Probably The Penultimate Post

Hello all,

As of this moment, I have one week and five days left in Paris before I come home.  If you can believe it, this still hasn’t really sunk in.  As I described it to a friend recently, I call this a win-win-lose situation.  1st win: I get to go home to an easy language, grocery stores I understand, friends I’ve missed, family I’ve super missed, pets I’ve super super missed (get well soon, Sumi).  2nd win: I am leaving an environment that I’ve decided isn’t really for me in a long-term sense (ie an urban environment) and going back, for better or for worse, to a summer in the middle of nowhere.  Lose: This is an incredible city in an awesome country on an amazing continent, and I don’t know when I’ll be back again.  No matter how much I’m looking forward to getting home, I’m going to be very sad to leave this place that I’ve gotten to know over the last 5 months.

That being said, I’ve been trying to formulate and finish a France Bucket List.  We’ll see if I get everything done.  What have I done so far?  Let’s see…

Last weekend I went with my program to Vaux-le-Vicomte and Fontainebleau, two chateaux near Paris.  It was sunny but chilly, making our explorations of the huge gardens a bit limited.  But the interiors of the chateaux were really cool since both of them were furnished.  It’s been a little weird going to other chateaux and trying to imagine people living in these massive, cold empty rooms.  Once you fill them up with carpets and poofy chairs and tables, it’s a little more understandable.

This past week I had my very last classes for my Paris semester, apart from my finals next week.  On Monday, Liz and I also went and had a very nice picnic in the Bois de Boulogne with all our favorites: wine, cheeses, bread (duh), raspberries, strawberries, mango, cheesecake, chocolate, and honey.  On Tuesday I went on my last monument visit with my class.  This was fun but more extreme than we had intended; we got caught in a massive storm that attacked us with rain, hail, and heavy winds for about twenty minutes before stopping as quickly as it had started.  We didn’t have it as bad as the new French president, Hollande, who had to give his various inaugural speeches outside in the rain and finished up the day by showing up late for his leadership conference in Berlin because his airplane got struck by lightning and had to turn back to Paris.  Poor guy.

I also had my last session with my 5th grade English class.  It was more hands-on than usual because the teacher didn’t show up, leaving me in charge of the class.  I surprised them all by knowing how to speak French.  At the end of the class they all tried to say goodbye to me in English.  The French for “goodbye forever” is adieu, which means something like “See you when we meet up in Heaven.” The 5th graders, however, went with the literal translation.  They all filed out the door, proudly using their English language skills to say “At God” to me one by one.

Last night, at long last, the Wheaton girls and I went to the ballet at the Bastille.  I was sitting in the 2nd balcony… I felt like a member of the senate in Star Wars.  The theatre was so massive and vertical.  I could have gone hang-gliding in there, easy.  The show was Romeo and Juliet, and it was very cool.  The set in particular was very clever; it was just two platforms on a hinge, and throughout the show the angles changed as the platforms unfolded.  I’ll have to refer to Molly on this one, but it didn’t really seem like ballet to me.  There was a bunch of opera singing, though, which was cool to hear.

Today I think I’m finally going to start studying for my exams and writing my final paper for my University class.  I’ll write one or maybe two more posts after this, but there aren’t too many days left to tell you about!

Here are the pictures:

The outside of Vaux-le-Vicomte.  Unfortunately, the dome was having some work done:

One of the furnished rooms in Vaux-le-Vicomte.  I’m not sure how they slept on such tiny beds:

In front of the hallway to the closed dome… too bad:

The gardens:

This is probably one of the coolest libraries I’ve ever seen:

One of my favorite parts of these chateaux was all the hidden doors.  I’d have loved to explore some secret passages, but they were all locked:

Beautiful swan on a beautiful lake, right?:

WRONG!  It’s actually a bloodthirsty swan on a beautiful lake:

Our picnic in the Bois:

Paroisse Notre Dame du Travail: This is the coolest church I’ve seen so far in Europe. It was made in a lower class neighborhood, with lots of laborers and such, so it was made cheap.  What’s awesome is that they took the materials from the Palais de l’Industrie from the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris (which was all made from iron) and used it to make the chuch.  So it looks like a cross between a cathedral and a train station.

The Pantheon, lookin’ majestic:

The Wheaton girls at the ballet:

Also at the ballet, a beautiful sunset:

Photo Bomb

Here are the promised photos.  Credit goes to Chrisse!

