Thoughts brought on by Beautiful Weather

Max and Meg are in Normandy, Sam is in London, and although I definitely have other people I would like to see, I’m taking this opportunity to spend a solitary weekend with the lovely company of myself. I think I have really been needing this, and I have really enjoyed it. Friday night, I skyped with some people I’ve been longing to talk to, and that was really what I needed. I made a list of things I really wanted and needed to do for Saturday, and made a commitment to myself that I was going to do them. I woke up, went for a run in a beautiful park, and then explored an antique market that I had wanted to go to. I know I’ve said this before, but I have come to absolutely love walking around Paris. I am at a point in my stay here where I am content with where I am and what I’m doing, and this allows me to really appreciate what is around me. I did not always have these feelings; au contraire. The first month and a half that I was here, its not a stretch to say that I resented almost everything around me, from the French advertisements, to the foreign language everywhere, to the food that I wasn’t used to. However, I have become much more comfortable using French anywhere I go, have become accustomed to seeing the French language everywhere, and I have come to appreciate where I am for the time that I’m here. I also have a lot of things to look forward to in the coming weeks: December 12-14, Sam and I are going to Dublin, Dec 17-28 I will be in Denmark for the holidays, Dec 29-Jan 8 Mary and Maya are coming to visit, and then I plan on taking one more small trip with a friend before 2nd semester starts. How lucky I am to be able to go so many places for relatively little money! That is something to appreciate and take advantage of.
The weather this weekend has been magnificent, and that has made my walking around all the more delightful.
As much as I want to be outside more today, I really need to work. Work, as in not only do school work, but respond to email, write a few letters, (write these blog entries!), and basically catch up on things I have been neglecting. I also reorganized my room late last night, and I think the change is motivating me. Its good to do that every once in a while, I’ve found.
Basically, I am happy here for the time being. I miss home and school desperately, but I have realized that I am really lucky to have this opportunity, to have 2 internships to put on my resumé and to add to my life experience, to have the experience of learning French in France and to benefit from everything that being in this place has to offer me! I also can’t imagine what I would do if I were only here for a semester; I would be leaving in less than a month! That’s ridiculous. Now, having this experience, I would really say to anyone who wants to go abroad, especially to learn a language, that the full year is the way to go. I have just started to adjust to life here, and luckily and have another semester to enjoy that.

Marta's Visit, etc

Oh my, its been a while! I think I just have to accept the fact that I am not good at keeping up any type of a journal, I don’t know why! But, after some haggling from a few people (coughSamcough), I decided that this beautiful Sunday autumn morning would be as good of a time as any to write a little bit.
What have I been doing since I last wrote? Hm, that’s a good question. I just have to mention it again because I simply can’t get over how quickly time is going. 2 weeks of November have already gone by? How is that possible? We only have 2 more weeks of classes, and then it’s December? It blows my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced time going by as quickly as it has here.
In my day to day life, things have just been rolling along nicely. Things at my internship are progressing, being that we are almost done creating our summer study abroad program, and currently I am translating course descriptions from French to English. I am also working with a company in the U.S. that makes canvas for museums and institutions because the INHA wants to have their own logo bags to give to researchers and people who come to discussions and seminars. I have written countless emails back and forth with “Mimi”, and write now we are discussing payment and design details. Thrilling, I know, but it’s just to give you an idea of what I do at work. To be honest though, even though I like my colleagues and I don’t mind going to work, I would much rather be working directly with art or art history research, instead of this more arts administration type of a field. But, fingers crossed, I’m supposed to have a meeting this week with Thomas (program director) and an atelier for painting restoration that I found to see if I would be able to have an internship with them. That would be awesome for me because, those of you who don’t know, I’m very interested in art conservation and restoration, and I would really like to know if it’s something that I want to further pursue. When Thomas contacted the atelier, he said that they seemed really interested, so…we’ll see!
In other news, Marta came to visit me this past weekend! (Marta is one of my good friends from Goucher). I picked her up at the train station Saturday evening (Nov 7), and after disposing of her bags back at my foyer, we metro’d-it over to Belleville area (the North) to listen to some jazz and drink some wine. Classy introduction to Paris, if I do say so myself. We met Max (Goucher), Meg (foyer), and John (Goucher), and although I was the one who was exhausted (not her, even though she had been traveling), we made it there and back and had a lovely night. Sunday was not such a pretty day, but that didn’t really matter all that much; at least it wasn’t raining. If it was one thing Marta and I did while she was here, it was WALK! We walked all over the city! One could even say I dragged her everywhere, but why not be positive, eh? We were going to go to the Louvre, but lo and behold, being the smart, prepared girl that I am, I forgot my student I.D. card that enables me to get in for free. Seeing as we had another day to see the museum, we decided to do other things and that we would return the next day. We went Notre Dame, which was lovely, and then we went on a mission for soup, because it was a cold day, and soup sounded delicious. Let me just take a minute to share a bit of wisdom with everyone while we are on the subject of Sunday: practically EVERYTHING is CLOSED on Sundays, so make Sunday your walking around the city day, and bring a sack lunch. Ok, I’m a little bit bitter, but only because I dragged the poor hungry girl to the other side of the city just to go to this soup place that Sam suggested, only to find it closed! Duh, how long have I been living here? We ended up just finding a sandwich, and unfortunately I wasn’t feeling too well, but I still wanted to show her one more thing! So, we walked from Hotel de Ville to the Eiffel tower which, you can see if you have your Paris maps in front of you, is quite a ways. But the weather got better and the walk was lovely. I have discovered that I love walking around Paris, I mean, who wouldn’t? We made it to the Eiffel Tower just in time to see in sparkle at night. It was really beautiful. Even though I see it everywhere I go in Paris, up close, its size really is shocking. We then returned back to the foyer, exhausted but happy after a full day.
I didn’t think I had to work on Monday, so we were planning to go to the Louvre together, but I was wrong, so I stayed at work and she explored the Louvre on her own. I met her for lunch, and we went to a bakery that I know, picked up sandwiches and took them to the Luxumbourg gardens, which are GORGEOUS at this time of year. We frolicked in the fall leaves and took lots of pictures. We then headed over to the Musée d’Orsay to find that…it was closed on Mondays. I almost wanted to cry, why didn’t I think about these things? Well, she decided she would go back the next day when I was at work and school, so we walked in the direction of my program headquarters where I had to go to a discussion later, and we sat in the Jardin des Plantes, which was really nice. So instead of giving her a tour of museums and such like I wanted, she saw a lot of Paris on foot, which I think we enjoyed just as much. She left the next day, and I think I can say that we had a lovely time, and I miss her already!
In other news, we’ve also had 2 atelier cuisines since my last blog entry. An atelier cuisine is when the kitchen is closed for dinner, and we have to sign up (there are only 12 spots) to cook a special themed dinner with a guest chef. We had a Halloween themed one with very fall type food – pumpkin, potatoes, soup, and…lamb (not very fall, but it worked). It was delicious. This past Wednesday, seeing that it was a ‘jour ferié’ (what I like to call a ‘fairy day’), Armistice day, and everything was closed, we had an American themed dinner: a Cajun salad, fried chicken and kind of friend sliced potatoes, and cheesecake. It was all delicious, but if you were expecting cheesecake (which I was) it was a little interesting. Good, nonetheless, and because the French don’t eat cheesecake, they all thought it was incredible! “Wow, I love cheesecake! I never knew!” (and you won’t until you taste real cheesecake, but why spoil their enjoyment?)
I’ll stop here, give everyone a breather, then return to this weekend.

Well hello again!

Wow. How has it been three weeks since I’ve written?! I apologize for my procrastination, but the internet connection at the foyer has gotten worse, meaning that there are now only 4, sometimes 5 working connections, and if I have the time to use the internet, I don’t always have the option if people are already occupying those connections. Alright, that’s enough of my excuses.
Life has been busy here, quite busy. It’s a strange feeling; I feel like the weeks are flying by, but what I did 2 weeks ago feels like at least a month. Let’s start with 3 weekends ago: My trip to the Loire Valley.
The weather was perfect! We couldn’t have asked for a better 2 days. I went with Sam and Emily, and along the way we met this German girl named Melanie, so it was really the four of us that spent the weekend exploring castles. We had to be at the meeting place for the bus at 6 am, so needless to say we got an early start on our adventure. Our first stop was Chiverny, about 2 hours outside of Paris. As castles go, it was relatively small, but very charming. It actually seemed modest and livable. The crowning jewel of Chiverny, for me at least, was the gardens and surrounding forest. I want to live there!
Time out. I just realized that if I spend this much detail describing each thing I’ve done for the past three weeks, you’re going to be reading for an hour. So from now on, I will try to tighten up and summarize, and I will also try to write a bit more frequently so this won’t happen!
During our weekend, we went to four castles: Chiverny, Blois, Chenonceau, and Amboise. Chenonceau was by far my favorite (but I will include pictures of all). It was also a really good weekend for me to get out of the city and into small towns and nature. I really was needing that. I will also include a picture of the amazing meal we had Saturday night in Blois. I couldn’t eat like that every night. Moreover, I couldn’t spend like that every night, but oh well, I was on vacation. Vacation from Paris. Ha. It’s a hard life I live, I have to say.
On the bus ride back, we spoiled children were whining about how we didn’t want to go back to Paris, and we had to laugh at ourselves. All in all, it was a wonderful weekend, which is evident in the approximate 300 pictures I took. As much as I resist the notion, I guess in some ways, I am my father’s daughter.
The following week was nothing too exciting: internship in the morning, classes in the afternoon, and on Wednesdays our night class. As usual, the week flew by, and before I knew it, it was Friday afternoon. I have found that, come Friday evening, I am exhausted, so Fridays have become my day of rest. I don’t care if it’s Friday night and I’m in bed by 11 pm; a girl needs to rest sometime!
Saturday was a wonderful day, again spent out of Paris (I do like Paris, I swear!). We have family friends who live about 30 minutes outside of Paris in the banlieu (suburb) of St. Germain en Laye, where Louis XIV was born. I went out there in the morning and Barbara (our family friend), gave me a historic tour of the town. It was so lovely! There’s a huge castle that looks over all of Paris and the surrounding areas, and gardens and a forest that goes on for miles and miles. We then went to Jean-Claude’s house (Barbara’s, boyfriend? manfriend?), which was a few towns over. I am so in love with his house! A beautiful 19th or 18th century (I can’t remember) farm house with a beautifully detailed interior that he redid himself. We had a lovely lunch: kir cassis before lunch (cocktail 1), followed by cheese-stuffed tomatoes, small chicken (it has a proper name, but I can’t remember), peas, followed by 5 type cheese plate and rustic bread, wine (cocktail 2), followed by the best apple tart I’ve ever had, and dessert wine (cocktail 3). (Note: It has to be said that I, who am known for being a lightweight, had good-sized glasses of wine and did not feel a thing! I don’t even drink that much here! Maybe its something in the water…). It was amazzinnggg. Six hours of French speaking later, I was exhausted but very happy, but it does not end there! I had to get back to Paris to participate in Nuit Blanche (literally, white night, but basically meaning all-nighter, a night where the city doesn’t sleep). It was a city-wide event where hundreds of artists set up different installations all around the city, be they music events, visual art pieces, or movies, and all of Paris wonders around all night (some much drunker than others, myself not included). I knew I wasn’t going to make it all night (is anyone surprised?), but I did make it until 3:30 am. By far, my favorite thing was a music installation that was set up in the medieval church St. Sévérin. The artists set up speakers in a circle in the middle of the church, each speaker projecting a different voice, and for 15 minutes at 2 am we were surrounded by an eerily realistic 50 piece medieval church choir. It was incredible, definitely something I have wanted to experience in my life.
I don’t think I did much on Sunday, or did I? Hopefully it wasn’t anything worth noting, because I can’t remember.
Last Tuesday was the last day of phonetics, so now I have my internship from 9:30 to 2, and French grammar remains from 3-5 pm. Again, the week passed incredibly quickly, and I find myself finishing class at 5 on a Friday evening and wondering where the hell the week just went. Friday was uneventful because, again, I needed to recuperate from the week. Saturday: I saw Rachel Robinson! It was so incredibly wonderful. She is currently studying abroad in Spain, and she has a few friends in Paris this semester, so she came and spent a long weekend here. So I along with Rachel and Adina criss-crossed Paris on Saturday seeing and experiencing: the Tour Eiffel (which I hadn’t gone to yet this trip), take out pasta in a box, which we ate for lunch in the Luxembourg gardens (1. take out pasta in a box IS the next big thing, I am brining it the States and become very rich, 2. the weather was GORGEOUS), did a little shopping for Rachel (what? Rachel shopping?), tried to go to the Musée d’Orsay but sadly it was closed, so we sat in the Tuilerie Gardens instead, and then we cooked a nice, hearty stir-fry. It was a wonderful day, but it wasn’t long enough! Oh well, until New Years, I guess…
Yesterday, Sunday (am I actually almost caught up?), Sam and I went to the Bois de Bologne, which is a huge forest in the west of Paris. Surprising fact I learned yesterday: the Bois, which up until now I thought was a nice, upper class park for families and rich people, is actually also a well-known spot for picking up prostitutes and transvestites during the evening hours. Funny, huh? A French friend told me that yesterday, and I was convinced he was taking advantage of my foreigner status and pulling my leg. But nope, it’s a common known fact. So that’s why I saw a condom wrapper on the ground during our nice afternoon stroll! (Don’t worry family members, its very respectable and safe in the daytime, but I was advised that it wouldn’t be the best of ideas to go wondering around there alone at night. Noted.)
It is currently 6:30 on a Monday evening, and I am about to go to dinner. Um, Monday’s almost over? Dad is coming on Thursday! I’m pretty excited.
Hopefully all of you have blinked in the time you took to read this, because otherwise you’re eyes would be watery and you would have a headache, and it would be my fault. Feel free to yell at me because this post was way too long, but I hope all of you cared enough to read all of it!
Hopefully, I will write sooner, so my posts will be shorter.
Bisous bisous, et a bientot,
Michelle

