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. :)