Endless happiness in the Lindt store:

A teensy weensy “road” we took a side-trip on:

Gettin’ ready to climb some trees:

Me zip-lining/Matze lounging around, not a care in the world:

Going into superhero mode:

Motorcycle!

Not a Bad Way to Wake Up

Last night, in an outburst of productive energy, I wrote myself a schedule of things to do on today’s edition of “mysterious French holiday.”  I haven’t got school, but I figured I’d get up early anyway and do some stuff.  Of course, when my alarm went off (I’m hypothesizing here, I’ve got no real memory of this event) I turned it off and rolled over without ever waking up.  Harder to ignore, though, was the marching band that came to wake me up twenty minutes later.  There’s a war monument at the end of my street, and today is the day that my town honors their soldiers.  With an early wake-up call.  It was sort of fun to hastily pull on a sweater and step out onto my balcony to watch the band come through, along with a bunch of other sleepy, ruffled Parisians on their own balconies.  Eventually, I even plucked up the courage to crawl over to the railing and take a video.  My host mom, whose bedroom is also connected to the balcony, came out at that point.  I didn’t make very good conversation, as I was concentrating on clutching the wall and inching my way back over to the safety of my window like an overenthusiastic spider-man impersonator.  Clearly, I made it.

Anyway, I haven’t got anything to show for my struggle here, because wordpress is telling me I can’t upload videos.  But the marching band did at least remind me that I DO have a blog which I should be updating, video or no.  And as it turns out, I have another heights-related story that I can include.  Insert graceful segue here:

I’ll start up where I left off, about to go to Germany.  Chrisse and Matze met me at the train station in Aachen.  I haven’t seen them nearly as much as I’d like in the past few years, so it was great to get a few solid days with them.  We stayed at Matze’s apartment, and the two of them did a great job of showing me around their part of Germany.  Some highlights:

1) German cuisine: Italian pasta.  As Chrisse and Matze are vegetarians, we didn’t go the sausage and beer route, but instead ate a whole lot of pasta, which is a popular German college kid meal.

2) More German cuisine: Swiss chocolate.  Apart from pasta, this comprised the largest part of my diet in Germany.  Chrisse and I went to a Lindt factory seconds outlet store and bought enough chocolate to make me legitimately nervous about the weight limit on my luggage for the return trip.

3) German recreation: High ropes course.  This is where my fear of heights makes another appearance.  I’m not sure if this is a thing in the United States, I had the impression that high ropes courses were just for team-building.  This was much more of a personal character-building exercise for me.  Fear cuts deeper than swords.  Anyway, I paid money to force myself up a ladder into the trees to do a bunch of obstacle courses.  It was really fun and really terrifying, and ranged from zip lines to rope swings to tightropes to riding a mini car over a hanging bridge to balancing on logs, etc.

4) More German recreation: Motorcycle ride!  Chrisse and Matze have a motorcycle, and on my last day in Germany Matze took me out for a ride.  Chrisse lent me her leather boots, leather pants, leather jacket, leather gloves, and armored motorycle vest.  Having just seen The Avengers with them, I naturally felt like a superhero.

On the way back from Germany, I found that I had unwittingly bought myself a first class train ticket.  Turns out first class is exponentially better than second class.  At first I was suspicious of the nice hostess offering me free snacks, but by the end of the two and a half hour trip I had accepted a complimentary soda, mid-trip brownie, dinner platter, glass of wine, after-dinner coffee, and after-coffee chocolate.

And now I’m back in Paris, working my way through the final stretch of my study abroad experience.  This feels both very normal and absolutely insane.  I haven’t got a huge amount of work to do, which leaves me with the big question of what to do with the last few weeks of my time in Europe.  I’m trying to put myself in the perspective of myself when I’m back in the US… what will I regret not doing?  One thing I’ve checked off that list since getting back is taking a boat tour of Paris (fun but chilly).  Another is visiting the Sewer Museum, which was very cool and very smelly.  I’ll probably have a couple more updates before I head back home, but in a little while I expect I’ll be telling a lot of you about my experiences in person.

Some Pictures: (**This is an abridged collection, because some pictures from my time in Germany aren’t yet available to me.  I’ll put them in later on.)

The ropes course… Matze was fearless:

More ropes course (why did I volunteer for this??):

Some fun pre-election demonstration… it wouldn’t be a trip to Paris if I didn’t experience a big crowd of people making some kind of point.  I believe these ones were pro-Sarkozy.  Oh well:

The trip to the Sewer Museum:

In the sewers:

 

Big Update

Ok, so it’s been a little while since I’ve posted, and I have a lot of photos to show and stories to tell.  First of all, there are some pictures in this post from Versailles (finally).  Secondly, this past week was the first of my two-week spring break, and my parents came to see me!  It was great to see them, and we did lots of fun stuff, which I will now tell you about.

