Day 14- Tuesday 21 June

OMG, TWO WEEKS.

This morning, when Maria caught me ovening a pizza at nine in the morning, I told her with a dead straight face This pizza is not for breakfast. She doesn't know me well enough yet.

Everyone who shows up to class tomorrow is going to be a wreck, so I may as well start this now: Today, the twenty-first of June, was Fete de la Musique, the festival of music, which, though technically goes on all day, really mostly goes on at night, so before that I: Rested at the apartment, doing homework, still sick but not too bad, then went to class, which was held at Musee Carnavalet again today as we did a more detailed lecture-walking tour that covered the last century of the monarchy, relevant to our history class, and also the French revolution [the first one], relevant to our being in Paris. Functioning more fully today, I was able to far better appreciate Everything in General, though, you know, the weather was still just not that great. We got ice cream as a class and then moved on to the Palais Royal, where we discussed our readings in the garden [mostly the changing position of females in society way before, just before, during and after the [first] revolution, I guess not wickedly relevant to my life but it's interesting ....]. That actually took up a fair while, and we did a mini-walking tour of the surrounding area afterwards, and went into le Louvre des Antiquaires, basically an only-antiques mall full of crazy things like vases and fans and pieces of fabric from the fourteenth century and gilt furniture and tons of jewellery and almost nothing had a price tag and the ceilings were low and the stores absolutely tiny and fun to window shop, and I failed to buy Erin a pipe or walking stick, and Tori was once again denied gold-plated dinner sets and a suit of Chinese armor. Completing our tour, I agreed to meet up with a group of people for la Fete after recuperating at our respective domiciles.

A lot of culminative miscellaneous hindering Things meant that I missed the rendez-vous with the group and went on to enjoy the Fete on my own. Bypassing a mediocre rock-thing on the corner, I went up a block and watched for a bit another rock-thing in front of la Sorbonne, then was attracted to a band doing covers of popular songs, which included cryptic French pop stuff that had people singing along as well as White Stripes and U2, so I was happy, and other people seemed to be happy at this one, too, and were dancing, and then I just kept moving up the Boulevard Saint Michel, pausing at other bands, going onto side streets as I felt like it, listening to a few, cramming down the narrow old pedestrian streets of the heart of the Latin quarter, getting a gyro and fries from a hugely harried, alcohol-swigging man at a Greek resto, walking on down to Notre Dame just because, seeing people lining the lower quais of the Seine, and it was absolutely indescribable, fries all over the stairs, a hundred new people every time you blinked, rock, screaming music, Italian music, Caribbean music, pop, DJs, clubs carried into the streets with speakers, everyone holding beer or wine or champagne or liquor bottles or cups of drinks or just sodas, smoking, most people dressed absolutely normally but tens of thousands, unknowable amounts of people on the streets on a Tuesday night, crazy cool, though I should mention the police everywhere, ambulances, people vomiting, official-looking people with large dogs in muzzles on the metro, so on. Moving on, I went to the Eiffel Tower, because I am a tourist, and the first band I saw there seemed to be legit Indians of some kind, and it was a nice contrast, and I just stopped there and sat on the lawn for a while, looking at the sparkle lights and salespeople throwing LED helicopter things into the air, other people selling alcohol, other people sitting on the grass or walking around, flash photography on the uppermost level of the Tower, but it was slightly cold and eventually did start to rain, and I made my way back to the apartment.

le Louvre des Antiquaires, a corridor

reeeeally bad photo

having fun

see, lots of people

more people

long exposure of the sparkle lights

where I was sitting

Day 13- Monday 20 June

I think I'm past the stage where I used to deny ever being sick, which certain family members and old friends may remember; yesterday I felt a bit off, but figured it was just whatever, but today I was sick, and I still am sick, and I don't feel good, so this'll be a short and probably slightly nonsensical entry:

Actually late today, but not by much; my lagging neurons were besieged by the excessively vocabularic writing of la Bruyere today for three and a half hours, who complicated things by using nonstop irony that meant that once I decoded what he was literally saying I then had to invert it all to understand what he was actually saying about French society, which made my head hurt. Grabbing a pain au chocolat on my way to history, I met up with the class at the Hotel de Soubise and, sadly, failed to fully appreciate a tour of what used to be a royal residence but was now, of course, partly a museum but mostly the National Archives. The guide knew a heck of a lot, and I feel bad for not absorbing more, but because I'm not a brain on a stick materiality got in the way and it was more like two and a half hours of endurance-concentration on appearing alert. Bleeeegh. I felt better in the fresh air, and industriously began planning a route to one of my favourite parcs until I consciously used my brain to think, and realized that a) it was about to rain, and b) I needed to pass out, so I just laid down until dinner, ate dinner, and now have to do my homework because the director specifically told us only to not show up to class if we're throwing up, symptomatic of a highly contagious Thing [I think gastroentitis?] people tend to get here more often in the states, and even though I think I am highly contagious, I'm not throwing up, ergo tomorrow is a school day. Mememememememememe, sorry guys, really selfish blog. Here's more me:

Today's dinner table layout: Our plates, forks, knives, glasses set up, one (1) large bowl of rice with spoon at the ready, one (1) large bowl of salad with those salad-specific utensils at the ready, one (1) pan of this taco-stuff on the stove. I'm told to help myself, so I sit down, salad-utensil myself some salad onto my chosen plate and Maria immediately grabs my plate, shovels the salad back into its home, washes my plate, dries my plate, sets my plate back down before me and tells me to never to that again. Already somewhat irrationally angry with the world from being sick, and for the fact that their maid rearranged everything in my room and I'm missing a pair of pants, I carefully asked why and was told to never eat this particular kind of salad before the main meal and that it must never be on the same plate with the main meal but that there are certain kinds of salad that are main meals and other kinds that are eaten before the main meal and I don't even like salad I was just slightly delirious and trying to be polite.

In the midst of my battle with gravity and severely localised winds today, I took one photo of the Hotel for you, dear reader.

Day 12- Sunday 19 June

Today we have more of a picture book format:

Abandoning a few hungover souls who didn't manage to make the bus, we went out of the city as a group today to nearby Giverny, a small settlement in a valley that was utterly unremarkable aside from its having Claude Monet's house, and also it was pretty:

Rolling hills, wheat fields, looming rainclouds, oh la la. Our first stop, of course, was his house:
To which people flocked and in which I was not allowed to take photos or touch any of the interior plants [they did a good job with them, and they really complemented the [doubtless] reproductions of his art that were on the walls of his atelier [studio], and apparently Monet collected Japanese prints, and those were lining all of the walls, really interesting]. Taking my time skirting the house garden, full of roses and nameless countless blooming things and bumble bees, I went on to the water garden:
A part of which was a water lily pond, but also of the faster-moving stream from which the pond got its water, and there were bridges and trees and benches and it was great, really. By this point, I'd completely lost the rest of the group, and moved on to explore the town on my own before our rendez-vous later at the impressionist art museum. So here is a bit of the main street:
And here an art fair that, on a lawn, with hills all around and no sound of the highway, with a cool wind and impending rain, reminded me incredibly of Maine:
Walking through the town, not especially tempted by the cafes and antique stores, I decided to check out the stream, a sort of detour of the Seine that met back up with it eventually, too wide to jump across, surprisingly fast-moving, lined most along the way by private, but conveniently uninhabited property. On the other side of this property were stretches of fields and then the hills, bright red poppies spattered:

Poppies everywhere, actually, it was hard to choose a photo. I walked along it for a bit, found a plank:

And then found an ostrich!

This is me with the ostrich!

Aaand I'm bad at auto[self]photography. A gite [B&B] in the town, tres picturesque, with its own section of the stream, had a farm-ish thing to attract guests that included: miniature horses, Vietnamese pigs, a lot of geese, kangaroos, emus, llamas, and of course one ostrich. This is another bit of the town, complete with corn field, that I photographed while walking to the impressionist museum:

Oh, and I detoured again, voila:
No pictures allowed inside, but it, too, had a thriving garden, and the artist being shown, Pierre Bonnard, a contemporary of Monet's, definitely had a lot to teach about colour, and it was interesting to see his style evolve. Spreading ourselves out over the bus, most of us passed out on the way back to Paris, and struggled onto our respective metros, and I went to the grocery store for yoghurt and Nutella and now I have homework due tomorrow, but today was a good mix of outdoorsy hopping fences and contemplating Art, and I saw an ostrich!

