dallas
hey guys
so i hugely slacked off about updating this towards the end of the quarter...i'm really sorry...school got really busy, and it was quite a challenge to keep with work while at the same time trying to make the most of our last weeks in Paris. I'd say we did a pretty good job of it. :-) It would take me several decades to write about everything that's happened since i last updated. If you want to hear about it, you should really call me. So yeah...now i'm back in Dallas for 2 1/2 weeks before heading back to Chicago. It's nice to be home, but i miss Paris...i think i'll be going back some day. Thanks a lot to everyone who sent me e-mails and cards and left me messages...keep it up! And if you're going to be in Chicago for New Years Eve, you should spend it at my apartment. :-)
love y'all.
Update part 2
Ok, so my laundry still has 13 minutes...stupid machines. But anyway, to continue...
Last wednesday we had a field trip to the Musée Carnavelet, which is a museum of Parisian history. We only really saw the stuff dealing with the French Revolution. I would definitely like to go back to see more of the museum, but that day we needed to get home to work on papers, which were due at 8am Thursday. We did however take time to get lunch. The musée is in Le Marais, which is the old Jewish quarter (and the new gay quarter), and the best falafel in the world is available there. That was a VERY satisfying lunch.
This weekend - Friday night went to hang out for a while with Chris' french friend Étienne. He lives in an apartment on the Right Bank with a lovely view of Sacre Coeur. After spending a little bit of time at his place, we went to a club that a bunch of Étienne's trendy parisien friends from the École Normale had taken over. We had a good time dancing.
Saturday morning took the metro to a park in the Northeast of the city, then walked all the way back to the Left Bank, spending quite a long time in the Pere La Chaise cemetery, where a lot of famous people are buried, most notably Jim Morrison. I didn't actually make it to Morrison's grave, or Sarah Bernhardt's, but i did see Oscar Wilde's. I'll have to go back.
Today went to the Louvre with Chris, and saw the Italian and Dutch Renaissance paintings, then walked home so that we wouldn't feel uber-touristy.
Anyway, that's about it. Tomorrow if it's open i'm gonna go to the Picasso museum, then it's over to the Centre to register for Winter Quarter classes - i'm so excited - if i get what i want, not only will the classes be really cool, but i won't have class Monday OR Friday. yeah, that's gorgeous. But it may be difficult to pull off.
Ok, time to go actually go transfer my laundry, then start dinner.
Love y'all
Sorry!
Allright, so here's the thing. I know it's been several decades since i posted...what's been happening is that my photo site has been quite annoying. So every time i start to try and post, i attempt to load photos and fail miserably and get really depressed and don't feel like writing anything anymore. So now i'm writing before i even attempt to do anything with my photos. Let's see...what have been the highlights of the time since i last posted?
Last weekend...Friday...went to Versailles. I HATE VERSAILLES. The ostentation of the decoration and the horror of absolute monarchy are nauseating. Still, it was a fun time just because of being in a big group, and getting to have another really nice meal with our teachers.
Saturday I went to the Rodin museum, which was absolutely beautiful. Especially after reading Descartes and thinking about pure reason for a week, it was nice to see a sculptor who's so into passion and despair. That night went to dinner in Montmartre - we tried to go to a fondue restaurant, but it's apparently like the most popular place in Paris - line out the door, so we ended up being called into the Indian restaurant next door. Decent, but not great. What WAS great was the jazz concert in the Bastille that we went to afterwards. It was in a really cool, dark little basement room - there was a female singer with a drummer and an amazing bassist. She did a lot of really classic songs, and some cool new things, like Hendrix covers.
Sunday went with my friend Evan to the English language used bookstore, then walked home from Montparnasse. Evan's an architecture student, so it was fun walking with him and having all the cool windows and lofts pointed out to me.
Ok, i'll finish this up after i transfer my laundry from the washer to the dryer.
Love y'all
Putain
Day of mourning.
It's not so much the end result that gets me, ok, well it is, but it's also how un-close it's turned out to be. I feel alienated, lost. My vision of America in no way lines up with what has happened today. I try to tell myself that it's only 4 years, really only 2...i'm trying to rejoice, at least, in Obama's victory. But it's hard to think positively at this point. Look at what's happened in the past 4 years. 1000+ American KIDS, just like the kids i went to high school with MURDERED along with countless Iraqis for NO GOOD REASON. And that's just a tiny tiny little part of it.
I'm just confused. And sad. Don't have much else to say. Love y'all
Weekend
So it's been awhile, I'm sorry. last weekend we were taken away on a lovely trip to the provinces. We had a very comfortable charter bus with a totally awesome bus driver named Hugh. We were fed lots of incredible food and slept in some great hotels. I took some marvelous pictures, and i'll get them up soon, but for now, how bout a day-to-day?
Thursday:
We got up crazy early Thursday morning and took a train to Chartres, where, after getting a cup of coffee to wake us up, we took a tour of the Cathedral, which is magnificent and old, and has a really cool labyrinth in the floor that pilgrims would have to crawl around on their knees. After viewing the Cathedral we went to the first of our wonderful meals, at an adorable french country restaurant all done up in blue and yellow. We then drove to our first hotel - a collection of pretty little cabins in the woods outside the town of Le Mans. After an hour or so of frantic prettifying, we got back on the bus and left for a Medieval Abbey that has since been converted to the seat of government for the department of Sarthe. We had a question-and-answer session and then dinner with a man who is the Director General of the department of Sarthe, and also Vice President of the French Senate. Basically he's like a state governor and a senator at the same time. So as you can imagine, the evening was fascinating and the dinner was REALLY good. How did we get this opportunity, you ask? "Monsieur le President's" son went to the UofC. Undergrad and Masters. Yep. If there was one thing we learned throughout the entire trip, it was that apparently our ridiculously high tuition payments are worth something after all.
