Of castles, crypts and coffee

Studying in Paris is a rather odd situation to be in because every day I have to make a choice between being a good student and taking advantage of the fact that I'm in one of the most interesting cities in the world. The result is that I go around with the vague sense of guilt - either because I know I'm slightly to significantly behind on schoolwork or because I know I'm passing up a fabulous cultural opportunity.

But just to set the record straight - I do go to class here! I'm basically taking three classes - a French grammar class, a class on French immigration, and a class on francophone African literature. These are more fuzzy classes than I am comfortable with, and in French, which makes it even more difficult to get through all of the readings and papers. :-)

And on to the things that are making me behind in class!

France really likes its strikes. I think I've mentioned this before. Some of them are really annoying - like the strikes on the metro and the trains and Air France. Others are ridiculously funny. One of the funny ones took place this Wednesday. The medical interns in Paris and the surrounding areas went on strike. I'm not sure what exactly they were striking for - something about no choice in where they work and the privatization of health care. What they did, though, was to put on their white lab coats with signs saying "interns on strike" and march through one of the main streets in Paris. They filled the streets! Every 100 meters or so they had a truck playing music, or a Stanford-style marching band (complete with painted tubas). It looked more like a party than a strike, to be honest. My favorite part (which I did not photograph, sadly) was one of them wearing a sign that said "future doctor" with a cigarette in one hand and a 2 liter of Coca-Cola in the other.

On Thursday morning, I tagged along with another Stanford class up to la Basilisque de Saint Denis, one of the patron saints of Paris. I've seen a good number of churches in and around Paris all of a sudden, and this one is my favorite. The walls are almost all stained glass windows, with really vibrant colors and images. It also is historically the burial ground of French kings and their family, so in the crypt and around the front of the church there are lots of varied memorials to centuries of French kings, queens and progeny. Including Marie Antoinette, although hers is not particularly elaborate...

Friday afternoon I went to a very chic salon de thé called Angela across from the Tuileries where (apparently) all of the Parisian socialites used to take their afternoon tea, though it's now a bit of a tourist attraction. I ordered my first Parisian café au lait and my friend Jennifer who I went with ordered their signature tea. We felt very sophisticated sitting there in this beautiful room.

Saturday afternoon, I went to Vaux-le-Vicomte with Jennifer. Vaux-le-Vicomte is a very beautiful château south-east of Paris built by Louis XIV's financial minster. Louis XIV was so impressed by its elegance that he arrested his finance minister to take possession of the château himself, and then proceeded to hire the same architects to design a new château specifically for himself (Versailles).

The grounds at Vaux-le-Vicomte are stunning. There's this pool probably about a half mile out from the château that was built to be a mirror for the building. Very cool.

The inside is also gorgeous - all the wood is painted with flowers and most of the walls have these exquisite tapestries hanging all over them. I have discovered since coming to Paris that I really rather like tapestries... I don't have a very good picture of the tapestries off my camera, but if I ever get around to taking pictures from other people's cameras I will post one!

Ok photos of things that aren't food

I did in fact increase the number of photos taken (and otherwise acquired), and here are the fruits of my labor!

First, this is a picture of me right outside La Comédie Française. I am bundled up in preparation for a long walk (or, as it turned out, half a walk) home.

Here is a photograph of the inside of Le Bon Marché. Right after I took this picture, a sales lady came over to tell me that I'm not allowed to take pictures. "Bon marché" means "cheap," but this store is the most expensive department store in Paris. It's basically a clothes museum.

And now we get to photos of Provence! This is a picture of me and Rachel standing in front of the ruins of a Roman (!) theater in Arles. France is old...

Below is a picture of the town of Gordes. The town is built into the side of a hill/mountain. All the fields around here grow lavender and lavanda. The air smelled amazing.

And then we went to the nearby village of Ruissillon, where they have ochre cliffs.

Ruissillon is probably the cutest village we saw. The sign below says: "Please respect the vine, which is 150 years old. Do not pick the bunches of grapes. This vine is sacred."

Ok, how cute is this town?


And then there was Avignon. So, there's a children's song about Avignon - specifically about dancing on the bridge there. Here you have the Rhône River, with the Pont d'Avignon. And then "on" the pont, or above it, you have 3 ladies dancing. So that kind of counts, right?