Mom and dad arrived on Saturday, and after setting up in our awesome hotel we went out for a preliminary tour of the area.  They stayed right in the center of Paris, close to Notre Dame, the Louvre, and Place de la Concorde.  We had the much-anticipated picnic by the Seine (wine, cheese, bread) and then walked around a bit.  The weather said rain but it was sunny!  That evening we walked up to the Pantheon and had dinner at a crepe place.  The next day, we had pastries for breakfast then went to Montmartre and Neuilly, where I live.  We also went to the eiffel tower at night, and hung around to watch it sparkle, which it does every hour.  On Monday, we took the train to Vernon and then rented bikes to go to Giverny and Monet’s Gardens.  Once again, the weather defied forecasts for rain and gave us sun, though with a chilly wind.

On Tuesday we got on another train, this time for Grenoble down in the Alps.  The view out the window was beautiful, but I started feeling sick about halfway through the three-hour journey.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t just train-sickness but the start of a very unpleasant stomach bug.  For me, the rest of the day was a blur of trying to give my poor parents directions to our hotel and catch glimpses of the beautiful mountains in between throwing up.  The town we stayed in, Annecy, is absolutely gorgeous, and because I was sick for the first day we decided to stay an extra day there.  Mostly we just walked around the old village, checking out the canals and the awesome lake ringed by mountains.  I also spent a lot of time in bed, nibbling on these great air-flavored crackers my mom bought for me.

Finally, on Thursday we hopped back in our cute rented car and drove up to Samöens, the ski village where my host parents have a chalet.  Apparently the village was a popular retreat for children and sick people who had been prescribed fresh air for recovery.  There were also some small farms on the hills, with these incredibly steep hilly pastures for sheep and cows.  My host parents greeted us with a massive lunch, lots of wine, and iffy English for my parents.  It was very funny to hear them speaking English… a new experience for me.  The small amount of time with both my real parents and my host parents was exceedingly confusing.  I kept getting my French and English mixed up, trying to explain things to my mom and dad in French.  I couldn’t even tell you what language my dreams were in that night… very very complicated Franglish, to say the least.  Anyway, my host parents gave us a little tour of the village and valley, and took us for a drive up to “The End of the World,” where a side-valley stops short in a circle of impassable, rocky mountains.

The next morning, we left with plenty of time to get back to the train station.  We took a semi-accidental detour over to Geneva to see some Swiss mountains, then headed down a seemingly simple, straightforward highway back to Grenoble.  Several hours and a disappearing highway later, we finally got there an hour or so behind schedule… then got almost immediately lost in the tiny tangled streets of downtown.  With a half an hour until our train was scheduled to leave, I lost hope entirely.  But then all of a sudden we turned down what I am still convinced was a road for trolleys only and saw the train station ahead of us.  We parked in the first Hertz spot we saw, did the awkward late-traveler trot into the station, practically threw our keys at the car rental lady, and hopped on our train with fifteen minutes to spare.

Back in Paris, we spent the last night at my host-parents’ apartment.  We made Annie’s mac and cheese for dinner and watched an episode of Star Trek… in other words trying to simulate an average night in Vermont.  The effect was somewhat counteracted by the fancy French interior of the apartment.  In the morning, I took mom and dad back to the airport.  It was great to see them, but it did make me a little more homesick and eager to get back to Vermont.

However, I’m not yet done with my semester in Europe!  The day after tomorrow, I’m off to Germany to catch up with some friends from high school.  Then the next week I’m back to school for the last stretch before finals.  I have a few more chateaus to visit, a boat tour of Paris, and an epic Parisian picnic planned.

Pictures!

Versailles:

Gardens at Versailles:

Mom and Dad and I in Paris:

Our hotel room in Paris:

Mom and Dad enjoying tiny coffee:

Pretty desserts at Angelina’s:

Biking to Giverny:

Monet’s Garden:

Mom and I in Annecy… the weather really wasn’t as cold as my outfit suggests, but this is me halfway through my sick-day recovery:

The lake:

One of the canals through the old village of Annecy:

One of the cool tiny streets of the old village, plus a closer look at my cute Parisian outfit:

Canals at night:

My host-dad and I on the porch of their chalet:

Mom pondering the End of the World:

Versailles Minus Pictures

Hello everyone,

Once again, quite a bit of time has gone by… I find myself writing these posts again and again, and the process sometimes seems to erase the time between them.  It takes a week or more to travel from writing one post to writing the next, and yet when reading posts the transition through time is as easy as an instantaneous shift of the eye.  Time simplified into landmarks.

