"There is never any end to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease it could be reached. Paris was worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it."

I once heard a saying that life is like a toilet paper roll – the closer you get to the end of something, the faster it goes. That sure has been the case with my study abroad experience. I can’t begin to express how mind-blowing it is that I am leaving here tomorrow. I really feel like I just got here.

This semester has been the most challenging, most frustrating, most fun, and most rewarding experience of my life. I feel like I have learned so much about myself, the French, and human beings in general and yet I feel like I know nothing at all. If you’ll indulge me, I want to share some things I learned while I was here:

• Any dish whose main ingredient is the blood of an animal is just a bad idea. Period.
• Men are eternally confusing, regardless of the continent they hail from.
• Consistently looking like a slob not only shows that you do not have respect for yourself, it shows that you do not respect the people around you. My French civilization professor explained it to me this way – when the French see an American walking into Notre Dame dressed in a 49ers football jersey with the sleeves cut off, a backward baseball cap, and sweatpants, they take it personally. When you don’t make the effort to at least look somewhat put together, it tells the people around you that they are not worth the time it takes to put on a clean shirt. Some people may see this as snobbishness on French people’s part, but I for one respect that theory very much. (That’s not to say we’re not entitled to a grubby sweatpants-wearing day every now and again. Just don’t go to any cathedrals.)
• Nothing is quite like the high you get when you are able to communicate clearly and effectively with someone in a foreign tongue.
• But muffins, with the right ingredients, can get you pretty high, too.
• Our way is not always the best way. Different does not mean dumb.
• If you pretend to like something that you secretly loathe, chances are you’ll get served it again. (And I’m not just talking about food.)
• Sometimes knowing where you come from is just as important as knowing where you’re going. The lady I live with can trace her roots back hundreds and hundreds of years. It seems like everyone here has this really rich knowledge of their ancestry, and I really feel like that is something we’re missing in the United States. I never realized what a big part of whom a person is can be related to where they come from, and I’d very much like to discover more about my ancestry when I get back.
• There isn’t going to be a point where everything becomes clear. I have to admit, I came to Paris thinking I was going to be Sabrina. I was going to come back from France a new person – knowing exactly who I was, what I wanted to do with my life, what my next steps would be. But, I think I realized that no one (except maybe the very lucky or the mildly insane) has a moment where the right path becomes evident and they figure everything in their life out. I’m pretty sure being an adult is just taking things as they come at you and accepting the consequences (good or bad) of your decisions, taking solace in the fact that, like you, everyone else is flying by the seat of their pants.
• There is no better way to test how competent you are than public transportation in a foreign country.
• Sometimes the things you don’t look forward to are the ones you enjoy the most.
• The internet should NEVER be taken for granted. (If you have difficulty wrapping your head around this, think about having to make a 30 minute commute or pay $6 every time you want to check your e-mail.) Also, the same goes for Heinz ketchup, free bathrooms, ice, peanut butter, country music, and Mexican food.
• I’ve learned that a group of people who have very little in common can be thrown together for a semester and come out of it having made genuine friendships and truly having had a blast.
• You only live once, so shut up, buy an overpriced drink, and miss the last Metro home.
• Traveling is one of the best things you can do during your lifetime, but you can only go so long before you just want to curl up on your couch and watch TV with the people you love.

I guess what I should conclude with is something my good friend Susanna (who studied in Beijing last year and who I tend to get very philosophical with when we drink red wine together) told me and which has always stuck with me. She said that no matter where we (human beings) are from in the world, at our core we’re exactly the same. I think we have a tendency to think of the rest of the world as fundamentally different from us, and they are in some ways, but at the end of the day, we all go home and worry about the same things – our work, our family, our friends, and just being happy and coexisting with everyone else on this absurd spinning ball. That’s certainly something I’ve seen while I’ve been here and maybe the world would be a little bit better if we could all remember that.

I hope you have had as much fun reading this as I have had writing it. I’m sorry for the cheese, but I wish I could have taken each and every one of you in my pocket so that you could have been there for every moment of what has truly been the best experience of my life. (Except for maybe the boudin – I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.)