Day 11- Saturday 18 June

I accidentally almost slept in today, it was a miracle; not too much to report today, I mostly decided to just take buses, to the point where I accidentally ferried myself out of Paris and off my map. The periphery and areas outside the city were good to see, though, too, a lot more cars and parking [though still not free], fewer shops on the ground floor, more spread out, more office complexes, actual houses on some of the rues. I visited some completely anonymous, random places in between changing buses [did I mention it rained on and off the whole day? Thus my wanting to find shelter] and eventually ended up at Sacre Coeur, which is just a fun place to be, anyways.

The more notable things today were us going as a group to see Moliere's play Les Precieuses Ridicules, which we'd read in class, and enjoying it quite a lot. The theatre was in a relatively small, vaulted, underground tunnel kind of room, which I didn't know if it was originally cellar space or just how the foundations were done or what, but unfinished so you could see the stones, and the cast was only five members who seemed to have a lot of fun performing, and did bits of it amongst the audience. My modified clique went to the Centre Pompidou across the street and managed to get in for free with our student IDs, and spent the time until closing looking at Art and out the windows, because it had a pretty good view. We walked around the shopping area for a bit after getting kicked out, had dinner at a Lebanese place nearby on their terrace, then went our separate ways, as tomorrow we're going to Giverny in the morning.

Today's edition of Weird Things About France: This one is more fun to witness, actually, but people like to get married in Paris. I already mentioned seeing the fleet of brides that one day I was in the Bois de Vincennes area, and I saw one in the parc yesterday, and so on, but this also means you see bridal parties and bachelor groups occasionally. Today's collection was better than usual, and first I saw a guy dressed only in tights, a thong, a raincoat and an explanatory sign waiting very publicly for a bus, then saw another one in a dress on the metro, both with groups of giggling thugs [I exaggerate, though], then I saw two bride-to-bes in the Montmartre area, one just dressed oddly being led around in a blindfold, the other mostly only wearing underwear who was being drawn in marker on by strangers.

the pretty new Sacre Coeur Basilica, as seen though the touristy bits of Montmartre

here it is again, from the Place des Artistes

the Place, full of artists

artists, a mix of portraitists and other kinds

the basilica, with the inexplicable addition of a wooden ramp being built that I was unable to google

basically I just turned around from the last picture, now looking south-ish

fabric stores, just for fun

inside the Centre Pompidou

a bit of the view from the fifth floor

the interior, and a Warhol

Day 10- Friday 17 June

Once again running desperately to the metro, I arrived barely in time for a rendez-vous with the group to Versailles. We packed onto a double-deck RER and chugged west on the Seine and then though some of the suburbs of Paris, seeing actual houses and old apartment buildings, gardens alongside the tracks, everything a lot older and clearly more medieval in origin than absolutely anything in the United States. Drizzling slightly, we made our way to then through the chateau, those lucky enough to be sardined alongside a professor being treated to supplementary material, the others forcibly jammed through doorways alternately wondering at the decor and about the whereabouts of everyone else. Through sweating hordes of sneaker-sporting fish, I oscillated between the two; equally as interesting as the various apartments and their trappings, and the new, temporary exhibit of different cultures' thrones that did wonders to obstruct the arteries of the tours and was confusingly introduced by a series of buddhas and other deities out of place in an opulent, clearly European antechamber, were the people to me, this time, their faces, their clothing, their coping skills, and I enjoyed the visit.

Losing only one person out of our group of twenty-two [who found us forty minutes later anyways, no big deal], we went out to the gardens and ate lunch on the steps overlooking the main thoroughfare of the garden, and afterwards spilt up into our individual cliques. The one I attached myself to took a zagging path down the hedged lanes of the gardens alongside the main stretch, brushing slowly past the signs of civilization at the foot of the main fountain, then wound its way back up to the gift shop. I stopped at the highly artificial lake for a while to talk to the fish in, but for the most part stuck with them, and it was fine.

Back in Paris, we walked the Tuileries a bit on our way to an apparently well-known cafe called Angelinas, where we sat in an obstructive group of seven on matchwood chairs and had hot chocolate and split pastries and mostly just discussed Life. Afterwards, we went into a next door bookstore that was neat for having a lemon tree in it, then split up. I drew in the parc for a bit, had dinner, accidentally missed a rendez-vous with the others and ended up doing a postcard and walking west along the Seine for the evening :)

I made Maria [my host mother, if you'll recall] actually cry last night when I mistranslated and accidentally call her husband an 'asshole.' Thankfully he wasn't there, but two of his children were, so doubtless it's gotten back to him by now somehow.