I have mentioned spring quite a bit in my blog already, but I’d like to comment a little more on the way spring works here.  In Vermont, winter is bleak and endless and yet one day you wake up and smell something a little more than 32 degrees, and then spring is coming and it’s just a matter of waiting impatiently.  You watch the snow melt, revel in the arrival of mud, root for the little daffodil buds poking up in the garden and then feel inordinately sad when the most daring ones are killed off by frost.  But nevertheless, spring always arrives; green inches up the mountains, you spy a red-winged blackbird, the streams start flowing like crazy, flowers pop up along the road.  In a city, I figured, things would be similar, if a little toned down.  Flowers grow in cities, and grass, and weather changes just the same.  But Paris hasn’t been like that.  First off, the weather: call it what you will, but somehow I missed winter entirely this year.  I got to Paris and it was cold.  A couple weeks later, it was mild.  A few weeks ago, it got really hot.  Now it’s cool again.  Being among so many people, I’ve gotten whiffs of all kinds of smells, good and bad, but no spring smell.  The real surprise, though, is the way things grow here.  It hasn’t been below freezing except for a few days in February, and there have been flowers planted cautiously around the city since before then.  Until a few weeks ago, though, the Jardin du Luxembourg was all gravel and dirt.  Over the span of a few days, it became a gorgeous spring-time wonderland.  But not because of spring growth… it was the spring gardeners who rolled out the grass and planted the flowers.  They also trimmed the new growth of the trees back into perfect right angles and turned on the fountains.  It’s really really beautiful, but it took me by surprise.  I had heard that the French like to enjoy nature under control (witness their famously geometric gardens) but I didn’t imagine this tendency would extend to the changing of seasons.  It’s been a weird spring for everyone, I guess.

Well that was quite a rant.  I should mention that it’s one in the morning as I write this, and I may not be as coherent as I could be.  I suppose you’d like to know a bit about my week?

The Shins concert last week was really fun.  For those of you who know their music, you know that (while they are super awesome) they’re not the most dance-worthy band.  But the audience tried its best… I won’t go into painful detail, but I can tell you there was a lot of arrhythmic swaying going on.

This week was also a big ol’ worry-fest on two fronts: 1) An exposé (oral presentation) for my French Sociology class, in front of all French students, which was on Thursday.  It went well, and more importantly it’s OVER.  2) The endless internship hunt.  As of today, though, it is also OVER.  I got an internship at Chelsea Green Publishing, which is in Vermont.  Self-five!

Today I went with my program to Versailles.  The palace was very crowded and gold-leafed, and the garden was pretty magical.  For one thing, there were cool maze forest things.  For another thing, hidden speakers made it seem like the trees were playing classical music.  We got to see the fountains in action and eat some ice cream, so I’d call it a success.  Unfortunately, my camera died after the first few rooms in the palace, so I’m waiting for Liz to send me some foster photos.  I’ll put them up when I get them.  In the meantime…

This is the breakfast I wake up to every morning:

I forgot to show you Invalides, from a few weeks ago:

Napoleon’s tomb… I found it a little tacky.  Inside are I think seven different caskets, each made out of a different material, containing (or so it’s rumored) the bones of one of Napoleon’s servants.

Another tomb that I thought was much cooler:

A couple cute little cars by the Seine:

Churches in Paris: No dogs, cell phones, or cleavage:

All I managed to get before my camera died… the chapel at Versailles:

A Week and Provence

Hello again,

Tonight, I’m going to see The Shins in concert.  This is a moment I’ve been waiting for since Erich first showed me their music in 8th grade on a car ride to Indiana.  It’s a big day.  It’s also warm and sunny, as it was last week.

Speaking of last week(expert segue), you probably want to hear what I’ve been up to.  Last week my host parents were in the Alps, so I was on my own for the week.  It was easy to pretend I was going home each evening, baguette under my arm, to my own fancy apartment in the suburbs of Paris.  It’s nice to pretend these things as long as I’m not paying for them.

Events for last week include:

1) Liz’s birthday tea party at Angelina’s.  I got the Fraise, which is “Toasted brioche, Bourbon vanilla crème brûlée, wild strawberry purée, fresh strawberries, sablé cookies.”  It tasted good, that’s all I know for sure.