The game continues...

Ok ok, I'm very happy with this one.

What does this newspaper headline refer to? (It's something that you would have heard about in the states and not some obscure French political reference.)

"Coup de baguette final"

La Gourmandise

Here are pictures of most of what we were served at our Friday night Bing dinner in Provence. I didn't take pictures of the bread, or of the first bottle of wine, so you'll just have to imagine.

To start with, salad and eggplant pâte.

Followed by ratatouille with three kinds of fish:

One empty bottle of wine. I think this was the red. We also had a nice bottle of white wine.

Dessert - pain perdu. It's french toast stuffed with caramel/chocolate, topped with carmelized sugar and chocolate, and served with a scoop of ice cream.

And coffee. Tea was not actually an option - the Bings will only pay for coffee.

Living the Bing life

So last week was really something extraordinary. For one, I had a rather valuable package stolen out of my mail. I reported the theft to the police this morning, entirely in French. It was rather exciting. That makes twice in my life that I've made declarations with the French police. I think the last time I did it in English, though...

That sort of put a damper on a couple of days there, but the week in general was pretty cool, and largely funded by the Bings. On Wednesday, they paid for us to go see Les Fables de la Fontaine at La Comedie Francaise, which is the most important and high-brow theater in Paris. We had nice, center, orchestra-level seats too. Very swanky. The play itself was a bit difficult to understand - not only was it in French, but it was in old French and in poetry format. The play was, however, visually beautiful. It felt a bit like being at the ballet.

This weekend, we had our Bing-trip to Provence. The trip was a whirl-wind tour of 4(!) towns in 2 days. We didn't have a lot of free time, unfortunately. There were some beautiful places that I would very much like to spend more time exploring. Cities built into the sides of hills, lavendar fields, ochre cliffs, Roman ruins. It was wonderful. And the air smelled amazing, which was such a nice change. I also saw the Pont d'Avingon, but I did not dance on it because they charge you to go on it. :-(

They did give us plenty of time to eat, however. My guess is that from Friday night through Sunday afternoon the total cost-of-food-per-person came out to about 190 euros ($250 ish). We had 3 or 4 course meals, wines specially picked to go with the food, duck, foie gras, ratatouille, 4+ kinds of fish, lemon meringue, eggplant pate, bruschetta, pain perdu, fresh fig jam, couscous, tiramisu... and the list continues. I came home from that trip with absolutely no room left in my stomach. For the entire trip, I never once had the slightest desire to snack between meals. So much food!

Last Thursday was also the day of la grève in Paris. This meant that almost no metro or regional trains ran all day. However, not all of my classes for that day were canceled, and unlike many Stanford classes, attendance here is mandatory and part of our grade. So off I went to class across town on foot. It took me an hour and forty minutes each way. Luckily it was a lovely day so the walk was actually fairly pleasant most of the time and I saw some parts of Paris I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise. But my legs were sore on Friday!

I will post pictures later... I look a bit like the living dead in most of the pictures off my camera from Provence (I was really tired) so I'm hoping someone will have some better pictures of me.

Weekly Update Rain-Check!

I had a very, very exciting week and a wonderfully delicious weekend. However, as a result I am incredibly exhausted and rather behind on work. The upshot of this is that instead of doing my end-of-week blogging on Sunday, I'm going to try to get to it tomorrow. (I'm such a creature of habit; this pains me.)

Important notice!

Please do not mail anything valuable to me. No checks, no money, nothing. If it's anything more than just a card or a letter or a postcard send it to my parents and I will get it in January.

She speaks French?

Ah hah! You thought I was just here to see the city... So, in my French class, we have to write 1-page journals every week (which I almost always end up doing on Sunday). I know some people back home who requested that I write them something in French, so I thought I'd post one of my journal entries for you. If you don't speak French, tant pis!

Aujourd’hui, pour la première fois depuis mon arrivée à Paris, j’avais du temps libre. Allegra et moi étions curieuses de voir un film français et voulions aussi améliorer notre connaissance de la langue française. Donc, nous sommes allées au cinéma avec Alexandre, notre ami parisien. Le film que nous avons vu s’appelait « L’Invité ». Il s’agissait d’un couple dont le mari est au chômage. Il invite son patron potentiel à dîner chez lui. Un voisin décide que le couple a besoin d’aide pour se préparer au dîner, et il essaie de les apprêter à recevoir leur invité. Le film était intéressant, mais très difficile à comprendre. Quand je discute avec un ami parisien en français, je demande souvent qu’il parle plus lentement, où répète ce qu’il vient de dire. Comme ça, je me débrouille bien. Cependant, au cinéma, c’est impossible de demander aux acteurs de répéter leur dialogue encore une fois. Heureusement, Alexandre était à côté de moi. Quelques fois, il m’a expliqué ce qui se passait, et j’ai réussi à comprendre l’histoire. Néanmoins, la plupart des blagues m’ont complètement échappé.
Je n’étais pas surprise d’être souvent perdue pendant le film. Au contraire, j’étais contente de comprendre si bien l’histoire. Ce qui m’a surprise, c’était la petite taille de la salle. À Pleasanton, la ville où j’habite aux États-Unis, les salles de cinéma sont toutes grandes, avec des écrans énormes. Il y en a qui sont aussi grands que ma maison. En revanche, cette salle était toute petite. Il y avait seulement cinquante places. La salle entière était plus petite que le salon chez moi.
Enfin, le dimanche après-midi s’est bien passé au cinéma. De plus, parce que deux vieilles dames nous ont donné des billets gratuits, l’aventure n’était pas trop chère.

Let's play a game! Round three

This week you get a French idiom!

The phrase is:
Ils nous prennent pour les américains!
Directly translated this is:
They think we are Americans!

What does it mean?

A week interrupted

Depending on your definition of exciting, this week was either the most or least exciting thus far. I have also realized that I am not taking enough pictures here. I will try to fix that for next week. If you do want to see all of the pictures from this week, they are here.

I'm not good at thinking chronologically, so this is going to jump around a bit, sorry...

On Wednesday, I talked with the academic advisor-type lady here about how to take the classes I want without doing some of the work that I don't want to do, and as a result I am now enrolled in a 1-unit lecture series. This, as it turns out, is a wonderful solution. Basically, this means that I now have a 60 euro budget for the quarter to spend acquiring Paris-related knowledge, provided I take notes every time. As part of this, I went with one of the Stanford classes to the Musée du Moyen Age on Thursday and then to Notre-Dame de Chartres on Saturday.

Unfortunately I did not get to spend a lot of time at the Musée du Moyen Age because I had class right afterwards, but I did get to see La Dame à la Licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn). It's this really stunning series of six tapestries. The colors are incredibly vibrant, and the images are so detailed and expressive. Very cool.

I also took Snow White-inspired pictures outside the Musée du Moyen Age. It's located in an authentic medieval building, complete with its own well. I like the way the picture turned out.

Notre-Dame de Chartres is a cathedral built during the 12th century located in the town of Chartres about an hour south of Paris. Like Notre-Dame de Paris, the cathedral is huge and awe-inspiring. They keep the electric lighting to a minimum inside the cathedral so it's mostly natural light coming in throug the stained glass windows which is closer to how the church would have originally been. The effect is eery, and makes for difficult photography, but the stained glass windows are impressive.

We also got to explore the crypt there. Apparently the current Gothic cathedral was built by expanding upon an earlier Roman cathedral that was built on the foundations of a Gaul church. In the crypt, they uncovered foundations of the original church built sometime around the 800s. Very cool.
The church at Chartres also has a priests' area in the middle, with the doors that the priests put in back in the day to allow them to get in and out. Those priests were short!
My other very Parisian adventure of the week was also on Thursday. I was shopping for socks with some of the other Stanford girls (very exciting, I know) when one of them said she had to leave because she was going to check out a choir rehearsal. This made me very excited, so I followed her. She knew very little about what it was we were going to, and I knew even less. The directions she had ended up leading us to the Sorbonne, where we had to prove we were students in Paris at the Sorbonne for a legit reason to get through the doors. The Sorbonne is gorgeous, though! I really wanted to whip out my camera, but after the hassle we went through with security I figured this might not be the best move. So in we went to the rehearsal hall, which was equally beautiful. When we showed up, the director had us sign our names to these pieces of paper without explaining what it was we were agreeing to, and about halfway through the rehearsal we figured out that we'd somehow just enrolled in a class at the Sorbonne that runs through the middle of January, and we both leave the country at the beginning of December. Oops! It was a lot of fun to sing again, though, and I was very excited to see the Sorbonne.

Last night I managed to find my Isolated Giant again. It turns out the statue is actually called The Giant Isore, not Isolé, but I have decided to rechristen him. I prefer my name for him - it seems more appropriate. Right near that intersection, I also found this gem:

From left to right, those storefronts read: "Picard: Frozen goods" "Protestant Church" and "Shopping Avenue" Oh Paris.

But the most exciting part of the week was that on Friday I had the stomach flu. It was not a lot of fun, but it was definitely an experience...

Let's play a game! Round two.

Only one phrase for you this week.

What are "systèmes d'exploitation"? A friend of mine here is taking class to learn how to make them.

Mon anniversaire!

Has it been another week already, really? How is that possible? Time is passing so quickly, and so much is happening. I don't think I can really do the week justice in one blog post, but I'll give it my best shot:

This week was the first full week of classes. We're not in class very often - only 9 hours a week of class for 13 units - but doing homework takes up a lot more time than at Stanford because everything is in French. Reading textbooks in French takes a lot of time, and I'm not as comfortable skimming the readings because I'm never very confident in what I skim. The academic highlight of my week was buying books for my African Literature class. I had to go to two tiny bookstores in the Latin Quarter to get them that were completely packed with books. I couldn't locate anything on my own so I had to ask the bookkeepers for help, but they could track down those books in lightning speed. It was awesome.

The Stanford center is on the French 6th floor of a Parisian school. That means 6 (not 5) flights of stairs that I climb up and down at least once a day to get up to the Stanford mini-library up there.Between those stairs and walking all over this city, I am going to be in great shape when I get home in January!

On Wednesday, I ate lunch at what turned out to be a Vietnamese restaurant near the school with my language partner and three of his friends there. It was a lot of fun - 2 of them were from Guadalupe and the other 2 were from Martinique. I'm highly amused that my designated guide to Paris isn't actually Parisian at all. My language partner (Nicolas) is on the far right. My favorite part of lunch was learning the French term for chopsticks: des baguettes chinois.

My birthday was Friday, and Angelica also came into town for the weekend. We said farewell about two hours ago. We managed to pack in a solid day and a half of Parisian sight-seeing. The weather this weekend was gorgeous - a nice change from the grey and rain we've had all the rest of the time I've been here. I don't have time to describe all the places we went in great detail, but here are some highlights:

We hung out for a while Saturday afternoon in the Champs de Mars drinking wine and looking at the Eiffel Tower, which had been claimed for the weekend by the New Zealand rugby team...
See that giant oval thing under the Tower? That is a giant inflatable rugby ball that says "New Zealand". Why it is there is beyond me.

Last night we also accidentally stumbled upon the Tuileries. We were really just trying to find a convenient metro stop when we saw all this fire and thought we should investigate. It turns out last night was La Nuit Blanche in Paris where a ton of monuments and museums stay open until 5am. One of those monuments was the Jardins des Tuileries. The gardens aren't lit because they usually close at dusk, so instead this carnival troupe brought in thousands of candles, flame torches, fire throwers, strange devices powered by fire... It was amazing. The gardens are pretty by day, but filled with these beautiful flaming displays they were surreal.They had probably 20 fireballs like that, among other displays. They also had security guards everywhere making sure people weren't going to burn down Paris...

Whenever I go to brush my teeth in my apartment I see the Eiffel Tower. It's a real treat. At night it lights up and sparkles. This morning I was up very early. (The Musee d'Orsay was free today so Angelica and I got there well before it opened to try to beat the crowds. We were no where near the front of the line anyway but it was definitely better than showing up as the doors opened.) As a result, I got to see the Eiffel Tower at sunrise, and thanks to my handy dandy camera, you can too!

Want to know more? I'm trying to send out e-mails with different stories from France, also about once a week. Shoot me an e-mail if you want to be added to that list.