Fêtes.

Merry Christmas, and Happy fourth night of Hanukkah! I'm thinking of friends and family tonight in Paris, and wishing you all the very best of holidays.

And today I have learned an important lesson, one I think is worth sharing: Never book a 4-hour layover in the Mannheim train station on Christmas Eve.

Hello from Berlin!

Arrived in Berlin yesterday and am having a fabulous time. So far, it seems to be a fantastic city! We left on Friday morning with no trouble at all and had a fun time wandering around Amsterdam for two days (it was cold), and yesterday we hopped on our train here. (Actually, "hopped" isn't the right word. It turns out that there are lots of train stations in Amsterdam, and the train station you arrived in is not necessarily the one you might be leaving from, and if you don't speak Dutch it might be a tad bit tricky to figure out what the abbreviations mean!) Lots of things to see and do in Berlin for two more days, and then I'll be heading back to Paris for Christmas.

More soon!

Goodbyeee!

So Friday morning, I'm off on the great adventure within the great adventure! I don't know how much internet access I'm going to have, so I may update from the road if I get the chance. I'll be stopping by Amsterdam and Berlin, with a quick pit stop back in Paris for Christmas, and then off to Nice and Italy. Since I'm not normally a big traveller, I'm getting pretty excited, and a little bit nervous!

Things are really winding down with school. Tomorrow I'll turn in my last paper, leaving me with just exams -- and it looks like two of them will be take-home, because I'm leaving two weeks before the real end of the semester. I meant to take pictures of Paris 8 this morning, but I had a tricky time getting motivated. (Actually, it was just one of those days. I overslept by 40 minutes and couldn't really wake up all day long, despite numerous attempts to caffeinate myself into coherence.) I'll try and remember to do so tomorrow. It is, to be honest, fairly gross, as sets of university buildings go. The battalions of cleaning people can't keep up with the muck trekked in by 24,000 Parisian students every day. Add wet cigarette butts and strange, forbidding architecture, and that's pretty much it. Classes tend to overcome the relative shabbiness of the surroundings, in any case.

Last night my host family and I went to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to see a concert of Bach and Mendelssohn piano concertos. It was fantastic. And novel, because the conductor was also the pianist! When he was busy playing, he conducted via expressive head motions.

Anyway, more coming soon!

Political interlude.

Sorry to talk about politics here, but I woke up this morning and checked the New York Times online while eating my bowl of muesli (as I do every morning), and the headline was "Senate Abandons Automaker Bailout Bid." The article contains the following quote from Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell:

Mr. McConnell added: “The administration negotiated in good faith with the Democratic majority a proposal that was simply unacceptable to the vast majority of our side because we thought it frankly wouldn’t work.”

How about nothing, Mr. McConnell? How do you think nothing is going to work?

Regardless of one's opinions on the advisability of large-scale government intervention in private industry, I think that sentence stands as a stunning example of blinkered logic and the yellow-bellied spitefulness of Congressional politics. Since the "vast majority" of the Republicans had advanced no viable plan, they knew that by killing the bill (which passed the House), they were killing any possibility of taking any kind of action at all. And it's not even because of principle! He does not say "because, as supporters of free-market capitalism, we thought government intervention into private industry would be unacceptable" (and he'd have to add "in this case," because I seem to remember reading a little something about a $750 billion bailout package for other industries). He only says he didn't think the other plan would work. So now we'll never have a chance to find out if it would have worked, and I am wondering, more than ever this morning, what coming home is going to be like.

The only living girl in Paris.

I know the minute Thanksgiving's over everyone starts thinking about the fantastic Hannukah-Christmas-New Years' holiday extravaganza, but I do want to return quickly to my Thanksgiving in Paris. In short, it was nothing like the real thing, but not bad anyway. Real Thanksgiving is, at least for me, an occasion to be gloriously chintzy and sentimental in a particularly American way; even thinking about it, I'm imagining warmly-lit kitchens, arrays of mismatched casserole dishes and salad bowls, those turkey hand-drawings kids do, snowman sweaters. None of these things exist in the French idiom as I've experienced it. Instead, people from our program met up at a nice restaurant in the 18th, where the tables were set with spotless white cloths and multiple types of forks. We had a delicious dinner. The turkey was, sadly, served on the plate, rather than carved at the table, but I guess it's not really the same if it's not one's Uncle Billy-Bob-Joe doing the carving anyway. The mashed (puréed) potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas, corn, cranberry sauce, and gravy were set out in adorable white pots that we passed around. Dessert was cheesecake -- the French version of cheesecake has a different texture, because they don't have cream cheese here and so use something else instead, but tastes pretty close to the American version -- and pecan pie, with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. Oh, and coffee, of course, after we'd spent two hours drinking le Nouveau Beaujolais.

It was a great meal and a good night, but I missed being home a lot that day.

Lately, I've been working on finals. Next week, I'll have my last classes before winter break, and then after break I'll have two more weeks of mostly exams. That means all of my papers are due this month. I've already turned in fourteen pages on Dostoyevsky, and I'm done revising eight pages on French feminism at the turn of the century. Leaves one exam (Francophone Literatures) today, and a ten-pager on Marx for next Thursday. And next Friday, I'll be leaving to travel through Europe by train! (I don't know how much internet access I'll have, but I will try to update as much as possible while I'm Eurailing it.)