Sadly, I forgot my camera, and have no photos, just so you know. Think opulence and overcast-ness. These I took later, and are today's Weird Things About France:

Day 9- Thursday 16 June

Not much to report today, mates; I desperately tried to sleep in until past eight, but was thwarted by many, many factors, and ended up just staying in bed for a while ruing those many, many factors. Eventually, I remembered I had a mini-quiz today and reading due, so I did that, ate lunch, and took a bus over to Reid. Today, in summary, we were treated to sweeping statements of eighteenth century French art and quick stylistic overviews of major artists of the period, and after a break for lunch [brownie-things from a vending machine, because most of the vending machine food is different over here, it makes me so excited] it was on to French, where, because it was the first week and our professor thought most of us had jetlag because she had jetlag, we mostly read a play out loud, taking turns with different parts, she interjecting when words had us really stumped or to explain why things were happening, or occasionally what was happening, and what Moliere meant, and it was great.

That night we were back at the hall for dinner and pizza as a group, and saw Ridicule, a recent film that the professors approved of as it apparently fairly accurately portrayed court life during Louis XVII's rule. Anyways, I liked it, and afterwards took the metro to Cite and walked along the Seine post-sunset, wending between groups of Frenchies of a wide age range spread picknicking with alcohol and baguettes on the banks, walking haphazardly in groups or languidly in pairs, leaning contemplatively against the stone railings of the ponts. It doesn't get fully dark until ten thirty or so, the sun just sets and the sky stays a strange dark, saturated blue for a long time as the lights come on.

Weird things about France: I need to ask Maria tomorrow, but I have no clue how anyone gets their mail. All of the residential buildings have codes to get in through the doors. None of the entryways through those doors have mail boxes. None of the doors have mails slots. The post offices don't have nearly enough boxes for everyone, yet somehow people get their mail ....

Day 8- Wednesday 15 June

Taking the bus for the first time so far to class, I arrived barely on time for a marathon of Moliere, the French equivalent of our Shakespeare. Thankfully his writing is so far less inordinately inventive as dear Will's and I can follow it without too much difficulty, and we're going to see the play as a group this Saturday. Deciding to grab lunch with two other girls, we stopped at a small boulangerie-patisserie and I took photos for your current benefit and my anticipated lack of photographic recall:

the drops are one the lowest shelf, second from the left :)

Fairly typical selection, and I got a three cheese tourte and a drops [a folded pastry with butter and chocolate chips, probably really American of me to keep getting chocolate things but they're sooooo good] as we walked to the phone store. Afterwards, I stayed at Reid Hall and worked on my online class until it was time to meet at the Louvre. Getting in for free with the group, we mini-toured the eighteenth-century French painting areas, but even that took a fair while, and afterwards I stayed to complete an assignment and just to stay, because otherwise I would have had to get a billet. This time, for our benefits, I tried to photo a sample of the different rooms in the Louvre; bits of it are constantly being remodelled and refurnished, and this has been going on since the early 1800s, so if you haven't been there you can't imagine the variety of different styles of rooms there are:

la Joconde, also known as the Mona Lisa

I once again got caught up in the Egypt section, because I love how they have as much Egyptian Stuff as they do European Stuff, almost, and fell in love with some plates. Driven out from the various wings into the pyramid area, I spent some time after just enjoying the air in les Tuileries, then walked past Concorde up a bit of the lower Champs, home to embassies and private museums and les tres riches, to a metro stop. This one, right by the Grand Palais [a Universal Exposition relic, then and now a museum, of course], was decidedly educative, and I learned that crickets from Afghanistan that live off cigarette butts live in some of the metro stops, but populations have been declining recently as a result of restrictive smoking laws. Getting back for a dinner of pasta, headache medicine and Nutella, I was educated by Heloise on French humor a bit as I showed her funny youtube videos, and she did not laugh, and she showed me funny French youtube videos, and I did not laugh ....

Weird things about France: Umm, their ovens are numbered 1 - 10 [lame, sorry], there are no degrees, though it's probably all the same as it's not like I can convert from centigrade to Fahrenheit in my head.

haha, colour, I love it