Friday:
Friday all day was passed at a Monastery in the town of Sevres, called the Abbaye St. Pierre. They're world-famous as being the preservers of the Gregorian Chants. We went to two religious services - morning mass and vespers, in the afternoon, and had 3 question and answer sessions, two with two different monks and one with a pair of nuns, who had to talk to us from behind a grille because they live a completely cloistered life. I think the day made us all think a lot about religion and about choices that people make. After leaving the monastery we drove through the Loire Valley to our second hotel. This was supposed to be some sort of Youth Hostel, but when we got there it became evident that it was more like a summer camp house, meant for younger children - there were Roald Dahl posters on the walls, and classrooms full of toys and finger paint. The room i shared with 4 other girls wasn't bad, but apparently the rooms our teachers were staying in were terrible, so they decided to find a new hotel for the third night. But that night we still made the best of it, invading one of the classrooms and singing showtunes and pop songs until midnight. (i should point out that we were literally the only people in the building, even the managers weren't there, so we didn't bother anyone.)
Saturday:
We woke up and drove to a medieval town called Loche, which is where Joan of Arc convinced Charles VII to proclaim himself king of France. Loche has both a medieval castle/fortress and an early renaissance royal residence, and we toured both. It was an absolutely beautiful fall day in an absolutely beautiful little town, and it was impossible not to be happy. From Loche we drove to Chinon, which is a wine region and also where Rabelais lived. Leonardo da Vinci, when he lived (and died) in France, had a house near there as well, but according to Sylvie, our head French teacher, "there's nothing to see there." In Chinon we checked into our final hotel, found at the last minute by our inestimable French vamp Program Coordinator Astrid. This was a cute little hotel in the center of the village, built around a courtyard in which the proprietor's adorable small sons were playing. We had 2 free hours to walk around the village, which was nice, especially since by then Malkah and i, in particular, were getting sick of constantly doing things in a huge group. The group reconvened at a cavern for a wine-tasting, which was a lot of fun...i had escargots for the first time - it was good! After we'd enjoyed the wine, a group of us went with our teachers to an "Irish Pub" and sat around talking. It was a lot of fun - our teachers are very cool people.
Sunday:
Sunday we visited Chambourd, one of the most gorgeous castles in the Loire Valley - it was built by Francis I, and may have been partially designed by Leonardo da Vinci. It has this incredibly cool double spiral staircase, among other neat design features. After a VERY special guided tour of the castle (we went into so many rooms with no entrance signs on them!), we had our final lovely meal of the trip, then our final journey with our beloved Hugh, after which Adelle thanked him for his "chauffage" which means heat, (she meant to say "chauffeurage), and finally got on a train and returned to Paris.
And have been here ever since...which has been a long time. I'm a horrible updater. Another weekend has passed since i started this entry. Not that much happened tho...we had a second paper due Friday and have all still been recovering. Celebrated halloween, which was fun. Had today (Monday) off for All Saints Day. But it's a busy week coming up. I'm not sleeping tomorrow night, to watch the elections. Speaking of...VOTE!!!!! (for Kerry, PLEASE!)
Love y'all...i'll try to get more pics up soon.
yay!
Yay! Pictures! Now i'm gonna get back to replenishing my music library by copying Charles' cds, but soon i'll try to post the pictures from Saturday night when we all went out clubbing.
Love y'all
AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
This is horrible...it makes me want to cry: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/opinion/15krugman.html
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
Il pleure dans la ville comme il pleure dans mon coeur...
So our second weekend in Paris was quite lovely. Friday night at the club was fun - lots of dancing to really strange songs, lots of irish people filling the streets on the way home...i watched the debate, and am surprised that they aren't saying that there's a clear winner. Kerry just seemed so much more presidential...or maybe it's just that Kerry actually seemed to HAVE A BRAIN. I don't know, when your political opponent knows your financial holdings better than you do, that's pretty sad.
Saturday I got up (after about 5 hours of sleep), and went to the Centre Pompidou, the museum of contemporary art. With a student of art history card that the University supplies, we get into the permanent collections of most of them museums for free, which is pretty cool. I had a great time walking around the museum and saw some really incredible pieces of art. Their cubist collection is particularly awe-inspiring. I had made plans to meet Adelle and Malkah to shop at 3, so i walked in the rain from the Centre Pompidou to Les Halles, and met the girls to take the train to Printemps Haussman, which is the oldest department store in the world. They were in the midst of their annual sale, and the store was incredibly crowded. Malkah got tired of it after a while and left to find a cafe to do homework, but Adelle and i spent several hours wandering amongst/trying on/buying/wishing we could buy the cool French clothes.
Saturday night i watched the last half of the France-Ireland soccer game. The Irish did surprisingly well...i guess the French really are declining. Later that evening we tried to go to a couple of free clubs on the Champs-Elysees, but Fashion Week begins tomorrow, so all the leaders of the cult of beautiful people in the world are here now, and they were the only people getting into clubs.
Today Malkah and i went to Montmartre and visited the Sacre Coeur before settling into a cafe midway down the hill to do our homework. We had a really lovely and productive afternoon on the North side of Paris. And now i've passed a few hours playing with the computer and should really be doing something else.
Love y'all!
View from Pompidou Centre 4
View from Pompidou Centre 3
View from Pompidou Centre 2
View from Pompidou Centre 1