I'm trying to take enough breaks from writing to enjoy being in Paris, though, and last weekend Lizzie came to visit, giving me plenty of opportunities to explore the city. I had a really great time while she was here (and I hope she did too!). We went to the Rodin Museum, to the Best Falafel Place in the World, to the Café Universel, to the Marché aux Puces at St-Ouen, to the 11th, and to see the amazing window displays at the big department stores. As usual, I don't have enough pictures, but here's a few.


Opéra Garnier at night. This picture didn't come out too well. When you're standing in front of it, both the scale and the brightness of the gold are beautiful and overwhelming.


Karl Lagerfeld's Christmas window display at Printemps! I was endlessly delighted by this. One, it has nothing to do with Christmas, as far as I could tell. Two, it is utterly terrifying. I felt that the dolls were somehow in danger.


One of my favorite windows, from the Galeries Lafayette. This is what various parents walking by me kept calling a "fashion" window, breaking the displays into pour les enfants (for kids) and juste la mode (only fashion, and not for the kids). I could see why -- although this window was gorgeous, the one next to it had tons of awesome, moving rabbit marionnettes, up to all sorts of shenanigans at a tea party.


The World's Best Falafel! I mean, I haven't been to the rest of the world, but the sign is pretty convincing, and the falafel was undeniably good.


The lights on the Champs-Élysées.

Last night, I went to see Kubrick's Paths of Glory at the Champo -- great great great movie -- and afterwards there was a little talk by Antoine de Baecque. I found this thrilling, because he wrote one of my favorite books about the French Revolution. ("Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution," in case anyone's interested.) It was also a little surprising to see an author and historian be so young. I was picturing old and crusty, but events proved me wrong. Gives one hope for an academic career at a young-ish age. At least in France.

I couldn't stay for the whole debate, though, because I had to head home to study for a test. In fact, I'm about to leave for St-Denis in a few minutes to take it -- my Francophone Lit final. Wish me luck!

Strasbourg, and technical difficulties.

This morning I trundled off to the Bibliothèque Nationale at 9:30 in the morning, weighted down with a bag full of books and my trusty laptop, ready to do some serious paper-writing. (Of course, I spaced out on the subway -- a guy came on and started to play a set of bagpipes that was shaped like a sheep, with a fuzzy outside and a little sheep face on the front -- and went a few stops too far, and had to get off to catch a train going back in the opposite direction. Probably, in retrospect, a sign of how well the studying was going to go.) Met a friend at the BNF, found our respective rooms, and settled in. The place was packed with French students diligently working away. I took out my computer and plugged it in, and... nothing.

Whoops! My charger has been acting funny for a few weeks now, taking five or six minutes to start working or needing a good firm shove into the outlet, but today there was just nothing. I decided I couldn't work on my paper (since I only had about two hours of battery life left, and if I couldn't get the charger to work, the whole computer would just die after two hours), so I did some reading instead, then left around 1 pm to go to a Marx seminar at the Sorbonne. Long story short, the seminar didn't quite work out, and instead I went to a café to try out my computer again and do some work.

It still didn't work. I freaked out a little. Mom helped me figure out that the FNAC (a huge, overwhelming chain store here, with electronics, DVDs, video games, cell phones, books, lectures, a café, and ticket sales) has an Apple store in it, so I packed up my things and headed over. There, a very very nice man tested my charger and determined that it was, in fact, completely dead. He also sold me a new one for an exorbitant price. But, now I can use my computer again! Paper-writing, here I come.

Well, paper-writing, here I come later; how about some pictures of Strasbourg first?


The day I arrived, the town was putting up its enormous Christmas tree in the Place Kléber. Strasbourg is famous for its Christmas market, and the whole town was in the process of decorating the weekend I was there.


I was just walking along, and a giant cathedral came out of nowhere!


A view of the cathedral from the front. It's so big my camera couldn't capture it all at once. We decided to go up to the tip-top of the spire, which turned out to involve hundreds of harrowing stairs on a tiny spiral staircase.


On our way up!


Continuing my theme of "me standing in front of a panoramic view," here's me and Strasbourg, from the top of the Cathedral.


Rachel and I took the boat tour of town in the evening. It was dark, so I didn't get many pictures, but I think this is a nice, artistically blurry bridge.


Here's Petite-France, a ridiculously quaint part of town, with lots of these very old, cute buildings.


Someone had made a tiny snowman.


A snowy French garden, part of the Orangerie park. Extreme symmetry!


We climbed up the rocky outcropping that overlooks this pond (and took a picture!).

I had a great time in Strasbourg; Rachel made an excellent hostess and showed me all around town. It even snowed a magical, wintry snow while I was there! We went to see a Molière play (Le Malade Imaginaire, which we actually read together in senior-year French class!), and I ate some choucroute, the Strasbourg specialty dish of sauerkraut, five kinds of sausage, potatoes, and bread. I will not be eating choucroute again.

However, I'll write more about Strasbourg next time, because now I really do need to work on some homework. Or maybe I should just do as the French do and go on homework strike...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Or "Joyeuse Donner-Merci," as we've decided to translate it here. I just got back from a Frenchified Thanksgiving feast -- more on that soon -- and wanted to wish everyone a lovely and happy day. Forgive me for being cheesy (oh so briefly), but today I donne merci for my family and friends, distant but far from forgotten, and the incredible opportunity to enjoy this incredible city. Also, pie.

I'm planning to make time for a proper update tomorrow: strikes, sausage, and school. Until then, eat some extra Jello for me!

A scholarly interval, and other recent events.

Paris has been damp and chilly for the past few weeks. In the afternoon, the white Haussmannian buildings blend into the low, pale clouds. Armies of blue-jumpsuited gardeners scurry around the Luxembourg Gardens, cleaning up all the leaves that fall from the rows of trees. (This might be the Frenchiest expression I've seen yet of the very French desire to remove all discernible evidence of organic plant life from their public gardens.) Half the city has perfected the art of smoking moodily while walking; the effect is hightened in a light rain, like we've had intermittently for weeks.

It's very picturesque, in an urban-melancholy kind of way. However, it's also just the kind of weather that exacerbates poor American exchange students' bronchitis. I came down sick a few days after Election Night, and I can only conclude that it is Sarah Palin's fault that I spent a week coughing like Satine at her turberculariest. My host mother took wonderful care of me. She got me an appointment with their family doctor at short notice, drove me to the appointment, helped me fill the prescriptions, made me soup and bought lots of clementines, for the vitamin C. Last Monday and Tuesday I didn't leave the apartment at all as I waited out my fever and rested up.

Friday morning, though, I was feeling better and off to scenic Charleville, France! When I applied to CUPA, I also proposed using the semester to get started researching my Bard Senior Thesis, which will be on the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. CUPA agreed to support my research, so I planned a trip to Charleville, Rimbaud's hometown in the Ardennes, to visit the Rimbaud Museum there and scope out the research possibilities. I spent Friday and half of Saturday in Charleville, and it was ... interesting!

The Museum was pretty small, although I was suitably (and geekily) impressed by things like "Suitcase, used by Rimbaud 1873-1875" and "Tin cup, used by Rimbaud in Harrar." I was much more disappointed by the paucity of books available for purchase. There were plenty of copies of Rimbaud's works, and a few glossy coffeetable-type books about Rimbaud's influence, but essentially nothing available in the way of secondary critical literature, which is what I'm principally interested in finding while in France. (Rimbaud is widely studied everywhere but, obviously, particularly esteemed in France. It's pretty easy to obtain the major studies of him -- Blanchot, Bonnefoy, Char, etc -- whereas it can be quite difficult to get a hold of the multitudinous specialized ones.) I was able to go to the Charleville Library, a gorgeous big new building, and speak to some unbelievably nice librarians, who gave me lots of good information and with whose help I was able to start constructing a preliminary bibliography. But I did not go on the mad, literary theory and criticism book-buying spree I had envisoned.

I did get to know the tiny town of Charleville, though!

The park behind the Rimbaud Museum.


Another view, with the river. (Don't ask me which river, though.)


The Museum.


The plaque outside the Maison d'Ailleurs, Rimbaud's childhood home. It reads, predictably, "Arthur Rimbaud lived here, 1869-1875."


Inside the Maison d'Ailleurs, now an extremely avant-garde conceptual museum dedicated to Rimbaud's travels.




The church at Épernay, a smallish city in the Champagne region where I had an hour between trains.


Mr. Charleville himself!



The Place Ducale, Charleville's main square, at night.

There's also nothing like traveling by yourself for meeting people. Or, at least, having conversations with strangers. I got started bothering the French populace right off the bat on the train to Épernay, when I realized I had no idea where I was supposed to have validated my ticket. I turned to the friendly-looking woman behind her, and explained with my best American accent that I was foreign and confused: was this the train to Épernay? Also, what in the world did "compostez ce billet" mean? She sized me up -- if I had to guess what her internal thought process was, I'd say she was evaluating the likelihood that I would burst into tears against the amount of time it would take her to explain what I was supposed to do -- and then said, "If you'll look after my things for a minute, I'd be happy to go take care of validating your ticket for you." I was floored and quite pleased; I was briefly dependent on the kindness of strangers, and it was fine!

In Charleville, people were generally also very friendly, although their reactions to me tended to break down into two parts: First, they noted my accent and asked where I am from. Second, they asked, with varying degrees of incredulity, what I was doing in Charleville. It's funny how, well, provincial the provinces are -- people seemed delighted with the fact that I'm American and utterly shocked that an American would be visiting their town in the middle of November. (A shopkeeper asked me to give Obama a kiss for him. You know, the next time I run into Obama, I guess.) Several asked me why I had chosen to learn French, which I thought was interesting. I wished I had a good answer.

Since I got back, I've been busy with school and, uh, culture! I spent a very serious day studying very seriously at the library; I saw the new James Bond (recommended! Although if you like your Bond Rogery Moorey, beware); I saw a staging of Camus' Les Justes; I went to a "Café-Philo," which is this gloriously French thing where a ten or fifteen people get together and have a philosophical debate for two hours over espresso. The topic yesterday was "contradictions." I felt like Sartre should have been there.

Things are going much better at the University lately. I have a decent idea of what's going on in most of my classes, and today I presented an exposé that went well. I heard rumors this morning that there would be a general student strike tomorrow and therefore neither classes nor homework, but since I fail to understand the whole "student srike" concept, I think I'm going to show up anyway. I mean, if there are no students and teachers, I'll just head back home and nap. (Striking is a big deal here. Next time I post, I'll try and explain it a little.)

Friday morning, I'm off to Strasbourg to visit a friend from high school, and then it'll be back to the daily Parisian grind. I can't believe I'll be home in less than two months. I still haven't been to the Louvre yet!

Une nuit blanche.

Around six in the morning on November 5th, the sun was rising in Paris; there was a drizzle, and the light was soft and gray; a dozen people were crowded around the open door of a diner, craning their necks to see the little tv screen inside the crowded diner playing Barack Obama's victory speech. Except for Obama's voice and the noise of rain dripping off the gutters, it was silent. When he finished speaking, a woman shouted in a heavy French accent, "Yes we can!" She was black and she was crying and the whoops of joy echoing in the otherwise-deserted street were hers even as they seemed to speak for everyone, all of us standing there, dead-tired, mostly Americans, up all night in a foreign land to watch the direct satellite feed of our futures, to participate in this moment of our history.

It was a long night, November 4th, and an even longer November 5th (class from 9 am to 3 pm, a brief nap, dinner, and then a viewing of the Comédie Française's Le Mariage de Figaro that went wildly, tragically unappreciated by me), and now I have gunk in my lungs and a cough that just won't quit, but I can't say it wasn't worth it. My first real nuit blanche, as my host mother said. It was great.

Now: another wet weekend in Paris, the warm embrace of the library, and catching up on some sleep. To everyone who has sent me emails in the past few weeks: responses are coming, I promise. It's been a busy couple of weeks and I haven't been able to devote enough time to sit down and answer my email yet, but I will very soon.

Election day.

Okay, I might actually explode. Why oh why did I choose to live abroad during election time? I got up at 9 a.m. and have been unable to do anything except check the internet for news -- news I know won't be coming for hours! When I first started looking, it wasn't even November 4th in America yet.

Maybe I should just try to nap or something, because I'm not sure my blood pressure can take twelve to fourteen more hours of nerve-wracking anxiety. Then again, I think the French might have already hit upon the answer to this problem, cleverly calling it "a bottle of wine with lunch."



[It's the final countdown!]

Oh, what a world we live in.

It's the evening of November 3rd here, and I must confess that I am locked in my room, obsessively refreshing various websites to see if there's any further updates about the election. Tomorrow night, I'm planning to head off to an election night bash that begins at midnight and ends around 6 a.m. -- bagels provided -- and then hopefully drag my weary bones off to six hours of lecture at St. Denis. Even typing it out, that seems like an insane plan. But I am so, well, excited about the election, the first presidential election I've voted in, that I think one or two days of exhaustion will be very much worth it when I look back in a few years.

But, you say, what have you been up to lately? Well, quite a bit! First, on an academic note, I think everything is going to be fine regarding the exposé disaster. (Thanks to everyone for their sympathies, though; you made a tough week easier!) I'm continuing to enjoy my classes, and am feeling pretty good about the rest of the semester.

Second, Mom came to visit! She and her intrepid traveling companion Sally arrived last Wednesday and left Sunday morning. Although the weather chose to be rather uncooperative, we had a great, very busy time wandering around a cold and drizzly Paris. I wanted to show off the town, and we saw everything: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre and the Tuileries, Sacré-Cœur, the Quartier Latin, the Hôtel de Ville and the Marais, the Luxembourg Gardens, and, of course, fabulous Issy-les-Moulineaux! And that's not counting the museums we visited and our day trip to Versailles. And the pauses for a crêpe here and there, of course.

I was also really pleased that Mom was able to meet my host family here. Madame invited us all to dinner, and she set out an absolutely lovely meal, with pâté and salad, a seafood gratin and Persian-cooked rice, and chocolate mousse. Madame used to teach English, so we had hardly any language difficulties, and I think everyone enjoyed the evening. I know I certainly did, especially when Madame offered to drive Mom and Sally back to their hotel, because she chose a route along the Seine that really showed off Paris at night; it was a real treat for me, too, since I usually take the subway everywhere and had never even seen some of the things we passed, and Madame gave a little commentary on what we were seeing.

Saying goodbye to Mom was very hard, and part of me wished I could have packed up my bags and headed off to the airport with them. (Of course, another part of me tried to convince her that hey, wouldn't it be nice to stay in Paris for another few weeks?) Already, I miss her a lot, but I'm glad she came to visit, and that she brought me some peanut butter.

The next few weeks look to be equally busy. Some important schoolwork's coming up, and on November 14-15 I'll be in Charleville, researching Rimbaud with my grant. The weekend after, I'll be visiting a friend in Strasbourg. Hopefully I'll be able to find a few minutes to update now and again!

(Oh, and even though I'm sure everyone reading this is on top of it, just in case: Don't forget to vote on Tuesday!!)

Falling flat and catching up.

Well, I've had quite a time since I last posted. Besides classes really getting started (and how -- but more on that later), I've walked around half the city, joined a knitters' group, been to the top of the Eiffel Tower, gone to an opera and a dance performance, seen a screening of Hitchcock's Notorious, found my favorite crêpe place so far, and maybe most importantly of all, tried fondue. Life here is very busy, and my days are very full. I usually get up early and cross the city by noon, either to go to class or to get downtown, and I don't make it back to my room until late in the evening, around seven-thirty or eight if I'm eating dinner with my host family and much later than that if I'm foraging on my own. This is both exhilarating and frustrating. It's great to be on the go, getting as much as I can out of the time I have here. But, on the other hand, a lot of that time is spent on the tram, the metro, the RER, the bus, walking at a brisk clip, planning, meeting people, getting directions, and (crucially) figuring out if the place I'm trying to go is open. My goal for the next few weeks is to spend more time wandering in the city, rather than always trying to be going somewhere in particular; there's lots of neighborhoods I have yet to explore, lots of museums I haven't gone to yet, and lots of adventures waiting to be had before it gets too cold.

I was happy to be able to check "go to the top of the Eiffel Tower" off my Paris to-do list. I met my friends Melanie and Allison early on Friday morning, before the ravening bus-loads of tourists arrived, and we got to see Paris as the day brightened. It was really beautiful. I have a lot of pictures to post, but I can't seem to post them right now, so I'll edit this entry as soon as I can get the picture-post function to work. [Edit: Seems to be okay now, here we go!]


That's the Tuileries and the Louvre (and a bunch of mist).


The Arc de Triomphe!


The Seine and the Trocadero.


Me! And Paris!

Last Saturday, I was also really pleased to make it to a French knitters' group that meets here in Paris. I found out about it through an online knitters' community that I belong to, and I was a little bit nervous as I made my way to the meeting-place, a bookstore on the Right Bank, because this was one of the first really French things I was doing here: being with French people without any other Americans around. (All of my classes but one here have another CUPA student in them, so at scary, oh-no-French! moments there's usually someone else to look baffled with.) I brought a pair of socks I've started working on and sat down near the back of the group, and after a few minutes other people started to say hello, and talk about what we're working on and whether violet is the color of the season, and then I was offered tea and homemade cake. And then I tried to just listen, to enjoy the conversation and the company. I had a great time, and while I won't be able to make it every week -- the meetings are at 10:30 on Saturday mornings, which isn't generally the most convenient time for college students -- I certainly hope to go again soon.

Other exciting things... CUPA provides us the opportunity to go to four big shows per semester, and this past week I went to two. The first, on Monday night, was fantastic: Rigoletto at the Opéra Bastille. To begin with, the Opéra Bastille is an amazing building. It was built by Mitterrand in the 1980s, along with the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Pompidou Center, and the Grande Arche, and the style is very imposingly modernist from the outside. The inside, however, is comfortable and the sound is amazingly lush. I don't know much about opera, but I loved the show. (At one point there was fire onstage!) The next spectacle on Tuesday night was less enjoyable. I managed to be about ten minutes late due to some unforseen subway difficulties, and rather than luxuriating in our top-notch CUPA seats, I got stuck on a half-seat on the end of a row in the nosebleed section. I fear that my appreciation of the dance was affected negatively. The seat was unbelievably awful; it constantly wanted to turn inwards, so I had to brace myself with my feet to prevent sitting in the lap of the person next to me, and the chair was less than half the size of a normal one, so the lumbar support was nonexistent. It was almost a stool, actually. There was no intermission, which meant I couldn't go take my real seat for the second half, and I will admit I spent the entire hour and a half frowning mightily and wishing I was at home, or at least in a real chair. The dance was okay, I guess. It was the story of Snow White in modern-dance form, and involved the seven dwarves swinging in complicated formations from bungee cords as they emerged from the mines. Also, they had spelunking hats and clicked the little lights on and off rhythmically sometimes.

Perhaps I just don't understand modern dance.

Unfortunately, the week wasn't all fun and games. I spent a lot of time in various libraries, working on an presentation for my French feminism class that was due on Thursday. I had volunteered to go first, on the theory that it was a subject that interested me (Hubertine Auclert) and that it's always better to get that kind of thing out of the way early, rather than waiting until the end of the semester when all the work just piles up. But I hadn't counted on one thing: I am in France, and I have no idea what I'm doing. This became abundantly clear when I gave the presentation. I had prepared, essentially, what is called an exposé: a sort of report on a figure or topic. What I was supposed to have prepared was an explication de texte: a line-by-line close analysis of a historical or literary document that seeks to clarify a historical issue. So, my twenty-minute summary of a four-paragraph document and the life of Hubertine Auclert was, um, wrong. I figured this out right before I went up to speak in front of the class.

It was one of the worst hours of my life. After I finished, the professor critiqued me (as is the custom here), and although she was extraordinarily generous, I still had a very hard time not crying. (However, I provided a valuable service to the other foreign students in the class, because after my clearly very-confused disaster, she explained exactly what the assignment was supposed to have been and how to do it for everyone else.) Once class finished, I spoke to the professor for a minute, trying to explain that I was really sorry, that I hadn't known what to do, and, miraculously, she told me not to worry about it. I am still worried about it, and thinking about what I can do to make it up. But I know that I certainly won't be caught so confused again.

Today I'm taking some time to relax and get organized. And I'm thrilled because Mom will be here in a few days! I can't wait to see a familiar face.

Quick update.

Just wanted to write and let everyone know that I haven't forgotten about this blog! It's been a very busy (pretty difficult) week, so I'll hopefully be able to find some time to write and post pictures soon.

La boulangerie.

Lots of things to write about, but first I'll post some pictures from our day trip to Chantilly. Last Saturday, CUPA arranged an outing to see the château, woods, garden, and stables at Chantilly, about an hour north of Paris. (It's also the home of a delicious type of whipped cream: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chantilly_cream.) When we arrived, it was cold and misty:





I took many, many pictures during the informative château tour. Tragically, however, none of them came out because I wasn't allowed to use the flash. I wish I could post the pictures of the Grand Singerie, a room decorated with beautiful, strange rococo paintings of monkeys dressed up in vaguely Eastern clothes. I also wish that I could summarize the château's history -- first owned by one royal family, then by another! -- in an interesting way, but I fear that might be beyond my limits.

The sun came out and we walked all around the grounds. The gardens are enormous and include a French garden, an English garden, a waterfall, a woods, and, apparently, a kangaroo house. Somehow I managed to miss the kangaroos. I did see the huge stables and gorgeous horses, for which Chantilly is justly famous.






But on to more important matters, namely, food. I've had a lot of questions about the food here, and my response is unequivocal: it is awesome. Of course, you might think, how can any cuisine that depends so heavily on butter, meat, bread, and cheese fail to be awesome? That's a big part of it. For many Americans, French food is at a basic level stuff we like to eat, stuff that's normally fraught with moral implications (so much cholesterol!, empty calories!, etc) but when in France, we throw up our hands, succumb to deliciousness, and give it a free pass. Sure, I say, why not, I'll take the crème brûlée. Another quiche. Steak au poivre, please!

I think there's another important difference, though, and that has to do with the way people think about eating here. Basically, they value eating well. Not in the way we as Americans think of eating well, our obsession with the low-fat and the vitamin-fortified, concerns that reflect our understanding of food as an aspect of health; rather, the French are very serious about the quality and taste of their food. I realized this when my host mother offered me some grapes one day. I said "Merci, I like white grapes," and she was puzzled by the term. She identified the grapes at a completely different level, actually the kind of grape, its name, provenance, flavor, and the best few weeks of the season to buy it.

My favorite manifestation of this particular French value, the value of eating well, is the boulangerie, or bakery. There's a boulangerie or two on every corner in Paris, and every one sells fresh bread: two or three different kinds of baguettes, round crusty farm bread, brioche, wheat breads. Any time of day, you can walk in and buy warm bread, sandwiches, pastries (the pastries! Pain au chocolat, éclair, mille-feuille, réligieuse, tarte au chocolat, croissant aux amandes, tarte aux fraises!). Obviously the quality varies, although I have yet to find a bad baguette in this town. At first I was astonished to observe how serious Parisians are about their bread; a month later, I'm a regular at my own boulangerie.

So, in short, the food is amazing. My host mother is an excellent cook, and I eat dinner here five times a week. For the other two, I'm free to explore the restaurants of Paris. I have yet to find anywhere serving anything involving peanut butter, but the search will continue!

One last thing, to wrap up. I've chosen my courses for the semester:
Introduction to Francophone Literatures
Stories of Madmen in 19th Century Literature (Russian & French)
Marx for Beginners
French Feminism, 1870-1970
All the professors were engaging, comprehensible, interesting, and friendly, and the reading lists look fabulous. More on school coming soon!

Bones, expats, and other mysteries.

It's been a busy week since last I blogged. Although I'm still not fully recovered from my cold -- the cough is particularly persistent, and I couldn't hear much of anything on Friday because of sinus pressure -- I managed to get out and about quite a bit in the last days before classes begin. (Tomorrow!) My list of Things to See and Do in Paris has plenty of items left, but I did manage to see one site that was near the top on Wednesday: the Catacombs.

A quick warning, though, before I write about them. The Catacombs, a massive ossuary containing hundreds of thousands of Parisian skeletons, are deeply creepy. I'm going to post some pictures, so if you don't think you want to read about and see a wall of femurs, please close your eyes tightly and scroll down for a minute or two.

Still with me? Good, because the Catacombs are one of the most interesting things I've seen in Paris so far. I went with three friends from CUPA without quite knowing what we were getting into, and when we got to the end of the long, long staircase that descends into the Catacombs, we found ourselves following narrow, labyrinthine passageways for twenty minutes or so. (No guides and no tours, just four American college kids with a brochure.) We went for so long without seeing anything that I wondered aloud, "Aren't there supposed to be bones or something in here?"

Eventually we came upon a sort of antechamber. The sign over the doorway answered my question:



Translation: "Stop. This is death's kingdom."

But who can resist a welcome like that? Not I! (Also, not the extremely loud group of German tourists who were there, being incongruously merry and chewing gum.) We walked on, and this is what we saw:



Wall after wall of bones, carefully arranged, piled into solid structures and decorated with skulls. Walls with skulls forming a heart shape, walls with skulls forming cross shapes, walls with skull and crossbones at regular intervals. There are no glass partitions, nothing separating the tourist from this incredible, overwhelmingly tangible proof of death except for a sign near the entrance asking visitors not to steal any bones. Walking through the cold, damp halls, beads of condensation dripped onto my head; I shivered as I brushed the water off, looking at a dusty skull with a perfect smallish hole in the temple. Here's me and my friends trying to strike appropriately sombre expressions (except for one grinner, studying to be a doctor and thrilled by all the bones):



I read the brochure after I got home that night, and it turns out they started moving bones down there in the late 1700s, when construction required the digging up of several cemeteries, and continued for almost a century. (Signs in each section indicate when and from where the bones were moved, a good deal of them dated 1859.) The Catacombs are consecrated, and there's a few rooms that have altars; apparently Mass can be held there, although I don't know if it ever was consistently. And ... now it's a tourist attraction!

Moving on to cheerier subjects -- although, depending on your point of view, maybe not -- another cool thing I did this week was watch the VP debate live, very early Friday morning. A group of American expatriates, study abroad students, and a few curious non-Americans gathered at an Irish pub in a swanky Right Bank neighborhood at 3 a.m. Aside from the debate itself, it was interesting to get a glimpse into the expat community here, and to think about what it means to be an expatriate. It's something I've struggled with in the month I've been here: how do you live in a foreign culture, with all the assimilation that implies, and maintain your original identity? Or: how do you live out the contradictions of choosing to live in Paris, but being passionate enough about America to stay out until 5 a.m. on a weeknight to catch the VP debate live?

I certainly don't have an answer, but it was a fun night. I spent much of Friday recovering, and then Saturday baked chocolate chip cookies with my friend Allison. Finding the chocolate chips was the toughest part, because they're somewhat exotic here, like peanut butter and marshmallows, and they turned out to be both hilariously small and moderately overpriced. Baking was a lot of fun, though, and I was happy to hear my host family declare the cookies "délicieux!" Saturday was also La Nuit Blanche, or White Night, but I was pretty wiped out and missed out on most of the concerts and art exhibits happening around the city all night, only making a brief stop at the Eiffel Tower. It was lit up a beautiful blue, but sadly, I didn't have my camera with me...

And today I went to the Cinémathèque Française! It's now one of my favorite places in Paris, and I plan to spend half of my free time there. A film library, museum, and theater, the CF shows six or seven movies a day, most of which are classics, revivals of obscure vintage Hollywood productions, foreign films, silents, and retrospectives (right now, Dennis Hopper). I saw Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" this morning, with a short introduction by a film historian. I picked up the CF's October-November calendar and already have it all marked up with lectures to go to and films to see.

Tomorrow morning at 9 I'll be starting my first university class this semester. All week I'll be attending class -- lots of class, probably seven different courses -- and then on Friday I'll decide on my final slate of four. I'm a little nervous; no matter how old I get, the first day of school always seems to call for one's best dress, sharpened pencils, and a little bit of nervousness. Updates coming soon!

The best laid plans.

One quick and easy way to mess up touristing plans is to come down with a really bad cold. Mine hit with full force around 2:30 in the afternoon on Sunday, making the trip to the Mont St. Michel a little less cool than hoped for, and forcing me to cancel my trip to Strasbourg this week. (I did, however, reschedule it for November -- something you can only do over the phone -- and had a pretty good time trying to make myself understood to the customer service representative.) So, I'll be spending my week off recuperating, resting, visiting museums, and trying to keep up with the stream of distressing news coming from the US.

Before I got really sick, though, I had a great time on our trip to Brittany. We took a very cool high-speed train (TGV) out to the northwest, and then a bus to the village of Saint-Malo. It's an old city, more like a fortress, surrounded entirely by thick stone walls and, beyond the walls, the sea. Apparently pirates used to be a big deal at Saint-Malo, but having skipped the trip to the pirate museum, I can't say much more than that. There are several small islands and structures close to Saint-Malo, which are accessible depending on whether or not the tide is in. Here's a view of the city from one of its docks:



After arriving, we all went to a crêperie and had an extravagant lunch. (Crêpe paysanne: proscuitto, tomato, mushroom, cheese, lettuce in a brown-wheat crêpe; crêpe au chocolat: sweet crêpe, chocolate sauce, vanilla ice cream.) When we emerged hours later, my friend Allison and I decided to go explore the beaches and rocks:



Dinner -- also delicious -- was followed by some more wandering. I ended up back on the beach again, enjoying the clear view of the night sky and the stars.

That was probably a bad move, as I realized when I woke up the next morning with a sore throat and stuffy nose. But hey, the trip must go on. We were off to the Mont St. Michel, our double-decker bus swaying perilously in the coastal winds and swerving crazily along France's thinnest, twistiest road. (For many, carsickness ensued.) Worth it, however, for this view:



I spent a few hours walking around the Mont, up and down staircases and narrow paths, coming along unexpected gardens and awesome views. During our group's guided tour of the abbey at the top of the Mont, I got really sick and feverish, so those two hours were particularly torturous. I have no pictures because I was so out of it. But here are two from before then:




On the bus and train rides home, I just tried to keep it together. In France, hardly anything is open on Sundays, partly because of the country's Catholic heritage, and partly because of their stringent employment regulations. While it's inconvenient to, say, have to wait until Monday to stock up on coffee, it's a lot more inconvenient to have to wait to buy medicine. Lesson of French life: Don't get sick on Sunday. Luckily, my host mother, Madame Dupetit, is a wonderful woman who immediately made me tea, gave me medicine, and put me to bed. I spent all of yesterday in my room here, sleeping and periodically attempting to read the Economist. Today I felt well enough to go out into town myself, so I am now reprovisioned with Sudafed, asprin, oranges, and cereal.

So, although things didn't quite work out like I had hoped, on the bright side, I now have an extra two days of relaxation and exploration in Paris!

I hope everything is well with everyone reading at home. I miss you all!

Inscriptions.

They're doing some construction work on the road that I take to get to the subway stop from the apartment, and this morning when I walked by a man was standing up to his knees in concrete, setting it. There's so much to see here, and living in Paris is much less hurried than spending time in New York; people walk slower (sometimes frustratingly slowly), they pause and watch the street around them, groups of friends take up the whole sidewalk while air-kissing goodbye.

As of today, I am finished with Orientation! Tomorrow I, and most of the kids from my program, am heading off for a two-day visit to Bretagne and the Mont St. Michel. I'm pretty excited -- I love train travel and I really love the Mont St. Michel. (When I visited Paris in 2005 with MV, we did a day-trip there.) It's really the last time the whole program will be together, since starting on Monday most people's courses begin, and then we start the business of actually living and studying here.

My courses won't start until October 6, though. I've decided to take a full slate at the Université de Paris 8-Saint Dénis, although given the peculiarities of the French university system, I might be attending up to 27 hours of class the first week. Once I have my schedule all set, I'll post it. Looks like I'll be taking one film course and three literature classes, if all goes as planned! But in my week off, I'll be visiting a high-school friend staying in Strasbourg for a few days, which I'm really looking forward to.

So far, every day has brought an interesting experience of cultural difference. Last night I went out for dinner with a French friend, who had never before eaten schwarma and had never heard of a bagel. (Once I managed to explain the shape, she thought I meant a doughnut. Drawing the distinction between a bagel and a doughnut is surprisingly difficult if you can't remember the word "fried.") And I recently went to a Paris city library branch, at Vaugirard, to try and get a card ("m'inscrire"). This was a frustrating process. First, I couldn't figure out how to open the door -- there was a secret push-button thing! -- and then, once inside, I didn't see a "Inscriptions" sign, so I went and stood in an official-looking line. The librarian was quite perplexed when I asked if I could m'inscrire. "Would you not prefer an inscription for the adult collection?" he asked politely. Why yes, I would prefer an adult library card! He directed me to the right desk, with emphatic hand gestures. I approached this other librarian, an older man with wipsy white hair, and asked if it would be possible to m'inscrire.

"Do you have your passport?" he asked.

Why no, I did not have my passport! He shook his head sadly. He was afraid a passport would be required to obtain a card. Perhaps I could come back another time.

I have a second try penciled in my datebook for Monday.

Until then, I'll be busy exploring the northwest of France. Unless it rains, I should be able to take lots of pictures, so I'll definitely be doing an update next week!

Journées du patrimoine.

Yesterday and Saturday were unbelievably beautiful days in Paris. The weather was beautiful, cool but sunny, with a cloudlessly blue sky. Good weather is in and of itself something to be happy about, but when you are walking around getting to know a city, it's glorious. And this weekend, cities all over France celebrated the "Journées du patrimoine" (something like Cultural Heritage Days): museums were free, monuments open late, fees waved, tours given, and, best of all, special access to buildings normally closed to the public, like the presidential mansion.

So, in the last two days, I've been all over Paris. I've visited eight of the city's twenty districts and memorized a few good chunks of the metro map. Here are some photos from my travels!


This is Père Lachaise cemetery, a huge space on a hill in the 20th Arrondissement. Lots and lots of famous people are buried here -- politicians, artists, writers -- but their graves are suprisingly difficult to find, even with the aid of a map. I think I expected there to be big, flashing red lights and signs saying "Famous Person Here!" But since Père Lachaise still functions as a cemetery today and not a museum, I guess that would not be so great for the non-tourist crowd.

I was also really pleased to be here because it is the site of a very famous scene from a Balzac novel: "À nous deux maintenant!"


We went on a walking tour of the Marais, one of Paris's oldest neighborhoods, and saw a progression of architecture from the medieval to renaissance, ancien regime to 19th century. I have a lot of pictures of this, but here's the coolest one, of a 13th-century building still in use today.


The Eiffel Tower! I went with friends under the assumption that it would be free, on the Journées du patrimoine, to go up to the top. Alas, this was not the case, and there were also about five million tourists there. We took many, many pictures and decided to come back another time.


Across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Hi, it's me!


This is the central debating room of the French Senate. I decided to stop by here at sort of the last minute on Saturday (my feet were pretty tired from walking from the Marais to the Latin Quarter to the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe to the Champs-Elysées to the Latin Quarter again) but it was the coolest place I went to. The French Senate is usually closed to the public, which is a shame, because the inside is just incredible. Every room was like this: over-the-top with gilding, molding, sculptures, and painting. The inside of the building glows.

My camera ran out of memory at this point, so I don't have pictures of the other cool stuff in the Senate -- Victor Hugo's outline for the 2nd Republic, Napoleon's throne, the unbelievably amazing Senate library that looks like the library in Beauty and the Beast. I went with a friend, Allison, who did get some pictures, though, so if I might be able to put up at least Napoleon's throne in the next few days. This is probably an obvious thing to say about a piece of furniture designed for Napoleon, but it was small!

I have more pictures and definitely more things to write about, but I must unfortunately head out and get to class. Today my program, CUPA, is taking interested students on a visit this morning to Université de Paris 8-Saint Dénis, and since I am planning on taking all of my classes there, I'm very interested. This week is my last of Orientation (and this weekend we are taking a group trip to Brittany to see the Mont St. Michel!), and despite all of my assignments being due in the next day or two, I'm hoping to have some time to write some longer entries and post some more pictures soon.

Week One.

A week after I arrived in Paris, things are beginning to make sense. I am no longer surprised when my apologetic "Sorry!" doesn't draw a response; maybe next week I'll progress to actually saying "sorry" in French! I'm beginning to get a better feel for the layout of the city, too, occasioned by explorations in several new neighborhoods. And orientation classes at CUPA have proved to be fairly interesting. I have three required classes -- Methodology, Conversation, and Language -- and each lasts two hours with no breaks, conducted entirely in French. If that seems really long, well... it is. But classes at Université de Paris 8, the school I'll most likely take most of my courses at, are three hours long each. So it's good practice!

Outside of orientation, I've had time to do lots of walking around. Some pictures:


The view from my window.


Outside the Tuileries garden on a grey day. The Eiffel Tower is in the background, the Obelisk in the middle, and a Place de Concord statue in the foreground.


This is the Arc gateway to the Louvre. You can sort of see the famous glass pyramid entrance behind the Arc.


Taken from the Left Bank, a view across the Seine. The tower of Notre Dame is just visible above the line of buildings.


The Arène de Lutèce, a Roman circus, one of the oldest structures in Paris.


The view from the top terrace of the Arab Cultural Institute.


This is the side of the Arab Cultural Institute. It's really cool -- there are hundreds of little aluminum shutters that can be open and closed to let in varying amounts of sunlight.


The gardens at the main mosque in Paris, where we had a delicious tea.


Another view of Paris, and the Eiffel Tower, from way up high -- here, from the 20th Arrondissement.