To Erin

Erin, for the love of God, please remember to bring the clothes that I left in the bag in my room at dad's, at least the shorts and flip flops if nothing else, please.

Days 44 to 47, Thursday 21 to Sunday 24 July

Thursday and Friday passed largely without notable incident, sadly; I spent a lot of them trying to write one particular art history paper that, for some reason, was just utterly unwilling to be born. Our group as a whole met up at a restaurant Thursday evening for a tres French farewell dinner, and I partook of goat cheese, some kind of bird and then alcoholic vanilla ice cream [bad translation, there] as everyone discussed where they were headed next. Quite a few were going to Barcelona, actually, one taking a weeklong Italy tour, another few staying in Paris for a while, and I got props for going to Dublin which, it occurs to me, is going to be colder there than here.

Saturday I walked around a lot. [this will be added on to later when I do the photos]

Sunday, today, I woke up, ate a Nutellawich, then headed off to the Champs Elysees. If you follow this link, that corner, just to the right of that purple-roofed bus, under one of the trees, is where I sat, and waited for a few hours, mostly reading, until the Tour came through.

the parade coming

a baguette car

this is after, when I'm just walking

you totally cannot see what's happening but I promised Tori a massive photo dump, so voila. This is looking down towards the Seine:

close-up: By craning my head, I could see the podium of the winners [between the post and the tree], a screen showing them [on the L], and the Petit Palais. You can't make it out here, but Evans, the Australian overall winner, just got his jersey:

yeah ...

and then the more exciting stuff, bits of the parade, then the very first time they came down the Champs towards me, then their backs, and I forget what the other video is, and I'm so, so tired and can't write any more, but I had a pretty great view, and it was fantastic:

Before I forget, I don't really expect to be using my computer in Ireland, so unless Something Happens, I'll next be in touch with everyone when I get into Philadelphia, where I'll turn my phone back on and let the relevant people know if everything is going on schedule with the flights :)

Day 43- Wednesday 20 July

Right, so this morning I met up with Layne, Lauren and Helen to take an English-speaking tour of the Opera Garnier which, as mentioned, was the inspiration for the Phantom of the Opera, which also had insufficient light for my beleaguered camera so my pictures are going to be worse than usual. Apologies in advance. It was, of course, crazy decorated, not too big but definitely fun, and our guide pointed out the tiniest things that the architect had thought to include, symbolism in the faces of lamp posts, a calendar clock, obsessive detail everywhere, twenty-four different kinds of marble, yikes. Here's an inept picture of the grand staircase, which only society's elite, the ones who rented boxes in the auditorium for the year, were allowed to climb, which is now a fave spot for I Was Here photos:

Now we're inside the auditorium, where it was more difficult to take photos. Here you can see the stage before they put the fake-curtain backdrop down in front of it to hide it, and it is apparently big enough to fit the Arc de Triomphe inside it [the stage, that is]:

And this is a large corridor to the side of the main room with the staircase where men only used to go after shows to conduct business:

After a good two hours, I went back to the apartment for lunch, dallied for a bit and then our class met up at Reid Hall to try to hack our way through more poetry for a while before heading over to the Centre Georges Pompidou. So here is a view from the sixth floor looking roughly south, where the pointiest things are Notre Dame and the Tower of St Jacques, and those fake people:

Now we're looking roughly south-east-east, and this one is for Tori- you've got St Jacques on the far left again, but then that black thing is the Tour Montparnasse, the only skyscraper in the first zone of Paris. I've always assumed that everyone knew about the building codes in France, but Tori didn't, so sorry: Pretty much everything is the same height, as demonstrated:

's vahry pretty, non? And this is just a photo:
We split up and then I had to go to the Louvre again for class stuff, and I perused northern seventeenth-century European genre scenes for a bit before trying to get to the French section one last time but I took a wrong staircase somehow and ended up in the apartments of Napolean III, which were beyond belief, crazier than Versailles, than anything so far, I couldn't believe our profs hadn't mentioned them. Here's a bit of a sitting room:
And some dining room:

I couldn't take any more photos as the Louvre police at this point began herding us out because the museum was closing. Some people are just too rich. It must be really hard to dust in there. Walked around, went back to the apartment and Maria had made ravioli for dinner, lots of it, remembering that I loved it.

Day 42- Tuesday 19 July

Days like these are when being short are an evolutionary advantage; whereas previously when I said 'it rained all day' there were actually some breaks in between, today it actually did rain all day, until about nine at night .... I was thinking about this as I walked to the Musee d'Orsay this morning from a metro, dodging small rivers and lakes in the sidewalk that threatened to drown my socks the whole way, that umbrellas like mine would work a lot better if I were six inches shorter. Anyways, the line was too long, but I was very amused by the communal umbrella formation, so here is a vaguely representative photo:

But the mass was pretty big in the compact line, neat. This was after remembering the Louvre closed on Tuesdays by way of stopping by there. So then I walked on a bit to the Petit Palais, this is what Paris looks like in the rain:

and this is looking inside le Grand Palais across the street:

because it isn't as well known, and got in with my magic pass [heh] and the place turned out to be very, very eclectic, starting with a decent collection of 2.5 thousand year-old Greek pottery and in the middle was a Monet and Dutch landscapes and sculpture and the end was a special exhibit on Charlotte Perriand, a designer and photographer very active in the 30s-50s who collaborated with Leger and Le Corbusier [very famous people, people] [the best bit of which was a room at the end with a lot of the different modern [as in the movement] furniture she designed, or participated in the design of, that you could try out]. A lot of randomness that was definitely good for a few hours [and the building was beautiful, too:

but no photos allowed inside, and everything was wa-ay too overpatrolled] and when I left, it was raining, so I chilled in the Carousel food court for a fair while, mostly thinking [because it wasn't just rain, it was also umbrella-eating wind and freaking cold again, in July, man] until our class met up at the Musee de Montmartre. Today's pastry just before our field trip was called a 'moka' and was basically a fancy kind of Little Debbie thing, and delicioso:

Full of paraphernalia from the region, the museum had a lot of original posters from cabarets of area [because Montmartre is wickedly known as a(n) artist/poet/writer capital/haven/dream], paintings from different centuries of the area [showing gradually how it developed from windmill-swept countryside to a super-dense bit of Paris], images of the building of Sacre Coeur near the end of the nineteenth century, so on, in four storeys of a small house-ish building.

just the area, looking roughly north, you can't see it but Paris is all spread out:

bad photo of the view from the museum, with the same vineyard pictured, the only one left in Paris whose half-litre bottles sell for about 45 euro, I believe, for charity:

yup, walking, most of Paris is not like this, btdub:

When we left, it was raining. Some of us, led by our prof, tried to find Le Chat Noir, whose well-known poster had become synonymous with Paris, until we figured out that it no longer existed. From there, I went with Lauren to get Layne, and then we met Helen after some logistics at a metro to eat dinner at Le Royal, a small resto near the Ecole Militaire. I had jambon de pays avec melon [salted ham with cantaloupe], pork with something orange:

tiramisu for dessert and actually a bit of white wine that wasn't too too nasty, and really we just chilled there for a fair while and talked, and while nobody else seemed to be as interested in Mystery Diagnosis as me, we all found common ground talking about TLC's Say Yes to the Dress, and it was good.

Weird things about France! Whistling. I'd held myself back before, knowing that it irritated CERTAIN PEOPLE, but recently took the habit back up when in solitude. Maria walked into me doing a nice operatic-pop medley and asked me what was wrong, and I checked frantically for what I was doing wrong and came up with naught, and she told me that when French people whistle it means they're bored, and that it is therefore abnormal to whistle in the house. I forgot to ask if it was rude, which is important. She went on to tell me about a previous student who liked to whistle a lot, who was taken out to coffee by the patriarch one day and apparently had a really awkward deep conversation because he thought the student was severely depressed and maladjusted.

Also weird: Rollerblading is a Thing here and it isn't weird at all to just go rollerblading about town.

Also weird: I hadn't realized until a recent convo with Vik, but guys wear scarves here and it's cool, or a better word is 'sophisticated,' I guess, and not just heavy scarves like sane people wear when its sixty Farenheit in the middle of summer but also silky ones with suits or nice shirts, or sometimes with just tee-shirts, and it's very normal, and I'd forgotten it wasn't in the US.

Day 41- Monday 18 July

Today's class was notable for our reading poetry; I'd done fine with it in high school, but as soon as you switch languages, Nothing, like this:

maybe with little prepositions strung in there, more like:

and ,

the

because every word in [good] poetry means something, and you can understand what goes on in novels without knowing exactly what is going on, but this absolutely cannot happen with poetry, and words cannot describe .... I understood that it rhymed, though. Right, so a few hours of class, then we picked up Layne from her apartment and went on to Notre Dame, oh and this was today's pastry, a tartlette au citron, THE BEST:

Ah yes, and now Notre Dame, here we have a rose window and prayer candles:

And here is a bit of the apse, behind the altar:
And poor Saint Ferdinand, see the glowing box thing? You put in two euros and get a medallion of the cathedral, and there are different ones, with Jesus, angels, the building, I don't even know:
Yup, the nave as seen from the entrance, illiterate tourists amongst the aisles even though signs in five languages tell them not to be:
And now we're walking away:
And we went across the street to Shakespeare and Company, a British bookstore wherein all of the employees were British and the top bit was actually an English library full of old books and places like theatre seats and cots to sit on and just read, apparently for however long you wanted to.
The aisles and the whole place was very narrow, as seen below, and sections of the wall were covered in love notes to the store/library:
Afterwards, we did a bit of tourist shopping, then Ingrid and I caved and got gyros and you know, I actually quite like this photo, I'm definitely channelling some serious Tori in it:

Though Ingrid's turned out better aperture-wise. We're in a pedestrian street of the Latin quarter, and afterwards they split off and I had to get some groceries, yadda, good day.

