Cuisinez! and Monet

The past couple of days in review:

Went to classes per usual and did homework – not so exciting, even in Paris. Tuesday afternoon Abbey, Nick and I attempted to do a little sightseeing but the combination of a closed exhibit and rainy weather severely limited our outing. Friday morning we had our second architecture visit looking at 17th and 18th century architecture, I believe (I should probably figure that out for sure shouldn’t I?). We saw a couple of Hôtel Particuliers that were quite pretty (well their façades at least) and also the inside of two churches. I suggest reading the first part of my friend Abbey's blog for more details about the architecture tour, she does a pretty excelent job describing not only what we saw, but also our somewhat nutty professor! Look for her name under the list of my friends' blogs on the left of this page.

After the walking tour I headed straight to the Louvre to meet up with my host mom, her friend and her friend’s husband to go to a cooking exposition. They basically had all of these booths set up demonstrating different products (blenders, whipped cream canisters and peelers to name a few) and foods/ drinks such as whisky, flavored dulce de leche and juices. There were also cooking demonstrations by chefs, some of whom are seen often on French cooking channels. To my Albuquerque readers – it kind of felt like a giant “Now We’re Cooking,” but with more food samples = heaven for Devon! I did some taste testing, including a raspberry milkshake (the idea seemed quite foreign to most of the people watching they kept asking about the ingredients and if you could just put them all in the blender at once), Tropicana juice “smoothies” (I love how the French pronounce the word smoothie – the concept of blending different fruits together for juice also seemed to be a difficult idea to grasp), whiskey (a ten-year and a sixteen-year – I liked the sixteen-year old better), apple liqueur (delicious! I bought a mini bottle) and crème de cassis (also bought a mini bottle so I could make a homemade kir or two!). Overall it was quite a fabulous and delicious afternoon, but I was quite exhausted by the time we headed home.

Today (Saturday) I went to Giverny to see Claude Monet’s home and gardens as well as the American Art Museum. I had to get up early to take the metro to the St. Lazare train station and from there I took a 45-minute train ride to Rouen. Giverny is just the next town over across the river and I took a special bus the rest of the way. The American Art Museum’s collection was rather “petit” but there was a wall with four paintings on it, of which I absolutely loved them all. I bought a postcard of one of the paintings before heading over to Monet’s house. His house was very pretty and decorated mostly with Asian items and had brightly colored walls. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take photos. The gardens were gorgeous despite this being the last weekend they’re open until April! Wild flowers were everywhere and the streams and ponds with water lilies were fabulously picturesque. I felt as if I was standing in the middle of one of his paintings – which I guess I basically was. After Monet’s gardens I decided to splurge for lunch and ate at a hotel restaurant down the street. I had a gallette with Roquefort cheese and walnuts, a boule of cidre (glass of cider) and a lemon sugar crepe. It was all delicious!! There was a dog at the next table over that resembled Whisky quite a bit and seemed very ready to come over and play with me, but sadly his owner wouldn’t let him, despite his barking and wining to do so when I smiled at him. His owner did however make a special trip out to the car after ordering his food just to get the doggy’s bowl, jar of food and cheese. The wife then mixed the cheese with food before giving it to the dog who seemed less than interested. She should have let him play with me! After lunch I wandered down the street a little more, enjoying the tiny, picturesque French town in all of its autumnal glory before taking the bus back to the train station.

Three of my four midterms are next week and then my friend Emily is coming to visit for the weekend Thursday evening, so I’m dedicating tomorrow to making study guides for my exams! Perhaps you will get a post if something interesting happens between then and now, but most likely there will be one either while Emily is here, or shortly after her departure.

Click on the title of the post for pictures of Giverny!

Cow, Wind Turbine, Chateau... Repeat.

I had a fabulous weekend in Nantes with Emily (a friend from UPS who is also a Theta)! I was able to get all of my homework for Monday done Thursday night, so I just brought a little reading for Tuesday with me incase I was bored on the train. Friday I took the metro to Gare Montparnasse and caught the 11am train to Nantes. The ride was only 2 hours and I spent 40 minutes or so dozing and the rest staring out the window, fascinated by French countryside after being in Paris for a month and a half. I felt like I had more culture shock seeing wide-open spaces with trees and cows than adjusting to living in France. I loved looking out the window and seeing not only farm houses, fields and cute small French towns, but also wind power turbines and numerous chateaux (French castles)!! I definitely decided that one of those needs to be on my “To Buy” list…

So I got to Nantes at 1pm and Emily met me at the train station. We hit the ground running and headed over to her IES building because they were taking a field trip to the “Mechanical Island” and I was tagging along. I left my luggage in one of the offices and we took a 10 minute walk over to the island where they have among other things, a giant mechanical elephant!! It was quite cool to see, but a ride on it lasts 40 minutes and we decided it wasn’t that cool. We looked around the rest of the workshop where they had other mechanical animals such as a squid and crab that also moved and squirted water. After we had exhausted the possibilities there we went back to IES to pick up my suitcase and then to Emily’s house to drop it off. She introduced me her host mom who told us she and her husband were heading to their other house for the weekend so we would have the house to ourselves. It was now 3:30 or so and I still had not had lunch so we went to Monoprix and decided to buy a snack and we would have a later dinner. We ate our food at Place Royal… very pretty, I’m sad now I didn’t think to take a picture. On our way back to Emily’s house we stopped to admire wedding dresses in a couple of the store windows. Back at Emily’s we ran into her host mom and dad finishing packing up the car to leave. We went upstairs wasted some time on the computer and then decided at 7 we were tired and needed to nap before going out since we were meeting up with some French friends of Emily’s at 9:30pm for a “verre” (glass of wine). We napped for a little while and finally headed out to dinner at 8:30pm. We found a Thai/ Vietnamese restaurant with reasonable prices and what turned out to be yummy, but smaller portioned food. After dinner we met up with her friend and some of his friends at a small place that was half tea parlor, half bar. I enjoyed it a lot! I introduced Emily to Kir (she got a raspberry flavored one while I stuck to the traditional cassis) and we stayed there until about midnight chatting.

Saturday we met up with another one of Emily’s French friends, Beatrice, and went to the marché (market). We meandered around the stalls and bought lots of fruit (Italian grapes – my favorite! – orange, the most delicious strawberries I have ever tasted – and perhaps the most expensive – pink pomelo – not sure how it was different from grapefruit – and a coing which resembled a pear-apple cross, but tasted like star-fruit to me). We then got sandwiches for lunch and sat at a café and ordered hot chocolate since it was chilly but sunny. By this time Emily and I were exhausted from all the walking and headed home to relax, we spent the afternoon watching old Gossip Girl episodes since Emily just started watching the show. We decided to get Chinese takeout for dinner, a process that took us an hour from leaving the house to get back, but had quite the feast of curry chicken, basil beef and chow mein. The evening was spent watching more gossip girl.

Today we slept in and then had brunch before heading out to see the local chateau and cathedral. We meandered down a couple cute French streets and admired the gothic architecture. A little French park then caught my eye before heading back to her house to pick up my suitcase and head over to the train station. I took the train back into Paris and got a little bit of reading done before falling asleep for most of the rest of the trip.

Now I’ve unpacked and eaten dinner, I might try to do a little more homework before heading to bed. Classes tomorrow again…

Click the title for photos!

Why Don't You Drive Like a Native?

So it seems to be standard driving practice in Paris for many cars to sit in the middle of an intersection waiting to make a left turn and when the light for oncoming traffic turns red about 6-8 cars turn left (2 at a time into one lane) on the red. Well this afternoon I was waiting to cross a street and watching this phenomenon when I noticed a minivan that seemed to have made a somewhat wider turn than the other cars and thus got cut off from merging onto the side street. Well this isn't usually something you see in Paris, and what's more the minivan wasn't cutting it's way back in after the first car went by! I had to investigate further to see who could possibly be driving this timidly in a capital where the only rule of the road I have yet to figure out is that anything goes. So I look more closely at the driver (male) who is sitting in a rather familiar, but at the same time foreign, position.. leaning back, one hand on the wheel. As my eyes refocussed to get a better look, I noticed a license plate sitting on the dashboard from, drumroll please.... Florida! Laughing with my dawning comprehension of the source of his inability to drive correctly in Paris and tried to give him a commiserating smile as he drove by.

P.S. Mom - I've been meaning to tell you, everyone in Paris drives just like you - you'd love it!

Long Time, No Post...

So it appears that I have gotten worse about updating my blog, not better like I had hoped. This week once again seems to have escaped me, despite my best attempts to get ahead.

Since my last update I have had my first Architecture of Paris visit, gone to the Louvre twice and also visited the Père Lachaise cemetery (something I’ve wanted to do since Mme. Sowar read us a story senior year of high school!). I also went to class (duh!) and tried to get ahead on my homework since I knew I’d be missing classes on Thursday for Yom Kippur. I thought I was on track to be successful, but still somehow managed to not have most of my homework for Thursday done ahead of time. Well I guess I’ll start at the beginning for the interesting stuff.

My architecture visit consisted of visiting Notre Dame, St. Severin (another church) and Hôtel Cluny (a large mansion from the middle ages – now a medieval history museum, I believe). Notre Dame was spectacularly huge as usual and also rather filled with people. We sat in the pews and my professor lectured a little about the capitals and what was early gothic and late gothic and then we walked around the church and she talked some more about vaults and support columns. Then we head over to St. Severin, which was much smaller and I found prettier, because you could actually see details and didn’t feel like part of the masses (no pun/ reference intended). We did get kicked out a little early because they were starting Mass, but got to see some great contrast between “rayonnant” and “flamboyant” gothic styles. Last on the list was Hôtel Cluny and by this time in was starting to rain. So it was just a quick lecture in the courtyard and a quick look at one of the few examples of medieval style gardens, which I found quite pretty and rather modern looking (sadly I don’t think I took a photo).

I’m going to try to combine my two Louvre visits into one, so as not to over bore you with random artifacts. I have now covered the entire basement and first story of the Louvre (I am rather proud of this feat – and look forward to covering the second and third stories in the near future). There is so much more in the Louvre than I could have possibly imagined when I was there 2 years ago. I'm still astounded half the time when I walk into a new room and see everything they have, not to mention how gorgeous the building is in and of itself! Last Friday my trip consisted solely of ancient Egypt, while today I covered what amounted to the ancient Middle East (Babylonia, Syria, Iraq and probably some other areas that I’m now forgetting – My brain has now officially been overly immersed in French, I just tried to spell Iraq the French way and could not figure out why spell-checker didn’t like it) and French sculpture. The French sculpture that was originally intended for gardens and other outdoor areas is kept in what used to be an outdoor courtyard of the Louvre which they covered in a high glass ceiling to keep the effect. My overall impression from these two visits is that the Louvre must have what amounts to these countries’ entire collections of artifacts and I wonder how there could possibly be anything left there or for any other museum. The collections are gigantic and in many cases they have whole parts of walls and what seem like buildings within the Louvre. I can’t even begin to imagine how they got everything there.

I did almost trip over Hammurabi’s Code today while at the Louvre. I was walking along and saw this big black stone and thought to myself, “ok…,” but then there was some big French writing on the wall next to it so I started reading it (it was an extract from what the stone said) and as I started to think that these rules sounded familiar and then I looked at the other wall and in big letters it said Hammurabi and I went “OHHH!” I didn’t even know the Louvre had the stone with Hammurabi’s Code. Sadly my pictures of that didn’t come out as well as I thought, so I will be returning next time just to snap a couple of better photos.

Père Lachaise was pretty amazing as well. It’s a huge cemetery with a fair number of famous people and many more beautiful graves. My walking tour book had a walk specifically for Père Lachaise, so I did that and then went in search of the grave of Abelard and Heloise. They are famous lovers and my French teacher in high school read our class a story about them, which kept the class, at least the girls, after the bell to hear the ending (If you would like to know more click their names… This doesn’t do the story justice like the telling I heard, but I believe it was in French and thus do even less justice than this for most of my readers). Sadly, the grave is currently being restored so it wasn’t the most photogenic of opportunities, but I snapped a couple of photos nonetheless.

I have yet to decide what I am doing with the rest of my weekend. I want to go to Giverny, but I’m not sure if that will end of being this weekend or the weekend after next, it will be quite a long day trip involving a train and a shuttle bus so I want to make sure I have the time and energy for it. Hopefully it will still be beautiful in the fall. Next weekend I am off to Nantes to visit my friend Emily, who is also a Theta back at UPS and studying abroad for the semester! I am quite excited and have already purchased my train tickets for that. Her host family is being very kind and allowing me to stay at their house, so luckily I won’t have to pay for a hotel room as well.

I really will try to update at least once if not twice before then, and definitely once I get back!

Click below for photos:

Louvre (sorry there are some repeats from the last post)
Gothic Architecture and Pere Lachaise

A Week of Haute Couture, Homework and Hebrew

So I have been rather terrible about updating my blog this past week (read: didn’t do it)… I let the stress of classes and missing classes for the Rosh Hashanah get the best of me and got lost somewhere under the pile of assignments and reading and I had to do. It is Thursday night, meaning the end of my school week, and I have finally resurfaced! So let’s start at the beginning.

Saturday I went to the Madeline district which is basically composed of the Madeline (a really HUGE church constructed in the ancient Greek/ Roman style) and lots of designer/ couture shops that made me really depressed I’m not living off of a large trust-fund. Dior had some amazing looking purses as well as Hermès in addition to their coveted scarves. I also wandered past the windows of Chanel, Longchamps and many others. Sunday I stayed at home, rested and tried to get ahead on homework since I knew I’d be missing class on Tuesday… obviously that didn’t work out so well, despite that I thought I got a decent amount done.

La Madèline

Monday I went to classes and then synagogue in the evening with Shaina, another girl from IES. I found a conservative synagogue in the 15th arrondisement that I really like – it feels almost like I’m back in the states, except for the French. I went back again Tuesday for services, but after 4+ hours my brain was feeling tired from trying to be trilingual. I returned to the apartment and tried to get a little more homework done before setting out for the Eiffel Tower to do Tashlich by the Seine (Tashlich is a service done between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur where we symbolically cast away our sins from the previous year by throwing bread crumbs in a running body of water). I met up with Shaina and we waited a little while for the rest of the congregation to show up. As we were getting ready to start, an Orthodox synagogue showed up and we all scooted away as to not intermingle – silly Jews! We did Tashlich and then as Shaina and I were about to leave this lady came up to us and started talking 20 miles a minute in French about Orthodox Jews: how she used to be one, how there were so many girls there just to find husbands and numerous other things. She barely gave Shaina and I a chance to throw in a “oui” or “d’accord” in acknowledgement so I’m not sure if she even figured out we weren’t French by the end of the mostly one-sided, yet very interesting, conversation. In the course of her telling us a good chunk of her life history I figured out she was the cantor’s wife! She seemed really friendly, so maybe I’ll run into her again at services.

Where we did Tashlich

Wednesday and Thursday were just playing catch-up from what I missed at school. Today this girl at school told me about a designer consignment shop in the 17th arrondisement, which I am dying to go check out. Aparrently most of the stuff is only worn once and they have Prada shoes, Louis Vuitton and Hermès purses and Hermès scarves... While still out of my price range one of these items might be buyable at the end of the semester if I'm good about not spendin too much money!

This evening (Thursday) my host mother invited the couple in the apartment next door over for an “aperitif.” Angeline and Loren (?? Maybe I’m not sure if that is his name now) are in their early 30’s I would guess – Angeline might be a tad younger and the both seem really genial and kind (they’re also Jewish – and there was much talk about who was Sephardic and who was Ashkenazic and making fun of the Sepharadim by the lady who is Ashkenazic – I’m sorry if I’ve lost my non-Jewish readers). We got invited over to their apartment tomorrow night for a surprise birthday party for the man’s daughter from his previous marriage (she’s turning 7!). I also got invited to go out to dinner with them and Angeline’s brother next Friday at 10:30pm at some restaurant, I can’t even remember there. Angeline also is planning on taking me out clubbing sometime soon as she was horrified to hear I haven’t been yet and her brother is a DJ at one of the big clubs in Paris. She seemed very excited to have someone to go clubbing with and warned Marie-Claire that we might not get back until 4am… at least we live in the same building so I won’t be going home by myself at that hour! I think that’s all for now, I’m rather exhausted, would like to catch up on my American TV a little and I have my first field trip for my architecture class tomorrow!