So Much to Tell, So Little Time to Write!

Well gosh, the time has finally come when I don’t have oodles and oodles of extra time with which to write daily blog entries, but alas, that’s probably a good thing. I’ll start with this weekend, because it truly was a lovely weekend.
This past Friday night, I was exhausted after a long week of classes and getting up early, and I wasn’t really planning on doing much of anything. However, when I hear a good proposition of something spontaneous, sometimes, just sometimes, I like to take advantage of it. A bunch of the kids, French and otherwise, were going to a bar in the 20th (arrondissement) to listen to some gypsy jazz. That sounded pretty great to me, so we left at around 10:30, and we found ourselves at a quaint Moroccan looking bar with a cave-looking basement where the concert was. It was so great! The band consisted of a guitarist, a bassist (who also played the accordion), a clarinet player, and violin player (who also played the drums), and a very jubilant, bouncy lady who had a beautifully smoky gypsy voice. It was an intimate concert, and both the band and the crowd had loads of energy. I also tasted my first kir cassis, which is basically white wine with current flavored liquor = DELICIOUS. Did some schmoozing (sp?) afterwards, and it was an allover very enjoyable night.
Saturday morning, I slept in, and it was glorious. This past weekend happened to be the “journées de patrimoine”, which meant that basically everything that is run by “l’etat” (which to the French is THE WORLD, or just rather the very centralized French government), is free and open to the public. This includes all public museums as well as the presidents house, the “hotel de ville” (city hall) for the mayor of Paris, and a slew of other tours that are offered. John, Sam, Emily, Kat, Natalia and I took a tour of Bercy Village, which used to be a town, but is currently a park. To be honest, I wasn’t really listening very closely because I was too taken by the park itself. I didn’t even feel like I was in Paris – it didn’t have the extremely manicured feel that is so present in the Luxembourg Gardens, (although it is very well taken care of), and it also had a very modern appeal to it. You can see in the pictures, of which I have many more of (Sam and I couldn’t help ourselves but to have a photo shoot…). We spent most of the afternoon in the park, eating ice cream while watching Sam ride a carousel (surrounded by 4 and 5 year olds, mind you). That night, a few of us went to Monmartre to eat crepes and drink wine while watching the crowd of people get progressively drunker as the night went on. Oh, what a life.
Sunday morning, John had reserved two spots for us to take a walking tour of the neighborhood around the Musée de la Vie Romantique in the 9th (how romantic). We saw the ateliers of: Eugene Delacroix (famous romanticist painter), Georges Sand (writer), Fredric Chopin (composer), and Richard Wagner (composer). The lady giving the tour was fantastic (dad you probably would have really liked her, and mom you probably would have found the tour fascinating). I then picked up Sam, dropped off John, and the two of us girls made our way to the Bois de Vincennes (bois=forest/woods), just outside the city limits of Paris. Ahh, how wonderful to be in untamed (kind of) nature. There was also a huge, medieval chateau there, which we walked through. We then found the “parc floral”, charmed our way into paying 2.50 euro instead of 5 euro (and when I say charmed, I mean showed the guard our student cards and he gave us the discount price he gives every other student), and we meandered through gardens of seasonal flowers and dahlias=MY FAVORITE FLOWER EVER. There were rows and rows of them, it was amazing! After hours of walking through flowers and woods, we dragged our tired legs to the metro to return back to Sam’s foyer, and she, John and I cooked dinner. Like my use of charmed, I use “cook” here very loosely. We bought bag salad, to which we added dressing, we bought an already cooked rotisserie chicken, but we did cook the rice! Anyways, it was much cheaper than anything else, and delicious. I then went home to get some sleep before the (drum role….) first day of my internship!
The lowdown: I work at the INHA (Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art). I have my own desk (score), my own computer (um, score), and a fellow stagiaire (intern) whom I haven’t met yet. Oh, and I already have my own project, which is pretty darn cool. Still unknown intern Florent (boy, who until I read this over again, I realized I was calling Flaubert) and I are supposed to work on creating a brochure that will propose different study abroad programs to universities in the U.S., Canada, and certain Asian countries. The INHA wants to attract different universities to hold classes, etc, at their site for a few months out of the summer. Florent and I will propose the idea in the brochure, tell a little about the organization, throw out a few ideas, but then it’s from the feedback and interest that we get from the schools that we use to create our programs. Pretty neat, eh? I have no idea how much work this will involve, or what else I’m going to be doing; all I know is that its way better than serving coffee and answering phones (in French).
This upcoming weekend, Sam, Emily and I are going on an excursion to see the Chateaux in the Loire Valley! The trip is organized by an international students club, and it was pretty cheap for travel, lodgment and tours. I’m pretty pumped.
Oh, I’m also making a lot of friends at the foyer and in class. Its really nice to chat with people at dinner, there are a few French girls who help me with my speaking whom I really like a lot, and a few Americans in my language classes that I also really like.
All in all, things are pretty good here. Sorry this was so long, but a lot has happened, and hopefully you were interested enough that you are currently reading this sentence! If not, its ok I understand, but then again, you wouldn’t know that because you didn’t get this far, so oh well.
Until next time, when I’ll probably have stories of provincial escapades and tons of pictures of castles,

Bisous bisous!

Michelle

Yay! and grrr

This is going to be a short post because im writing on a french computer, and even though just a few letters are moved around, im just about to chuck this thing out the window. Buuuuut i just wanted to update everyone on 2 exciting things:
1) i just bought a ticket to go to the Loire Valley through an organization for young international students. Im going with Sam and Emily and im pretty stoked. And it was a really good price.
2) I LOVE MY INTERNSHIP! or at least what i know of it. i had my interview today, and it was great. alright i cant take this anymore, i promise ill write more when my lazy old american hands have access to my beautiful american keyboard.
But thqnks for listening to ,y ra,blings even though it zqs short qnd i cqnt zrite everything i zqnt to becquse this is zhaqt happens1
ya. thats what happens. ugh.
a tres bientot
michelle

A Week Come and Gone

I think it’s been about a week since I’ve written, and it seems that the time is starting to go by a little quicker here! The first week of classes came and went. I think I wrote about my French professor, but I don’t think I mentioned my phonetics class. Well, I’m taking a phonetics class. What does that actually involve, you might ask? Well, I wondered the same thing before it started. It’s broken up into 2 half-hour sections (that fly by in a matter of minutes). The first section is in a classroom, and we learn a quick lesson of, lets say, how to connect certain words when speaking, its called ‘enchainment’ in French, like chaining words together (you see the root ‘chain’ in the word). Our professor is named Aude, and she is very classy and always wears high heels and dresses and chic sweaters. She is also very Parisian, and this being the case, while speaking she connects her words like it’s her job (ha, it is!) making it very hard for us to distinguish the individual words in the mush of enchainments. Apparently that is an especially Parisian thing to do. So she repeats sentences, some a bit long, and we’re asked to repeat the sentence after her. Sometimes it’s quite comical because, if we can’t distinguish the actual words in her sentence, we just have to go on the sounds we’re hearing, and sometimes it’s a bit hard to remember all those sounds, so the class just ends up mumbling the last few bits. I can tell she’s trying not to laugh, but not in a mean way at all; it is really funny! The second section is in a language lab where we each sit at our own cubicle with fancy recording devices built into the desks. We are each given our own headset with a little mouthpiece, which makes me feel like I’m a part of air traffic control – I think I enjoy it a little more than I should. Aude first speaks examples of the rules that we just learned into the headset, and we repeat after her. After we’re done, we get to rewind the tape and hear ourselves speak in order to judge how we’re doing. That process is repeated over. I like it; it’s actually kind of fun.
I’ve also been meeting some new friends, which is a really nice comfort (note: this does NOT at all discredit my amazing Goucher friends that are here with me! Sam, you’re probably reading this and I love you do death, Kat, same goes for you if you are…). Meg and Molly live in my foyer and they are in IFE, but in the program that I’ll be doing next semester. Then there’s another Meg in both my phonetics and French classes who’s actually from San Francisco and goes to UCLA. En plus, I went with John the other night to dinner at his friend Pia’s apartment. She’s his friend from home, and she’s also living in Paris this semester. She lives in a funky little studio apartment in the 6th, and I love it and I want it. She invited her 2 friends Davis and Zoe from her program, and we had a lovely evening! We all just seemed to click really well, it was really great.
What’s on the agenda for next week, you might ask? Well, I have to write a small paper today for my class tomorrow, and we have our first weekly IFE classes starting Wednesday. We have a phonetics/methodology class on Wednesday evening, and a culture class called Paris-France-Paris on Friday morning. Wednesday is going to be busy once our internship starts, oy: Internship from 9-12:30/1 roughly, then phonetics from 1:30-2:30, then French from 3-5, then Methodology from 6:30-8! That’s a busy day, yo. But I’m kind of excited to be busy; its felt like vacation here for a while. I also have my interview for my internship this week – I’m so excited to start that!
Even though I speak English for the most part when I’m with American friends, I’m starting to feel like I live here, and not like a tourist, which is really nice. But don’t worry Mom and Dad, I’m not speaking English all the time! I’ve actually been told by a few French people that my French is really good, which always makes me feel nice :)
Alright, that’s about it – I should get going on my little bitty paper. Then I think this afternoon, Kat and I will go to the Louvre for a bit. Mmm, yay.
Thank you all for continuing to read, it really means a lot!
Love love love,
Michelle