only problem with this was that our guide seemed to be tempted to talk us through the entire Bible while we stared up at these windows...luckily after going through Genesis and Exodus he seemed to realize that we didn't have the necessary attention spans, and wrapped it up after hitting just a few more high points.
Wednesday night i stayed up til 5 to watch the debate and um...yeah...Kerry won. Is pretty much what i have to say on that. It seemed to me that even when Bush was presented with a question when he had something good to say, he failed to answer well. (ex. deviating to education on the minimum wage question.) And i was particularly impressed with Kerry's directness in answering the question on homosexuality - given Kerry's tendencies, i would have expected him to give a wishy-washy political answer like Bush's, but instead he came straight out and took a stand - good for him!
Having been up that late Wednesday night, i was too tired last night to do anything other than watch half of Love, Actually with the girls and collapse into bed, but hopefully i can get this paper finished and have some fun this weekend. Guess i should get back to it.

Love y'all

posted by Monica @ 5:37 AM