2) OFII exam, which is a mandatory doctor’s appointment to get me approved to stay in France.  I passed with flying colors, after shuffling from waiting room to waiting room, practicing my French letters and numbers in the eye exam, and getting a souvenir chest x-ray.

3) The Hunger Games (in English, with French subtitles).  I was really impressed by the acting in the movie, as well as by the huge number of French ads that came before it.

4) Going over to some of my host parents’ friends house for dinner.  I think my host parents set this dinner up so I wouldn’t eat alone every night.  It was fun to see a totally different style of apartment– very modern and artsy and cluttered, compared to my own fancy, antique-filled one.

So then on Saturday morning I went with my program to Provence, an area in Southern France.  We went to Avignon, Uzes, and Arles.  We saw a cathedral, an awesome market, a Roman aqueduct, one of the biggest surviving Roman arenas, and a palace where some popes lived.    It was very warm and mediterranean, with tons of awesome tiny streets and old buildings (asusual).  I had olives and falafel for lunch, and spent some quality time sitting in the sun talking to my bank (they forgot to send me a new debit card, oops).  We spent the night in Arles, then came back to Paris on Sunday.  Since then I’ve been doing homework.  I’ve got a lot of work to do between now and spring break– a presentation anda paper for one class, a presentation for another class, a paper for a third class, and a fun assignment for my teaching assistant position.  The teacher I work with wants me to put together a presentation on my life in the United States for the students.  It’ll be in English, but it’s actually kind of difficult to speak only with the vocabulary and tenses they’ve learned so far.  After break, though, I’ll be done with the majority of my work for the semester, crazily enough.

Some pictures:

Me and my Fraise at Angelina’s:

Spring in Paris:

Stained Glass in Arles:

Aqueduct:

Some kayakers by the aqueduct:

Our tour guide going to face the bulls in the arena… or looking for a way around the construction work.  One or the other, I forget which:

The only remnants of a huge Roman theatre:

Oh wait, here are a few more remains:

Underground tunnels that used to be an above-ground market (all cities in Europe seem to be built on other cities):

Dasom and I in the Pope’s palace:

Wooden roof on a very stoney building:

My new rules, since I’ve been reading too much English and not doing my homework:

The Shins!  In the future… or maybe I just waited until after the concert to post this:

Spring and All

Hello,

Please find attached my cover letter and resume expressing my interest in an internship with your compan… oh wait, this isn’t another internship application.  This week has been a kind of fever-dream of researching, applying to, and fretting about job opportunities for this summer.  It feels odd to be in Paris but have responsibilities and obligations to take care of at home… it’s like I’m remotely organizing another life, which I suppose I sort of am.  The prospect is exciting, daunting, and probably not what you want to hear about on my Paris blog.  However, it’s necessary to at least mention internships in a description of my week.

In other news, spring has sprung.  Yesterday I wore a skirt and t-shirt, and was actually too warm for some of the day.  I predict that the metro is going to get really unpleasant as it warms up… in winter rush hour was a welcome source of body heat, but I think it’ll just become sweaty and stuffy from now on.  My adventures for the week have mostly involved being outside.  I took a trip to the Chateau de Vincennes again, this time to go check out the massive Bois de Vincennes, where the king used to go hunting.  I think he’d have a hard time finding game in there these days, but it was very pretty and I think I’ll go back with a bicycle one day.  I also had a pretty typical Parisian moment yesterday with Liz and Anna, sitting by the Seine on Ile de la Cité (where Notre Dame is).  The return of spring also means a return of tourists, and I’m starting to see Paris in its more crowded state.  I’m learning to avoid the busiest areas.

In other news, I have become brave enough in this warm weather to creep carefully out onto my 5th floor balcony (my fear of heights made this a less-than-dignified process, with lots of unnecessary crouching and gripping of the doorframe).  My host mom also put a pot of forsythias in front of my window and floral sheets on my bed… it’s all very festive.

This weekends events include going to an Irish pub tonight for St. Patrick’s day and going to Angelina’s Cafe for pastries and hot chocolate tomorrow (also known as Liz’s birthday).  Next weekend I’m going to Provence with my program, so my post will be delayed until I get back from that.  I know you’ll all be hanging off the edge of your seats in anticipation, but please try to contain yourselves.

Not many pictures this week, I’m afraid:

A mossy angel outside the eglise Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, by the Louvre:

Awesome pink interior:

Me, book, and forsythia (Hugo)… Best friends forever: