Election Day & Museum Visits

It's election day here in France!! The first round, at least, to determine the two major candidates for the second round May 6, and of course it's Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal. Personally, I want Royal to win because then France would have a woman president (and also she's liberal, and Sarkozy is kind of a jerk), but Sarkozy was ahead in the first round and I can see him being ahead in the second too. But the left votes were divided, and in the second round all the lefties can vote for Royal so she might have more support. It's gonna be really interesting and I'm a little sad my flight out is the day before the second round. I can follow from home but it won't be the same...

So I got up in time to have lunch with my family today (delicious; duck and pasta! Carottes ratées! yummmm), and afterwards I went with my host parents and Geraud to the voting place, the massive high school by the apartment. Once we got there, my host parents were appalled by the apparently long line (it would've only been like 30 minutes of waiting), which they claimed was the worst they had ever seen it (which turned out to be par for the course for Paris, this election had a nearly-record turnout of 85% of voters) and said they'd return later. (When they returned later, the line was still long!) Who were they voting for? Well, Sarkozy, we do live in the 16th after all, but oh well...

After that I followed the plan for the day I'd decided on the night before. See, I have very recently decided that I AM going to visit my friend Rebecca in Scotland next weekend, my last weekend here, so there's a bunch of Paris things I haven't done yet and want to do before I leave, and won't be able to do next weekend. And I'm tired of trying to entice people into doing what I want to do, or waiting for people to feel like doing what we've been saying we'd do, so I decided I was going to go and people could join me if they wanted (those I called were already busy/didn't answer, so I went solo after all). At Giverny we learned that the majority of Monet's paintings are in this museum in Paris right in my own 16th, so I hit that up first. I went one stop on the 9 over to La Muette and walked to the Musée Marmottan-Claude Monet, which is a small cute little museum that nevertheless has a very sizable Monet collection, including many of his waterlilies/Japanese bridge paintings and the painting that gave Impressionism its name, "Impression, soleil levant [Impression, sunrise]." All of it was soooo cool to see. There's paintings by other Impressionists there too, like Morisot, Renoir, etc. It was really nice, and so close to me! It was also especially cool to see after visiting the gardens; I could totally recognize a lot of things.

From there I went to the Tuileries, because I wanted to go to the Musée de l'Orangerie that's at the Concorde end and I also wanted to walk through the Tuileries garden, which I hadn't fully done yet. I began at the Louvre end and walked its whole length down to the Concorde end where the museum is (my shoes got sooo dusty from the path!). The garden is pretty nice, all of Paris was definitely there sunbathing, reading by the fountains, having lunch in the shaded cafés, everything. Inside the museum is some more Monet, his huuuge entire-wall-spanning waterlily canvases, and then many other things including Matisse, Renoir, Cézanne, etc. At the gift shop I got a big horizontal Monet print for my room next year :) It's gonna look so cool. Oh yeah, and they had that Renoir painting of the two girls at the piano (Jeunes filles au piano), which I wrote a paper about in my second year of French for evil Mme Rector/Gardner, so that was extremely cool to see. (I had been wondering why it wasn't at the Musée d'Orsay... though it moves around a lot, so maybe it was and I just can't remember.)


Tuileries




Big Monet rooms in the Orangerie museum

From there I checked out the Place de la Concorde, which I had never properly inspected before (seeing the big Obelisk and the two fountains).







After that I found the Métro stop and went over to the Centre Georges Pompidou, that crazy building with the colored tubes on the outside like something you'd see in Akihabara. It houses the Musée National d'Art Moderne, which is what I was hitting up. I definitely saw every single crazy thing in that museum, oh yeah. Lots of Picasso, Dalí, Kandinsky, Matisse, Mondrian, Chagall and so forth... very cool. I also ran into two other groups of 2 IES girls, haha. All of them were there to "do what they hadn't done yet," just like me. Afterwards I checked out the Stravinsky Fountain nearby (very cool looking) and then headed home, and had dinner with my family. I love how they sometimes give me lunch too on the weekends, they're not supposed to. My family is pretty awesome most of the time.


Centre Georges Pompidou


Stravinsky Fountain

These are the other things I haven't done yet and have decided I'm going to try to do:
- Catacombes (it's gonna be hard, they close at 4, but one day after school I'm gonna try to book it over there. I need someone to go with me though, cause it's too scary to go alone. I wish Mom and I had been able to go!!)
- Sainte Chapelle (I originally didn't want to because it costs money but I've heard it's beautiful so now I'm going to try) and, maybe, explore Luxembourg gardens more thoroughly
- Musée Rodin

There's some others, like the photography museum, Musée de Cluny (only for the unicorn tapestries), and La Madeleine church (Saint-Sulpice too), and I finally found out that all the Steinlen cat prints are at the Musée de la Publicité, so I want to go there too. But all those... I'm fine leaving them until a future return to Paris if I have to. I mean, you have to leave SOME things not yet explored, right?

I'm just glad I'm actually doing some of this stuff. (I already went to Paris's Chinatown last Monday, another thing I'd wanted to do. It's definitely where all the Asians in Paris are! I got edamame and koala snacks. No melon soda, I had to settle for Indian "melon milk." Weird). At the end of last semester, I had this list of stuff I still wanted to do in Tokyo, and I got almost none of it done because I wasn't aggressive enough about being like "Okay. We're doing this. Let's go!" I never rode the roller coaster at Korakuen, never saw the transportation museum in Akihabara, etc... and of course, the one that will haunt me forever, Meiji-jingu Shrine (even though I TRIED, it closed just as Allie and I got there wahhh). What's the key this time? Uh, just not being afraid to do this stuff by yourself if no one else will go with you... and it's often easier that way anyway. I definitely prefer visiting a museum by myself, so I can go at my own pace and not keep having to look for my friends.

I'm also realizing that, to expand on an earlier theme, my language skills HAVE improved. I was pretty convinced just a month or so ago that I was going to come away from this experience still speaking terrible French. Not so! It's simply the effect of being in a foreign country for 4 months: you're bound to pick some things up if you keep your eyes and ears open and do everything you can. It worked for Japanese, and miracle of miracles, it's working for French too. Who would have thought! Seriously, French is seeping into my brain, and making me want to insert it into English thoughts, or phrase things in a more French-grammar-based way (weird indeed). So it's the same case with Japanese: just when you're really on the path to getting so good... you have to leave. ragh. I also--dare I say it--really, really love Paris. After quite some time of not really admitting it, the spring weather did me in: I love it here. I'm going to be so sad to leave, as much as I am dying to go home. There's just so much about it that I've accepted as normal and I'm going to get home and go "Wait, you mean I can't just find a sidewalk cafe to sit and people-watch from? I can't just go to a boulangerie I know is good and get an excellent ham-and-cheese sandwich on a baguette? I can't just hop on the Métro and go wherever I want? Beautiful, famous sights aren't around every corner? Are you kidding me here?!"

At first, I was like "Wow, I'm so glad I didn't come here for a full year" but now, I think if I had stuck to the original plan--that was the original plan--and been here from August to May (though it seems most year students did go home in between), it wouldn't have been so terrible. I'd have more of an established life here, which it seems almost all the year students do, as obnoxious as some of them are (some, not all). I suspect more of them have actual French friends, too, something I never managed to acquire--and have no problem blaming IES entirely for (how am I supposed to do it on my own?! There's literally no way--cause yeah, meeting random people on the street is a GREAT plan, and I totally have the time for some random dance class or whatever to meet strangers in). But, of course, then I wouldn't have gone to Japan, and we all know what a very good decision that turned out to be indeed! For something I literally decided almost on the fly... seriously. I'd already turned in the paperwork to the study abroad office for full-year-in-Paris plans, and if Hyung-Hye hadn't told us one day that she was going to be working for IES Tokyo next year, which really was the last straw for me (who had already been longing to go back to Japan after Janterm), things would have been veeery different...

Quand même, quand même... I'm happy with everything. More or less. Still. Yes. :)

Giverny

So to my great surprise, after being out of France for 10 days and speaking pretty much English the whole time with the people I was with, I come back to find that my French has IMPROVED. Or rather, I've just gotten less anxious about speaking it so it's just easier to let it flow. The accent isn't perfect, nor will it ever be I suspect, but it's a little easier to make work the majority of the time. Actually, when I think about it, I was practicing French while I was gone, because 3 out of the 4 books I brought to read while on trains and whatnot were in French, and I did read them often. So I guess that was practice. It's really helpful, too, I've picked up a lot of useful everyday phrases to make my speech more natural. I love being able to read in French!

So dinner with my host family the other night was just fine, I could even jump into a discussion and contribute stuff at one point, and when I think about how huge of a change that is from the very beginning, I'm blown away.

Today was my second IES field trip, a visit to Giverny, a very small village where Monet's home & gardens are, and where a lot of American painters came around/after the time of Impressionism. It was veeery cool, I loved it. We left by bus in the morning and once we got there divided into two groups. I was in McKenzie and Allie's group that went to see the Musée d'Art Américain (Museum of American Art) first, hosting paintings made by said American artists, which was... interesting, mostly because we had to have this guided tour by this woman who just would go on and on about a particular painting, and even though she had been told we understand French she would keep interpreting what she was saying with an English translation every couple sentences, which got annoying fast. I just wanted to be able to browse freely, and I'm sure we all did too, but nooo, we had to be led around by her. Then, with 15 minutes and a couple more rooms left, she just says "Okay, I'll leave you here!" and those last rooms turned out to be the best ones and we were annoyed that we'd only gotten 15 minutes to look at them because she wouldn't stop going on about stuff!! Ohhh well. It's a very nice museum in any case, I just don't see why we needed the guided tour.

After that it was LUNCHTIME YAY at this restaurant called Les Nymphéas, which means "Waterlilies" (Monet's favorite subject, you'll recall), and it was delicious. A wonderful salad with carrots and hardboiled eggs, then a main course of roasted chicken and fries, then apple tart dessert. It was soooo good. One thing I've gotta say for IES, you do not dine badly when they do the planning!!

And then it was finally time for our group to explore Monet's house and gardens. Which was, of course, AMAZING. Just amazing. There's the main gardens which are in front of his house, which is filled with Japanese woodblock prints (and I mean filled, they cover every surface) and has nice open-looking rooms painted in different colors, and those are wonderful, and then you go under a road outside and you get to the water gardens, where the famous Japanese bridge and the waterlilies are. Oh, I loved it, it is beautiful there, with the weeping willows hanging over the pond. The bridge had a wooden canopy bursting with lavender flowers arching across it; it was amazing. I took many, many pictures. So, so pretty.




McKenzie


I had to once again play with the 'digital macro' setting on my camera...








Allie






We decided that this cat contained the soul of Monet. And was also mean.


Water garden!!!













In the gift shop I got a couple of Monet prints for my room next year, and then it was time (before stopping for ice cream at a very cannily located ice cream truck) to go home. As we were driving through Paris, my friends (who live also in the 16th, but in a different section farther away from me) were like "Hey, I recognize this! Can we just be let off here?" and the bus driver actually let us all off there. I got off too, although I had farther to walk from there. But it was a beautiful cool day and I didn't mind the walk at all. I just kept heading for the Eiffel Tower and walked along the river. Finally I got to Passy station on the 6, and it turns out there's this really cool looking pedestrian walkway over by that area...



...then some outdoor escalators that take you up to the station platform. I hopped on that, rode in one stop to Trocadéro, and then walked home from there. Lovely, lovely day.

Spring Break 2007: Nuremberg, Florence, & Rome

Thursday, April 5

After school finished (I had brought my suitcase with me and left it in the IES Paris center during the day), I went ahead and got on the RER to get to the airport, and had a very lovely relaxing ride to CDG, err, Charles de Gaulle for anyone who hasn't had the pleasure (9_9) of flying through there (I had a whole compartment to myself and just looked out the window listening to music the whole hour-ish there), and although I got there wayyyy too early for my flight and had to spend a lot of time waiting around, finally I could check into my flight, which was Air Berlin to Nuremberg, and once I got there (around 10) I met right up with Rebecca and Chris. We got on a bus and got off at Nuremberg and got some Burger King there (where we happened to meet some of Chris's friends who spoke some pretty good English with us, though not nearly as flawless and natural as Chris's--JEALOUS). Then we got on a train and a bus and walked to Chris's apartment, where we stayed up reallllly late just talking and looking at things online, then finally went to sleep.

Friday, April 6

We slept in until like 1 or 2, Chris made us pasta which we ate, and then we went and walked around Nuremberg. It is so cool there, a cute little German town (I was reminded of Disneyland's Fantasyland @_@). We climbed up this castle thing and then just walked around all over, passing by Chris's old high school (he pointed out this school-sponsored graffiti thing he and some classmates had made) and other such landmarks as the place where the comic book store he would go to before/after school used to be, etc.





Then we decided to go up on this cafe on a second-floor terrace overlooking the main town square and have some sodas, which was really nice and fun, and then we went to a Thai restaurant closer to Chris's apartment for dinner. Mmmm Thai food, it was so good, I got duck :3 And then we went back to his apartment and stayed up really late (til like 6 a.m. late) talking and laughing etc.

Saturday, April 7

We all slept in (well, of course) and were so lazy we got pizza delivered, and didn't leave the house until around 5 or 6 to head to the Nuremberg fair which was just beginning, and once we got there it was so crazy and interesting. Super crowded with people, and it was fascinating to look at all the booths and rides. Crazy German fairs.

Sunday, April 8

I woke up and said goodbye to Rebecca (who had an earlier flight back than my train, and Chris drove her to the airport). Once Chris got back, it was time for him to take me to the main Nuremberg train station, where I would take a train to Munich and then catch my main night train from there to Milan. Chris ended up buying my ticket to Munich cause I didn't have enough cash on me... thanks Chris!! I'll pay you back someday! He put me on the train and then we said goodbye, it was pretty sad, can't believe we'd known each other (online) for like 8 years before that!!

From that point on things got a little shaky and scary. I mean, I made it through, but I was just pretty unsure of myself since I was ALL ON MY OWN from that point on, going from Germany to Italy. I almost didn't get off at the Munich train station, which would have sucked so I'm glad I did finally realize I was at the right one and get off, and then I had to find my night train and wait around until I could board it (I bought a muffin and a fruit cup in the meantime, ordering in English--gah I hate doing that but I don't speak a word of German!).


Munich train station.

And here is the thing. I thought "night train" would mean like, an actual compartment with a bed I could sleep in; a sleeper car. Nope, not so much. Just a plain seat, and not even one I could recline back. Fortunately, there weren't many other people on the train and I snagged a 6-seat compartment (closed off with a sliding door) all to myself. I read for a while (feeling very very alone and a tiny bit scared and worried) and then stretched out across 3 seats (not comfortable) and tried to sleep. But the thing is... this train stopped at like every station along the way (and would pause there for like 3 minutes even though no one ever got on/off, and the constant stopping and starting was really offputting especially when you're trying to sleep), and it passed through like 4 countries (Austria, Switzerland..), and at every country, inspectors got on the train and asked to see passports from all the passengers. Nope, this wasn't a sleeping train where the conductor gathers up all your passports ahead of time to show them--nooooo sir. At some points (when a no-nonsense, fit blond man in a uniform pulled open my compartment door) it felt like being interrogated by Nazis, although I know that's silly, haha. But yeah. The end result was that I got pretty much zero sleep, regretting my choice to travel to Italy by train the entire way. -_- A flight would have probably been more expensive but it wouldn't have been as ridiculous. bahhh

We got to Milan around 7:30 a.m., and I still had to figure out how to purchase a ticket to Florence...

Monday, April 9

...so good thing the lady at the tickets window didn't speak any English, and that Milan station is slightly ghetto and fairly intimidating for a girl traveling alone!! Oh well... I'd already looked it up so I just wrote down the details and put it up against the window and got my ticket. I took the 9:00 Eurostar Italia (the nice train, because I felt like I deserved it darnit) to Florence, and once I arrived in Florence I met Kathryn at the train station and she took me to her apartment (which she shares with 3 other girls, and which is fortunately very close to the station). I was so glad to have made it successfully and to see a friendly face!! ahhh.

After I put my stuff away and freshened up a bit (a shower was DEFINITELY in order), she showed me around Florence, which is, of course, utterly beautiful, although since it was April by that point, definitely crowded with tourists. But the weather was absolutely gorgeous. We got lunch at this wonderful sandwich place frequented by American exchange students known as the Oil Shoppe (ooooomg, so, so, so good) and then went to Santa Croce church, where Galileo, Machiavelli, and Dante all have tombs (although Dante is actually buried in Ravenna so his tomb is fake). It was so cool and pretty in there!


Kathryn and I outside the Arno river


riverrr


Florence~


Galileo's tomb


Michelangelo's tomb.


Dante's fake tomb

We also got some gelato (twice, actually, haha) as we were wandering around the city, which was so so so good. Mmm gelato. We went back to the apartment and I had a much-deserved/-needed nap and then we went to get dinner at this restaurant Kathryn knew. We split pizza and pasta carbonara and it was amaaaziiiingggggg! @_@

Tuesday, April 10

Today was the day I was supposed to meet up with my IES Paris friends, who had made their own way to Florence, and after much deliberation and searching we found them by the banks of the Arno river, and they asked Kathryn where they could buy ingredients for dinner so she took them to this indoor market place and they got pasta, sauce, cheese, meat, etc, and we said goodbye to Kathryn there (she had to go to school).

It was my IES Paris friends plus McKenzie and Mark's friend Emily (who was studying abroad in Birmingham, England, and was beginning a MONTH-LONG spring break), and since she booked her hostel reservation later than the rest of my friends, she didn't get a spot in their hostel and had to go check in to this other one, so we went with her allllll the way to the other side of town (like a 30-minute walk) to go check into her new hostel. Once we got up there, we just wandered around making our way back to the main part of Florence, getting gelato and relaxing in a park along the way. We wanted to go see the David but we got a little lost and wound up at the wrong place, and by the time we figured that out, it would have been too late to get over to where he actually is in time. So, no David, which is sad. :(


Cool fountain in the park we chilled at.

After that I met back up with Kathryn and we hung out with her roommates that night.

Wednesday, April 11

Kathryn and I got up early to go to the Uffizi museum, and we had to wait in line for like 45 minutes (a novelty to me, I never have had to wait to get into the Louvre!) but we did get in and I got to see so many awesome paintings like Birth of Venus (the whole Botticelli room was amazinggg), and even some I wasn't expecting to be there like Venus of Urbino, which I knew about because of the paper I did researching Manet/Olympia sophomore year for French class. I bought a print of it in the gift shop :)

We had been hoping that maybe afterwards we would have time for David too before I had to meet up with my friends again for our train to Rome, but we didn't, so we just headed back to the apartment and I packed up my stuff and Kathryn accompanied me to the train station, where we found everyone lounging out front on the grass in the sunshine (feet away from gypsies... haha). We got on our train to Rome and had a bit of a stressful time navigating the Rome train system (we had to transfer to another line to get to the stop closest to our apartment) but we did finally arrive at our stop, one right outside the Colosseum, and we walked down the road to get to the apartment we would be renting. We had decided we wanted to rent an apartment together for our days there instead of a hostel, so that we could make dinner, have our own space, etc, and Marc had been in charge of talking to the guy about it and he'd done a good job, because the apartment was very nice! We got there and threw open all the windows, claiming rooms (I got a cot in the room with a big bed that Emily and McKenzie would be sharing), while the guy who owned the apartment gave us instructions etc. After he left, we set out in search of a grocery store to buy things for our meals from, and it took us a while to figure out where one was but we FINALLY found one and got things for breakfast, dinner, etc. We made dinner using some of the leftover pasta from Florence and some sausage, etc. We made a salad too, we pretty much had a feast, it was so good!

Thursday, April 12

We split up a bit today, because Marc and Jack and Joe went on this tour of the Colosseum, while McKenzie, Mark, Emily and I hit up Palatine Hill, exploring that all over. I was astonished to see all the fountains with fresh drinking water flowing out of them, where you could just drink straight from or fill up your water bottle with or whatever. We also found some orange trees and were determined to get some oranges down out of them. It was definitely an intensive process, but we did get some oranges down, and felt very proud of ourselves.


Chilling somewhere around Palatine Hill (there are all these cool, relaxing park areas down by the bottom). I'm wearing the sunglasses I purchased from one of the sketchy sidewalk vendor dudes (we bartered him down to something like 12 euros, but looking back on it that's still way too much for knockoff sunglasses).


Emily getting fountain water


The park areas I was talking about


Looking out over the Roman Forum and the rest of the city from the hill


Oranges yeahhh

We were walking back down from Palatine Hill when Mark suddenly got sick and had to literally RUN home (yeah... it was that urgent of a sickness. >_>). That night, since it was mostly the girls who had made dinner the night before, the boys made dinner. They made feta-stuffed hamburgers--SO, SO AMAZING AND DELICIOUS. Ooooomg. Then again, as before, hanging out and talking etc at night.

Friday, April 13

Those of us who hadn't been to the Colosseum the day before hit it up today, and it was so cool and awesome to see.


Sup Colosseum. I like how they're building a new platform over the top, so it looks more like what it used to be like in its heyday.

Then we went over to Vatican City and saw St Peter's Basilica and the Vatican museum (we almost didn't get in and we were losing hope but we stuck it out and made it in--and I'm glad, because it was so cool to see the Sistine Chapel, something I can remember learning about in like 3rd grade and never imagining I'd actually see for real someday).


St. Peter's Basilica & Egyptian obelisk


Swiss Guard dudes hee hee hee


Inside the Basilica


Vatican Museum

Once we got back to the apartment, we went for dinner at this pizza place right across the street from our apartment.

Saturday, April 14

Today we went to the Pantheon (we're goin goin goin to the Pantheon!), Trevi fountain, Spanish Steps, Piazza Nerona (which is where I called Bekah and wished her a happy birthday), saw some of the Roman cats, etc.


Trevi Fountain (yes, I put coins in and made wishes etc)


Spanish Steps


Piazza Nerona


Roman cats!

Sunday, April 15

We all got up at 3:45 a.m. to get a 4 a.m. taxi to Ciampino airport (it had been my responsibility to order the taxi and it was such a headache and I was really not that appreciated for it, plus it took forever to get everyone up and some of them snapped at me for it--which, yeah, sucked) in order to catch our cheap Ryanair 7:00 a.m. flight home. Ryanair sucks and I'm never using it again. It's super cheap for a REASON--they hit you with ads the whole time you're on the plane, and forget about being served any food or anything. Such ridiculousness. When you get to Paris you're dumped out at this airport way out in the boonies and you have to take this hourlong (11-euro) bus ride back into Paris, to Porte Maillot. But from there we could catch our own trains home, and it was soooo wonderful to come out from the subway and ascend back into Paris, where spring had sprung and the weather was breezy and beautiful. yayyyy so glad to be home