Day 40- Sunday 17 July

DAY FORTY! WOW. Today was pretty laid-back, partially because the other American successfully turned the apartment into a brothel for viruses so I am freaking sick AGAIN, and partially just because it was laid-back. I first went to Sainte Chappelle, a small chapel built by Louis 9 solely to house 22 relics of the passion of Christ [now in Notre Dame, but holy cow, twenty-two relics] somewhere back in the thirteenth century, now a top tourist destination for its being crazy ornate and crazy old, with most of the stained glass dating from the time the chapel was built [intact eight hundred year-old glass, doesn't happen often]. Yep, so I spent a bit over an hour there, thought it took a while to get through the lines, in superficial appreciation, then journeyed to the Latin quarter for a bit of lunch, then was indecisive for a while, then read Zola for class tomorrow in front of the Tour Saint Jacques [which I forgot to take a photo of, but the important thing is that one cannot climb it], then it began to rain again, so I journeyed through the area to the Louvre, thinking I'd pick out works for an upcoming final paper, but got a bit turned around in Oceania and distracted by Greek and then French sculpture, long story short, it didn't happen and the museum closed, SO I book-shopped because I'm bad, then read more Zola in the food court of the Carousel, the underground mall around the pyramid entrance with the only food court I've seen over here, and when I left it was light but still raining and I felt bad, and also felt bad for just going back to the apartment, but there's nothing I can do about it. I don't know if its the me constantly finding out things like yesterday that the patriarch doesn't like it when I wear my towel around my shoulders when I go into the kitchen or the freakish weather [cold again today, but it was really sunny and hot for about ten minutes around one] or all of the lemon yoghurt I've been eating, but I just keep getting sick. I don't mean to complain; today was, of course, fantastic, because I'm in Paris :)

best view one can get of the chapel:

lower chapel and gift shop:

the ceiling was nice, gold stars all over:

rose window, done a bit later than the other stained glass:

typical tourist photo, the stained glass was interesting because the windows all had differently-shaped panels, rectangles, quatrefoils, ovals, and all of the capitals [decorated top bits of the columns] were different, and the statues, a lot to look at:

lunch, a chorizo panini:

yuuussss:

Italian bit in Denon of the Louvre:

stele of Hammurabi, very famous, I didn't realize that it has writing all on its sides and back, too:

another yuuuusss, three cheers for the plundering by the French empire. These guys came from an Assyrian palace, and are supposed to be scary guardians but, to the contemporary viewer, appear to be smiling in quite a friendly fashion, so I took a photo with them, too [though not of posting merit]:

inner courtyard, French sculpture:

Day 39- Saturday 16 July

Today I woke up and it was raining, so it turned into a Semi-Homework Day, with my first stop being the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, with which we area already familiar, to pick out an object from an era relevant to one of our texts and describe it within the context of said text. I found a fantastic decorative mantelpiece-Thing that also doubled as a thermometer/barometer but was also Chinese but also had clockwork bits that moved, so that was cool, and spent more time after looking around some more, watching weird French commercials involving Neanderthals in the publicity bit of the museum. I came out, and it was not raining, but then it started to again, so I decided to go to the Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature [Hunting and Nature Museum], which our prof had mentioned, with the aside that it was 'bizarre,' which sounded good to me.

My magical fake student-for-the-year-in-France ID got me in for free, and it did not disappoint; it was organized mostly by animal [wolf, boar, bird, unicorn], with the addition of a few random rooms like the 'Blue Room' and one full of weapons, and it was pretty fun. Almost absolutely nothing was labelled, and it was not organized chronologically, and there were weird hollow glass babies and skulls everywhere and educational cabinets with fun drawers about different kinds of prey [like, each one explained where to find the animal, when, the best way to kill and skin it, and had examples of droppings and casts of paw prints and absolutely miscellaneous literature, fun], and the weapons room, the top half of a wall would be glass-fronted display cabinets, the bottom drawers that slid out and there were knives, ceramic guns, coins, arrowheads, swords, Things, and, of course, there were taxidermied animals also everywhere and contemporary Art about organs and photos of chimpanzees using forks at a dinner table and yep, it was fun.

That was kind-of long, but when I got out, it was only raining lightly, so I got my pastry for the day, and then was going to eat it Somewhere when it began raining harder, so I went to Chatlet and spent a happy few hours in a FNAC, which is like a Fandango-Best Buy-Barnes & Noble combo, and played with a double-touchsceen computer [like, in Notepad, the bottom half of the screen would turn into a keyboard and with the top you could choose where and how to edit the text, fun] and spent a while in the bookstore end of it, perusing ze frenshz literature, until it closed and it was Still Raining, aaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhh.

not sure why people dislike pigeons, these ones were super-cute:

the weapons room, do you see the glass baby??!! I know the photo is bad, sorry. Also worth mentioning, I didn't take a photo because I was being Watched, but I guess these were used in hunting? Owl feather hoods complete with beaks, which they put up on the ceiling [and also had one modelling on a fake head], but they put glass eyes where a person would look out and it was creeeepy, much creepier in person.

the bird and polar bear room ....

the trophy room:

just passing the Centre Pompidou:

a clafoutis cerise, a cherry custard-thing, pretty good, and the view looking into the courtyard of Les Halles: