The Peanut Butter Week (Sunday June 5th - Monday June 13th)

So yes, it’s been a while. In all honesty this may not have been updated tonight, had the internet not gone out last night leaving me with nothing more to do than catch up on my blog. But I’m in France, so give me a break! FYI This is kind of long, so sit back and relax :)

This was our third and only normal week of the program. We had class every morning and during 3 afternoons plus a make-up afternoon for the ascension holiday we had class off for the preceding week. There was nothing to break up the daily homework and quizzes. Let’s just say I was a tad exhausted by Friday night!

Free days: On these days, Stephanie and I usually sleep in as long as possible (usually a consequence of staying up late reading for fun, haha) and then head out for lunch and some low key sight-seeing. We sight-see every day in art class, so it’s very relaxed. That doesn’t mean we wander aimlessly, however. We’ve visited: The St. Martin Canal (very picturesque, but not like the Queen’s Hamlet was at Versailles!), The Pompidou Center (modern art museum with an amazing view from the top,) and the Marais (the Jewish and gay district of Paris, very quaint and pretty.) We’ve also had lunch on the lawn of Sacre Coeur at Montmartre and done a fair bit of shopping. Our days off are wonderful – we see Paris yet aren’t rushed about it. Sadly we won’t have any others until the end of the program. There are a couple of afternoons off, however, during which I have an agenda planned!

Le Canal St. Martin

Pompidou Center - its quite the building with its guts on the outside.

This is art. I don't get it.

Again, I'm lost. I'd rather have sat on that than taken a pic of it.

This, however, is quite creative.

Sorry for the blurriness/darkness - no flash allowed and this is the best one that showed up of me inside this piece of art.

I'll never get tired of the Parisian skyline. That's Notre Dame in the background :)

Perfect!

Random mole, nbd.

Attempted rollerblading: Every Sunday in Paris there’s a “rollerblading parade.” Anyone who can roller blade can participate and join the mass of people rollerblading throughout Paris. Stephanie and I decided we were totally up for this so we put on our comfortable cloths, ditched the purses that would be awkward to blade with and headed across city to the rendez-vous point. Sadly, in the process of ditching our purses, we also ditched the ID that we needed to rent skates . . . so we headed to Notre-Dame for the best ice cream in Paris instead.

No moving on up: So sadly my class situation was not, in fact, resolved. There was a bit of miscommunication and I’m in E3 for sure. It’s extremely easy, but there’s nothing to do for it – c’est la vie.

Smoking: I gave an oral presentation on smoking in French. Everyone has to give an oral presentation and I thought I’d talk about the differences between the States and here. What did I discover? Surprisingly, not much. It’s illegal to smoke inside and on campuses in France, which is exactly what I’m used to at home in Michigan. I thought a lot about the stereotype of French smokers being the norm came to be, and I realized that the city has a lot to do with it. Everyone heads to Paris to experience France. There are a lot of people here and of course if you see a lot of people a decent amount of them will be smokers. Down in Biarritz, I didn’t get caught up in smoke clouds as often because there was more room and less people. The conclusion? Don’t judge France by its smokey book cover, Paris.

In art class: We went to the Invalides (government military center), l’eglise du dome (Napoleon III rests there,) le Musee de Rodin (a wonderful sculpter,) le pantheon (homage to the great people of France,) the old opera, and we walked around Mont St. Genevieve and the 2^nd arrondissement (section of Paris) that had a bunch of old time markets and a bank that you weren’t allowed to take pictures of inside.

Les Invalides. Crooked b/c I'm short and had to reach up blindly to take the pic. I'm a scientist, not a photographer, remember?

Inside the military church at Les Invalides

Tomb of Napoleon III. My friend, Abby, noted that the statues seem to be guarding him even in the afterlife.

The Thinker. Whaddya think??

The Kiss.

Above Rodin's Gardins

In Rodin's Gardens

Butterflys!

Supposedly St. Genevieve 

Le Pantheon

Marie Curie remembered and honored in the Pantheon

Here's Paris from way up high.

The Grand Staircase at the Opera!!

This pic does not do this room justice! 

The Phantom's private viewing room.

Friday was probably the best day ever: First off I saw the Catacombes with my program. Don’t know what they are? Imagine being underground with a bunch of stacked bones, multiply the weird factor by 0.5 and multiply the totally wicked factor by 10. After the Catacombes, I saw X-Men: The Origins at the cinema. It was awesome! We saw it in English with French subtitles, but during the French part of the movie there were not subtitles to help the gaps in the story only listening leaves me with, and during the German parts there were French subtitles, so we definitely got in some French practice. It was one of those days where everything works out and it made me feel extremely lucky to be in Paris at the same time as grieving my approaching departure.

So pictures don't come out great underground w/o flash (it was forbidden.) But you can get an idea from them at least.

Mouse in the house: Stephanie sighted it the other week, and when we approached Madame Reynaud about it, she knew; apparently that mouse is a frequent visitor and she can’t put down traps or poison because of her grandchildren and dog who wouldn’t know to stay away from the mouse killer. I could’ve lived with the mouse in the dining room. I can’t live with the mouse in my room, however. I saw it scurry under my bed and now the lights must be on before I walk anywhere. Stupid mouse!

Too bad Edgar, the dog at my homestay, is more afraid of the mouse than I!

Entertainment in the metro: at least once every other day, I’ll be walking around a corner in the metro and I’ll hear the faint sound of music, so quiet I think I’ve imagined it. It grows in volume and eventually I see a lonely man playing his life away on a guitar or an entire group of strings rocking out. It’s the best ever; just when the daily grind of Paris gets you down, the music picks you back up. Some guys will play in the metro trains too. The coolest thing I saw, however, was the puppet show on the train.

Blurry, but you can totally tell there's a puppet show happening here!

Swimming: I’ve always been a swimmer and always will be. A month without stretching out my limbs in thw water was getting to be a bit much so I found the local pool. First of all, the local pool is well hidden. Only after taking a chance and following a man and his son because I thought they looked like they had a swim bag with them did I find the pool down a long road, up some stairs, across a lot, and down another set of stairs! Here are the three things I discovered about French pools: 1) If you find yourself in a locker room with a member of the opposite sex, you’re not necessarily in the wrong place. There’s only one locker room. Thankfully they have ample changing rooms! 2) Swim caps are mandatory. If you don’t have one you can always buy one from the swimming supplies vending machine they have conveniently located at the pool. I’ll bet it reduces the hairballs we get in the States . . . 3) I should’ve been prepared for this – meters, not yards (the pool seemed so long!)

Cold: Not the temperature sadly, the temp has actually been perfect – not too hot and not too cold. It’s true we could use more sun, but we don’t really have much say in the matter. The cold is what I caught. It’s not terrible, I’ve been through much worse, it’s just a pain in the butt that I’m sniffling and coughing my way through my precious days in Paris. Hopefully it disappears quickly!

Sincerely,

So happy to be here

S

And the Beat Goes On

Another week is gone already – time has learnt to fly! This week was the beginning of my French course meaning the real work begins.

On Monday we had an oral exam and on Tuesday we began classes. I understand that they place students into French levels all the time; however, I’m not convinced that their placement system is completely accurate. The levels are as follows: Beginner, Elementary 1,2, & 3, Intermediate 1,2,& 3 and that’s all that you need to worry about. My written test score was Intermediate 2 and my oral exam score was Elementary 3 – it was a bad day migraine wise and I’m atrocious at interviews. My problem with their placement system is that they put me in Elementary 3 instead of averaging the scores and putting me in Intermediate 1. The class I’m in is extremely easy and we’re reviewing things I’ve known for years. I am still learning though – our teacher wants the best from us so I’m digesting a lot of vocab and different ways to say the same thing. Switching classes has been done, but the tragedy is that there’s no extra room in the Intermediate 1 class, so our professor is going to see what she can do about giving us extra work and us getting the Intermediate 1 credit. It’s been a tad stressful.

On the topic of stressful, three weeks in, half way through my adventure, I had my homesickness spell or “I hate French moment.” I’ve been doing fine (with the exception of crowds - I loathe crowds) up until now; it was just one of those bad days and seeing as I’m in a different country, I wanted home. I’d had a disappointing conversation with my French professor in the morning about the wrong level situation and when I decided to walk to my Art class, I turned the wrong way and walked for over an hour straight instead of the 20 minutes that the journey was supposed to take. I wasn’t in the right French class, my feet hurt and I was late for my Art class – clearly France was to blame for my misfortune. Anyways my spell lasted all of 1 hour; when I arrived at art class, I wasn’t the last one there and the professor hardly noticed I’d arrived late, my feet learnt to live and the French situation would have to work out somehow. I’m not even sure that qualifies as homesickness . . . but I’ll count it anyways. It’ll be another of my life experiences.

This week in Art class we visited the St. Chapelle – the royalty built this church for their private worshiping purposes (apparently Notre-Dame wasn’t grand enough,) the Concergerie – a prison type place, Notre Dame and the Louvre.

St. Chapelle

Inside St. Chapelle. Gorgeous stained glass windows. I want to know why they're so high nobody can see them properly!

King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette's names on the roster of people beheaded during the revolution. The last name "Capet" was given to them because they were stripped of the royal honor of not having a last name.

This reminds me of the Phantom of the Opera chandelier :) I found it in Notre-Dame.

Famous pyramid of the Louvre. The American architect's modern design caused controversy amongst the French.

Dedication of the new "Grand Louvre" to President Mitterand, whose grand vision saw numerous changes throughout Paris.

This is how the Louvre used to look back when it was a fortress protecting Paris' western border.

Venus de Milo

Winged Victory

Napoleon III's receiving chambers. 

Professor Clark: **sarcastically** "Can you imagine wearing these royal jewels?" 

Female student: "YESSS!"

I really liked this painting. Fighting in all directions amongst the angels.

Look how strong I am ;)

Finally this weekend’s adventure was a trip to Versailles. I'd just been there with Christine, so my prior experience allowed me to skim the boring stuff and investigate the cool stuff. Unfortunately it was absolutely packed there and we had an hour's wait to get in and once we were inside the chateau, getting from room to room was slow going. But we had a great time at the Hameau de la Riene (Queen's Hamlet,) a fantastic lunch and delicious natural ice cream!

Ice cubes in my Orangina!! (Ice cubes are a novelty in Europe fyi)

Awesome fountain!

These fish knew we were there and were dying for us to feed them. Their yellow mouths that they kept opening above water in hope of food landing in there were quite fascinating.

This one clearly got the two thumbs up

The epitome of picturesque 

Yeah waterfountains!

The only other thing I did this week (besides hw of course) was make an evening trip to the Eiffel Tower and what can I say - it's the best.

Tres romantique!

Merci pour votre attention!

Normandy/Mont St. Michel Trip

The beginning, middle and end of this story are that they were wonderful. A warning: this blog is picture intensive - a picture is worth a thousand words after all!

We set out on Saturday morning at the early hour of 6:30 AM to get to the meeting place on time. The Metro doesn’t have trains that come by as often in the mornings on weekends however, so we were a little late regardless of our preparation. Not to worry though, we weren't the last one's there and the unwritten rule is don't be the last to arrive (although I suppose it's written now . . .) Our first stop was a memorial museum for WWII in Normandy. Pretty cool, even though I’d just covered all of that information in history last year. I was guiltily happy that we didn't have enough time to go into the Holocaust in depth (we only had 2 hours for the museum, lunch and a short film.) It's absolutely necessary that we remember so nothing like it is done again, but it's tough on the emotions.

Hitler and Petain shaking hands signifying the Collaboration between the Germans and the Vichy Regime

Prisoner smiling before his death. Haunting. 

Read this - it's an interesting view of a German soldier's feelings after murdering. 

Next on the agenda were Omaha beach where the American troops landed and the American cemetery. The beach was beautiful, although the water was very cold (I know, I trekked over the sand to put my feet in!) The cemetery was beautiful too – all of the crosses (or stars of David) were lined up and it was very scenic. It was sad to see how many Americans lost their lives during the attack. I had a hard time multiplying the American losses that I saw by the number of different countries helping.

Omaha 

Proof I was there! Like the tan lines on my feet? Thanks sandals!

Pretty little spring :)

American Cemetery. Behind that building in the distance are numerous more graves.

Still at the American Cemetery. Lilies!

After Omaha, we headed over to Pont du Hoc. That’s where American Special Forces invaded German bunkers. They invaded after the area had been bombed, so they had to scale the cliffs and navigate through the holes in the ground.

We then had a surprise: apple cider mill visit! It was very interesting to see how they make the cider, pommeau and calbados that they sell. We even got to taste everything. It turns out I only like the apple juice over here, haha. It was cool and surprising that they gave us pommeau and calbados to try; the surprise is because calbados is 40% alcohol!

By the time we got to the hotel, we were starving. And what’s the number one rule about restaurant service when you’re starving? You guessed it: it was slow as could be. But there was great conversation to be had and after dinner we were tired enough to opt for a good night's rest instead of finding something else to do and losing more sleep.

The next morning we set off for Mont St. Michel. I’ve been dreaming of seeing it in person since I first learned about it in high-school. It met my expectations of excellence and surpassed them by far! Everything was beautiful from the fortress to the weather and surrounding scenery. I felt like I could have been in a fantasy book with the random suits of armor and the impressive architecture that surrounded me. Stephanie and I had lunch outside on a terrace and had a great time wandering around the shops. My only regret is that we didn’t have more time there. I’m so glad I got to be there and I miss it already! 

ooooo

ahhhh

From a story book!

10th Century Mt. St. Michel

20th Century Mt. St. Michel

The Cloister

My back was against a wall when this was taken. The building is so tall! And the route is so tiny!

Prisoners ran on this wheel and that rope there hauled up heave objects.

Magnificent!

Incredible!

Lookout posts back when this was a fort. I'm picturing a Lord of the Rings scene with ladders delivering the enemies over the wall for invasion.

So that was my weekend. Thanks for reading :)