I love y’all and I’ll see you Stateside!

Kate

I am in such a Christmas-y mood! Saturday night my friends and I took a train to Strasbourg, a city in Alsace-Lorraine on the border of France and Germany. At Christmastime, Strasbourg is known for its huge Christmas market that lasts all through December. It was absolutely adorable! In different parts of the city they have rows and rows of wooden huts selling everything Christmas-related you could imagine – thousands upon thousands of Christmas ornaments, every color and style of Christmas light, jewelry, toys, Christmas trees, hundreds of different figurines for the all-important crèche – nativity scene. And the food, oh my Lord, the food! Hot spiced wine (delish), sugary and salty pretzels, roasted chestnuts, chocolate-covered marshmallows, beignets, hot chocolate, fudge, gingerbread everything, waffles drizzled in Nutella, tarte flambée (a kind of flat, thin crust pizza with bacon, cheese, and onions), choucroute (sauerkraut and sausage), the list goes on. It was absolutely incredible. The city was adorable, too – it’s truly a combination of French and German everything. It had these adorable half-timbered buildings and lovely canals. We walked around all day and took everything in, and it was such a blast.

Monday night I was invited by Madame de Billy to attend a wine-tasting at her and Jean Claude’s country club. (It was really cute how they explained country clubs to me – I had to tell them we have exactly the same thing in the States!) So, Madame told me to be home around 6:30 so we could leave, and I rushed in at about 6:25. I had been browsing at Galeries Lafayette and Printemps, the two major department stores in Paris that are absolutely gorgeous (not to mention packed) at Christmastime. So I get home, and she immediately asks me if I’m going to change. (I was in a grey jumper, black turtleneck, and tights and heels, which, although not super-fancy I deemed acceptable for a wine tasting.) So, of course, I changed into something un peu plus élégant. It made me laugh! Oh, the French.

So then, along with Florian, her nephew that she has shamelessly tried to set me up with, we hop in the old Renault and drive to the club which is by the Bois de Boulogne in a very swanky area of Paris. When we get there, it turns out we weren’t invited to actually taste wine, we were supposed to help Jean Claude by bringing in wine from out back for his customers! So we go out back and we’re crawling in this old truck looking for bottles of Beaujolais blanc with Antoine, Jean Claude’s assistant who always looks like he’s on the verge of tears and who didn’t say a word to me all night. I think I freaked him and Florian out a bit when I hiked up my dress and crawled in the back of the truck – I bet Parisian girls wouldn’t dream of it. It was also kind of a weird situation, because were it me and two American guys, I’m sure we would have just said “screw it” and opened a bottle of the good stuff, or at least joked about it, but these were French boys, and they were very serious and completely dedicated to the task at hand.

After about an hour of this, we were finally relieved of our duties and given permission to walk around. We walked around to all these little stands and tasted wine from all over France. I was so proud of myself! I met lots of people and carried out small talk in French, aucun problème! This cute old Frenchman was telling me about how his brother was a cowboy in Austin for six months twenty years ago and we talked about Stetson hats and cowboy boots. Love it!

One thing I did learn, though, is how seriously wine is taken here! I mean, I suppose people take it seriously in the States as well, but as I tasted more and more of it last night, it became harder and harder to keep a straight face as Florian and the vendors discussed bouquets and aftertastes and all that business. It was fun to compare the different regions, though, and I learned that you really can taste the difference in cheaper from more expensive wines. I also learned that France actually has laws against putting pieces of wood in their barrels of wine as they age, which some other countries do to infuse their wines with a more “woody” taste – something that the French consider cheating. All in all, an interesting and quite sophisticated night!

I have only a couple days left here and I am freaking out.

“Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand different circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will.” –Lawrence Durrell

Okay, now, I have been secretly quite proud of myself for eating all sorts of different foodstuffs while I have been overseas. This includes smoked salmon, various spreads made from fish eggs, foie gras, raw miniature crawfish (complete with heads and antennae; oh yes, we just pop them in our mouths whole like popcorn), duck parts, oysters, beets (also known as slimy tasteless disgustingness), a vaguely fishy-tasting doughy thing in an unidentifiable white sauce, and an assortment of smelly cheeses from every animal imaginable including Roquefort, which I will eternally detest and yet choke down almost every night. Tonight’s meal, however, takes the cake. Oh yes, folks, 20 minutes ago I was eating boudin, which is, wait for it – a “sausage” made out of congealed pig’s blood, chestnuts (or sometimes onions, as I was informed, as if that would make it better), and oats. YUM. The taste was, well, bloody, and the texture was pasty and…bloody. Aaaahhh! I can’t think about it being in my body. It is quite the delicacy apparently, and oh, lucky me, it’s the season for it right now! If you are ever in France and hear the word boudin, run. Fast.
Okay, now I feel bad for complaining. Tasting regional specialties is all part of the experience, right? And it is cute how Madame wants me to explore les goûts de France. As far as I’m concerned, though, I’ve done my duty, tasted the tastes, and I’m ready for my good old-fashioned peanut butter and jelly, or pretty much any dish that doesn’t involve the eyeballs, organs, or the blood of an organism.
On a slightly less vomit-inducing note, Neuilly, my town, has a Christmas market coming up! It’s so cute – all around the church across the street there are these little wooden huts and starting December 2nd they will be selling all sorts of goodies for Christmas and yummy food like hot spiced wine and roasted chestnuts. I can’t wait. Hopefully they don’t sell boudin.

Lesley and Steph have left. We had such a fun week! Now the stressful part of my life begins – next week is finals time. I can’t believe it’s already here! I have so much studying to do, because in some of my classes, the entire grade is based on the final exam. (This is apparently how the French do things – no papers, no tests, just one make-it-or-break-it final exam. Yikes.) But, first things first. Here are some highlights of my week with the girls:
After some trouble with lost luggage, lost people, lost minds, etc., we finally rendezvous-ed at the hotel and then had dinner at Café Le Depart by Notre Dame, which everyone who has come to visit me has been to, because it is delicious.
I hadn’t seen Les in over a year, and Steph in over 4 years, but I knew we would still get along very well when I asked them what they wanted to do and they immediately said: “shop.” We did a lot of that, and I continued to feed my obsession with Longchamp bags.
We went to the top of the Eiffel Tower at night when it gets all sparkly and amazing. Night time is really the best time to go – there are absolutely NO lines, and the city is gorgeous all lit up. We took pictures proposing to each other, and I think we seriously disturbed our fellow tourists. There was one snafu – it was terrifyingly windy. I’m really surprised we weren’t blown up against the grate or even off the tower itself, like the Kelly bag in Le Divorce. So, dear reader, beware of the gusty conditions if you ever find yourself up there.
Steph left on Thursday (Thanksgiving) morning, but Lesley was still in town, so we made reservations at this restaurant called Joe Allen, which had a special menu for Thanksgiving. We had turkey, sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pecan pie, and it was glorious. I missed my family, though. Just a little bit. Okay, a lot.
Last night, Les’ last night in town, we went to Kong, which is the restaurant that Carrie goes to in Sex and the City when she has lunch in Paris with Alexsandr Petrovsky’s ex-wife. It’s really cool, but kind of almost too cool. I felt like the wait staff was walking around and saying to themselves, “Alors, I am zo cool because I work eer and it eez cool, so zat makes me cool. Plus, I am French, weech eez zee coolest.” No, in all honesty, it’s a beautiful restaurant, with a glass ceiling and these Philip Starck plastic chairs with models’ faces on the backs of them. And the food is amazing!

