Walking, Walking, Everywhere!

Well the election is over and perhaps I will now not be bombarded with the question of who I’m voting for every time someone finds out I’m American. A lot of kids from my program went out to American bars and such last night, staying up to watch the election results as they came in. I decided I preferred sleep and set an alarm for 4am so I could check out what was going on then. Abbey also called me at 5am after they had officially called the election for Obama to let me know.

This past weekend was Fall Break! I spent most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday procrastinating from writing and then eventually writing a 5 page single spaced paper as part of an application for a summer internship… Monday I went to the Louvre in the morning and walked around half of the second floor looking at French and Italian paintings from the 15th – 18th centuries I believe. I saw a couple of famous pieces I had studied in my art history class last year, which was pretty cool. I saw the Mona Lisa from a distance as I negotiated the crowds around it to get to the next room. I really find it unimpressive and not worth being jostled around my impatient tourists all using their cameras’ flashes when all the signs specifically say you can’t! I’m really unimpressed with the Louvre as far as their artistic esthetic goes… they seem to spend very little time organizing paintings so that you can fully appreciate them, often putting them one on top of another two or three high in small rooms where you can’t get far enough away from the wall to see the higher painting. I feel they are much more interested in the quantity of items collected!

Monday evening I finished up my essay and felt quite relieved to have it behind me. Tuesday my friend Emily, who was here the weekend before, was back in town, just for the day. She and 3 other friends went to Italy for fall break and their plane arrived in Paris at 8am and their train back to Nantes wasn’t until 9pm. I met up with Emily and one of the other girls (the other two went to the Musée d’Orsay for the day) and we set off for what became a day of walking. We started off at Monoprix where they bought breakfast and I went next door to get a Starbucks. Ok, I know I said my last Starbucks was going to be my only one while I was her, but they just came out with the holiday drinks here, which are completely different from the holiday drinks in the U.S. so I was just dying to try one! Here they have three holiday drinks, Morello Cherry Mocha, Crème Brulée Latte and Praline Mocha. I got a Crème Brulée Latte which tasted kind of like a mix between a Cinnamon dolce Latte and an Eggnog Latte, pretty yummy, but not obviously Crème Brulée. After having gotten our food we headed to the near by Luxembourg Gardens to sit, eat and enjoy the surprisingly clear and sunny weather. It was November 11th and thus a “Jour ferié” or holiday that everyone has off work and school for so the park was fully of families and couples. Children were sailing mini boats in the fountain and runners were making their rounds around the perimeter of the park. After a while there, we decided to do a bit of wandering, first in the direction of the Panthéon (which you have to pay for to get in, so we admired the exterior), then another church, which a random guy told us was the most beautiful in Paris, but it didn’t open until 2pm. We ended up on boulevard St. Germain, which is known for it shops and is home to two famous cafés: Café Flore and Les Deux Maggots. We walked along for a while and would stop and look at all the shoe stores as we are all in search for cute French boots at a reasonable price. We stopped at a Fragonard boutique (brand of French perfume) and smelled, sprayed and tested many scents until our scent cells were dead. We continued down the street until we hit the Seine and decided to cross to the other side and start thinking about lunch. We walked along the Rue du Rivoli and decided to go to the Louvre for lunch and eat gallettes (like crepes, but with buckwheat instead of normal flour). Emily had also decided at this point, after having pleanty of time to spell the top, heart and bottom notes of the perfurme, that she wanted to purchase one of the Fragonard scents so we went to the Fragonard boutique at the Louvre so she could do so.

After that we decided to go search out the famous ice cream parlor Berthillon on the Ile St. Louis. It was a little bit longer of a walk from the Louvre to the island than I had originally anticipated, but we got to admire more of Paris and I used my newfound knowledge from my architecture class to interject random facts about places as we walked by. It was my first time on the Ile St. Louis and I’m definitely planning on heading back, everything is cute and tiny and there were pedestrians (albeit mostly tourists) everywhere! The ice cream parlor was closed, but there were a number of other little restaurants along the same street that sold their ice cream so we shelled out the money for the rather pricey deliciousness and headed to the park behind Notre Dame to enjoy the frozen delicacy. I got caramel made with salted butter, white chocolate and praline/ pine nut. I enjoyed the caramel and the praline/ pine nut immensely, but the white chocolate had a very strange texture that we decided was cornstarch and was less than impressed. Ice cream finished, sun starting to set and wind picking up we were all quite cold and decided to take a walk around the interior of Notre Dame to warm up. After that, we headed back across the Seine the meandered aimlessly down streets in the general direction of Montparnasse. At 6:30 we met up with the other two girls at the Montparnass train station and headed to dinner. I only had a hot chocolate since I was scheduled to eat with my host mom that evening and a little after 7 I said my Adieu’s and headed back home on the metro.

Today and tomorrow it’s back to classes and Friday I’m going on a field trip to Fontainbleau (a chateau) with IES. I have recently discovered reruns of old episodes of Gilmore Girls and JAG on French TV, which I find highly amusing. Sadly, at the moment it’s time to get back to the the homework done I ignored over the weekend! Pictures to come later…