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!