Today, I went with the Accent Center to the Loire Valley to see two chateaux. We saw Cheverny and Chenonceau, and they were both magnificent! My favorite thing about chateaux is that they are all so different from each other. I’ve seen five different ones here now, and I keep expecting it to be more of the same, but I’m always surprised!
Cheverny is a chateau that has been owned by the same family of nobles for hundreds and hundreds of years. The current owner (part of that same family) is only 41 years old and is a Marquis. Sixteen of the rooms in the chateau are open to the public and he and his wife and their three kids live in the other 34 rooms. Life is rough. The five-year-old son will inherit the chateau after his parents kick the bucket. Talk about winning the genetic lottery.
Cheverny is also famous for its stag hunts – they have one every Tuesday and every Saturday, and so they have kennels with over 100 hound dogs. Apparently each dog has a name, and the guy in charge of the dogs (pretty sure it’s not the Marquis) knows each of them by name. Although it was Saturday, we didn’t see them hunting. We smelled them, though, which just wasn’t as nice.
Chenonceau is the other chateau we visited. It was a royal chateau and at one time it belonged to Diane de Poitiers, Henri II’s mistress. Old Henri was quite enamored with her and so he gave her the chateau, but when he died, his wife, Catherine di Medicis (who was very jealous of Diane and also much uglier) made Diane leave and then she took over the castle. Ah, intrigue. During World War II, the owner converted it into a hospital, and one half of the chateau was located in occupied France, and the other half was in the free zone. I thought that was pretty cool. Now it’s decorated like it was back in the time of Catherine and is completely fabulous.
It was a good day. Now I have to get some sleep so I can study my face off for the next week.

"Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well-used." -William Shakespeare

Happy Beaujolais Nouveau! Yesterday was a big day here in Paris – the release of the first wine of the year. Beaujolais Nouveau, if I understand correctly, is a wine from the Beaujolais region near Lyon that is made from grapes that are harvested very early. (The sooner you drink it, the better.) Everyone freaks out on an annual basis when the first bottles are released to the public, and yesterday was the day. All the restaurants put up big signs in their windows that say “Il est arrivé!” (“It has arrived!”) and the supermarkets have huge displays of it for sale. The best, however, was when my French professor brought in three bottles of it and we all drank wine and ate cheese crackers during class. If I wasn’t already in love with France, I would be now.
My buzz was a little dampened, however, when I got home and wished Madame happy B.N., and she sniffed, “Oh, but that is market wine. Pas très bon, eh?” I guess when your boyfriend owns a chateau/vineyard, you can afford to be a little bit of a wine snob.
In a way, she’s right – it’s actually very inexpensive and not known for its quality, but I find it delicious. I guess that’s proof that drinking a lot of wine does not a wine connoisseur make…
My childhood best friends Lesley and Steph are coming to visit me tomorrow. Their trip was a little spontaneous, which makes it all the more exciting! I can’t wait to see them.

When I die, Dublin will be written in my heart. -James Joyce

I have returned from my journey to the homeland! Dublin was great. Blair, Gideon, and I flew out on RyanAir (crummy service, really cheap) on Friday (my birthday) morning. We were supposed to meet my friend Madi (flying from Rome) at the airport – her flight ended up being cancelled due to fog. (But more about that later.)
So, Madi-less, we took a bus to city center and found our hostel. It was, in a word, foul. Okay, maybe not complete squalor, but pretty gross. Welcome to la vie bohème. Blair and I were staying in a 12-bed female dorm with one(!) bathroom for all 12 girls. (Gideon stayed with his friend Kate, who goes to Trinity College in Dublin.) The girls in the dorm were pretty nice. Most of them were Canadian, and they had been living in the hostel for a MONTH while they were working and looking for a flat. That’s insanity, in my book, but they didn’t seem to mind.
After getting somewhat settled, we went and got the most delish fish and chips for lunch (with lots of salt and vinegar – yum), and then walked around the campus of Trinity College, which is just beautiful and for about an hour I was seriously contemplating transferring there. In the Trinity library there is the Book of Kells, which is this old beautiful manuscript, copied by monks hundreds and hundreds of years ago.(It’s one of the “1000 Things to See Before You Die,” so I figured we had to go.) We looked at that for a while, and then Blair and I walked around the city, and did some shopping, of course!
We found this store called Carroll’s which was totally dedicated to all things Irish – no joke, three floors that looked like a leprechaun threw up on them, chock-full of any kind of souvenir you could imagine. I think we spent an hour and a half in there. Pretty sad.
After a delicious dinner in a pub, we experienced Dublin nightlife. Allow me to share some things I learned:
Only losers go out before 11.
There are no such thing as bars for the younger set. Even at the trendier pubs, there is a mélange of people ranging from age 16 to 65. It’s actually a little disconcerting to watch, ahem, the more, shall we say, “mature” set try and get down and party. Not pretty.
When someone asks you, “What’s crack?” they are not inquiring about illegal substances. They are saying, “What’s craic?” which is Irish for “fun.” (You ask it when you want to know what fun things are happening.)
Irish men are awkward. Painfully awkward. Blair and I were hit on by the following men:
- A boy our age, who was so drunk he forgot his command of the English language. He came up to us, told us we were pretty, and then started swaying back and forth with a blank look in his eyes. When we looked confused, he resorted to sign language and starting pantomiming something that I think was, “I like to jog. Penguins are nice. Toilets.”
- A chubby balding man with a dimple in his chin of epic proportions, who asked us if we were on holiday, but couldn’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that we were Americans studying in Paris. We left him to ponder that one a while.
- My personal favorite, an Irish guy who, when he found out we were Americans, told us he was actually from Louisiana and started speaking in the poorest approximation of a Southern accent I have ever heard. He started spouting nonsense – I’m still not entirely sure what he was trying to convey, but he used the word “critters” a lot, told us that we need to listen to our “Commander in Chief,” and said he knew Donald Rumsfeld, the “fecker.”
- A guy whose opening line was to point to our drinks and ask us if we knew they had 7% alcohol in them. Yes, thank you, genius. (It said so on the bottle.) He then immediately proceeded to ask me if I had ever seen the movie “Unfaithful” with Diane Lane and Richard Gere. I said I had only seen parts of it, why? Einstein replied, “Oh. I don’t really know…It’s a good movie.”
Needless to say, by the end of the night, Blair and I were really good at making a tactful, yet hasty, exit. This was very disappointing, as I am a huge sucker for an accent. However, even the hottest accent can’t cover a complete dearth of social skills.
Don’t let Riverdance fool you – most Irish people can’t dance. In fact, I’m pretty convinced that this extends to all Europeans, but the Irish brand of dancing seemed particularly heinous. More field research may be necessary.

Despite all this, we had a blast. I love how everyone just piles into the pubs and it’s noisy and crowded and every one is sloppy and tipsy. It’s great, and made me proud to have the third most common last name in Ireland.
The next morning, Mads FINALLY arrived. (She actually had to take a plane to London and then connect to Dublin at 6 in the morning. Ouch. But, she was determined to get to Ireland!) The three of us actually found a tour to go out into the countryside, and we went and visited Malahide Castle, which is outside of Dublin. It is a medieval castle that was owned by the Talbot family for 800 years until they sold it to the state in the 1970s. It was so cool, and the grounds it was on were unbelievably gorgeous. It was also kind of misty outside, so the pictures turned out really neat-looking.
After the castle tour and a scone with clotted cream (so unhealthy, so good), the tour took us up the coastline, where we saw beautiful green cliffs – just like the postcards! Unfortunately, my camera didn’t quite capture how vividly green they were – the girls and I were getting quite faklempt.
Upon our return to Dublin, we enjoyed fish and chips again, and then went and toured the Guiness factory! It was pretty neat, although after the Heineken factory in Amsterdam, we were already pretty much beer experts, so it was a little same-old, same-old. At the end, though, we got to go up to the Gravity Bar for a free pint of the black stuff, and the bar had a gorgeous view of all of Dublin at sunset. Fabulous.
Speaking of Guinness, the “blonde in the black skirt” is really growing on me! I’ve been drinking a lot of the stuff lately. (I mean, not like, alone in my room in a sad pathetic way, but when I go out. You get what I mean.) It’s so dark and full of bitter goodness, and plus it kind of makes me feel like a badass. Okay? I admit it.
After Guinness, funds were kind of low, so we enjoyed a delicious dinner at…Burger King. Don’t knock it – after almost two and a half months without, a char-broiled meat patty really hits the spot.
At that point, Madi had been up for 48 hours straight, so she went to bed and Blair and I headed out to a bar called the Porter House for more awkward encounters. It was glorious.
I’m back now, and exhausted since we got up so early. The good news, though, is that I am 21! Woo hoo! And, I have been to Ireland! And, they actually stamped my passport this time!

"Amsterdam...is a dream of color and tender tones." -M.E. Sherwood, 1897

Oh, I am a little bit in love with Amsterdam. I spent the weekend there with 5 of my friends, and it was great! I wasn't really sure if I would like it or not, since I envisioned a kind of seedy city full of prostitutes and potheads, but it was actually really clean, beautiful, and very quaint. Some parts of it reminded me of Georgetown, oddly enough, with the row houses and such. Amsterdam has many canals in concentric circles in the city, so it's full of cute little bridges and pretty walkways. Also, everyone there rides bikes! It's so cute - they have special lanes for people on bikes, and they will not hesitate to run you over. But, everyone rides their bike, which I think is just fabulous. Also, the Dutch are so friendly, and they speak perfect English. It was a really nice change of pace.
We took the Thalys train on Friday morning and arrived in Amsterdam around 2 p.m. We went to our hostel, which was perfect - it was relatively clean, and we had a room with 3 sets of bunkbeds in it - great for the six of us, and we had our own bathroom. The first thing we did (typical college students that we are) was go to the Heineken factory. It was so neat! They walk you through and show you how it's brewed, and there's this little ride that jostles you around as if you were a beer bottle in the factory - kind of cheesy, but fun. You also get three free beers with the price of admission, which was nice. :) Ooh - outside of the factory, I ate the most delicious doughnut I had ever had, called an appelbollen. It was rolled in sugar and had warm apple compote in the middle - I highly recommend them if you ever make it to Holland.
After the Heineken factory, we walked around a bit and then went to an Argentinian steakhouse (weird, but there were a ton of them there) for dinner. It was pretty good. We asked for a carafe of water, and they only had bottled water, but the waitress went in the back and made one up for us. We couldn't believe it - in France, they would have just said, "screw you" and moved on!
Post dinner, we went to a coffee shop, which actually doesn't sell coffee. I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain. I then enjoyed a typical Dutch baked good, about which I won't elaborate. It was definitely a learning experience.
Saturday morning found us at the Anne Frank museum, which was very very tiny, but so well done! It was very moving to see where and how she lived. They still had the pictures of movie stars up on the walls of her bedroom where she pasted them. They also had her actual diaries, which were really neat to see. After Anne Frank, we went to the Van Gogh museum, which was also interesting. We were disappointed to find out that Starry Night, his masterpiece, is actually at MOMA in New York. Whatever.
For the rest of the afternoon, we walked around the city. I saw the flower market, with thousands of tulips, and the Red Light District, which was one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. Basically, each woman (I wouldn't call them ladies) stands in her own window in her underwear to conduct her business. (I'm trying to be polite, here.) All of them were hideously unattractive.
That night, we went out again in Amsterdam. We found a Guiness pub and played a lot of foosball, among other things. Everything there is so much cheaper than in Paris, which was super.
I guess that's about it for Amsterdam. I've (finally) put up the Rome photos, so check them out!

"Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young, Who loved thee so fondly as he? He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue, And joined in thy innocent glee." -- Margaret Courtney

My Daddy left today. I had so much fun with him! He arrived in Paris on Friday, surprisingly coherent despite the jetlag. We pretty much did tourist-y things all weekend: Notre Dame, the Louvre, etc., but he told me that he liked just walking around and people-watching and taking in everything the best. It was neat to see Paris again from an outsider’s perspective – after living here for two months, I sometimes forget to notice a lot of the things that make Paris really special.
I would have to say the highlight of his visit was the dinner cruise on the Seine that we took last night, his last night in Paris. It was amazing! If you visit Paris, you must do it! (The company, for reference purposes, is called Bateaux Parisiens, and is found at the foot of the Eiffel Tower on Quai Branly.) We got on a big beautiful boat and had a delicious dinner while going up and down the Seine for 2 and a half hours. (I had escargot and spinach fritters, five-pepper pan-fried beef with courgettes, and a chocolate melt with raspberry coulis for dessert. Très fancy.) Included with dinner were two bottles of wine and a kir aperitif. Very nice! They also had a singer on board who sang songs in French and English. It was so lovely. They slowed the boat down when we passed the cathedral of Notre Dame, and the lady started singing Ave Maria, and I teared up – it was so beautiful! Funny stories:
There was this guy walking around taking pictures of everyone on the boat to sell, and while he was taking pictures of a French family across the way from us, a Japanese man went up to him to ask him where the restroom was. The Japanese man tried to communicate in Japanese, then broken French, but finally had to resort to using sign language – he grabbed his crotch and jumped up and down to indicate that he had to faire le pipi, and then photographer finally understood. I’m pretty sure the French family was mortified.
Also, at the end of the cruise, they started playing disco music, and people were dancing. My dad and I went to dance, and this funny little man got out on the dance floor and was dancing like a maniac. I come from a family of very enthusiastic dancers (Barr family functions, anyone?), but I have never seen an adult get into it like this man did. It was hilarious.
While my dad was here, on Sunday night, we also had a petite degustation du vin (wine tasting) with Mme. de Billy and Jean Claude, and then my dad and I took them out to dinner. It was so fun! We had wine from Alsace and from Jean Claude’s chateau. I also, by the way, found out that Madame has a chateau as well. I saw a drawing of it, and it’s gorgeous! It amazes me how they both play it off as no big deal – I’m pretty sure if I had a chateau, I would tell everyone I knew about it and show them pictures nonstop. But, then again, that’s what makes me a gauche American…We had dinner at a lovely seafood restaurant called Auberge Dab, and Dad and Jean Claude talked politics for three hours straight. Amazingly, Jean Claude did not manage to work Rudy Giuliani into the conversation…Nonetheless, it was a great evening.
Today after my dad left, I went to the Salon du Chocolat with Blair. It was awesome!! It was basically this big chocolate convention at the Paris Expo. There were chocolatiers from all over the world with booths set up where you could get samples. I ate so much chocolate I felt sick. There was every kind of chocolate you could imagine. We had truffles, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, chocolate liqueur, dessert wine (to go with chocolate), this spicy chocolate sauce from Mexico, and so on. Blair even ate a foie gras sandwich on chocolate-dusted bread with a cacao-onion compote. A little too exotic for my tastes, but she enjoyed it! They had candy sculptures, cooking demonstrations, and even a fashion show where the models were eating chocolate on the runway. (Leave it to the French to work haute couture in there somewhere…) It was so neat.
It’s really getting scary, though. Time is passing by so fast! It wasn’t even sad when my dad left today, because I’m going to see him again in a little over a month. I really need to take advantage of the time I have left here. I really have no free weekends until the time I leave, so it’s going to start going by even faster, I think!

"Enchanted? He-he ha-ha! Who said anything about the castle being enchanted?" -Cogsworth, Beauty and the Beast

Okay, okay, I've been slacking off with the whole blog thing. I've been very busy! This past Saturday I went on a day trip with the Accent program to two chateaux outside Paris. ("Chateau" is French for "castle.") The first, Fontainebleau, was the Royal hunting lodge and home of French kings before Versailles was built by Louis XIV. It was also Napoleon's favorite palace. I liked it just fine, but it wasn't my favorite. The other chateau, Vaux-le-Vicomte, was unbelievably gorgeous. It was much smaller and more charming than Versailles, but still very luxurious, and the gardens were absolutely nuts - just amazing. Vaux-le-Vicomte is the former home of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's finance minister who was wrongfully imprisoned after being accused of embezzlement. The chateau is now owned by a French family of aristocrats, who alas have no sons of marriageable age. I was quite disappointed to find that out, as I would marry a deformed ogre just for the chance to live there. (They live on the property in a "smaller" building, since the main chateau is open to the public.)
The rest of my week has been filled up with schoolwork, internship applications, and the like. Silly me, I thought my semester here would be stress-free!
My Dad comes on Friday, and I am so excited to see him.
That's pretty much all that's going on right now. I will try to get my Rome pictures up soon.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city. -Anatole Broyard

Ah, Rome. I just got back yesterday morning. It was a lot of fun! I must admit, though, I’m slightly relieved to be back in a country where I can communicate in the native tongue. Going to Italy was the first time I had been in a country where I did not understand ANYTHING anyone was saying. It was a lesson in perspective, that’s for sure!
Anyway, here’s what I did:
My friends and I spent the night at Paris’ Orly airport on Friday night, because our flight left at 6 am on Saturday morning, and we didn’t feel like dealing with cabs at 3:30 in the morning. Needless to say, it wasn’t the best night’s sleep.
So, we got on our flight, which was great and cheap (yay Easyjet!), and landed in Rome at about 8 a.m. I met up with my good friend Madi at the Termini train station, and she took me to her apartment to drop my stuff off.
My first experience with Italians was watching two girls getting arrested on the bus. All of a sudden there was a scuffle, and this undercover cop pulled out handcuffs and cuffed these two girls who looked about 15. Of course, I had no idea what was going on since I can’t speak Italian. It was fun in a very scary way.
Madi lives literally across the street from the Vatican. You open her window and you are staring at St. Peter’s Basilica. It was pretty cool. There are always cops stationed outside her window, guarding this one entrance to the Vatican, and Madi is friends with all of them. It’s so funny – she leans out her window and has 30-minute conversations with them. Oh, Mads.
After dropping off my stuff, we walked all over Rome. I saw the Colosseum and the Forum (so cool and so OLD), the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps. The Trevi Fountain was amazing! So gorgeous, except there were just so many people around it, it was kind of hard to relax. They also have the most annoying vendors in Rome. They come up to you and literally stand in front of your face and hold up what they are selling until you walk away or yell at them. That kind of put me in a bad mood. And I’m not sure if I can say I actually saw the Spanish Steps – I’m pretty sure I just saw the hundreds of people sitting on them. Kind of a disappointment, but no matter.
OH! Crazy coincidence – while I was at the Colosseum, I ran into two girls from high school at two different times. It was so weird! I hadn’t talked to or seen them in at least two and a half years, and there they were in Rome! One of them even has a class with one of my sorority sisters (Hannah) in London. I thought my head was going to explode.
That evening, I had dinner with one of my other sorority sisters (Nooners) and her two roommates and Madi. It was fine, except we ordered fried fish for the second course and they brought out entire fish that had just been dipped in batter and fried whole, eyeballs and all. Whoops! Remember that if you go to Europe – only order seafood if you don’t mind your dinner staring at you.
Well, while we’re on food, let’s talk about the gelato. It is an explosion of flavor in your mouth, pretty much. Aaaah so good. I ate it twice a day, which was bad for the waistline but pretty fantastic for the soul. My favorite flavor was Crema, and it was like this lemon cream flavor…aaah. And gelaterias were everywhere – I decided they are the Italian version of the crepe. Okay, that’s enough.
After dinner we walked around Campo de Fiori which is this crazy piazza at night with lots of bars and people just go stand out in the middle and hang out in this giant square. It was kind of like high school football games where everyone just stood around in that big parking lot next to the football field, except without the sport and with lots more alcohol.
Sunday morning was truly serendipitous. I got up early to go to Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. I was planning on going to the 10:30 Mass, but when I got to St. Peter’s Square, it was full of thousands upon thousands of people. I looked up at the steps of the Basilica, and lo and behold, the Pope was up there! It turns out it was a canonization mass for four new saints, and it had just started. So, I made my way over to the middle and I got to attend a Mass said by the Pope. It was one of the coolest moments – the ceremony was so beautiful and it was so cool to see the big guy himself! (He’s actually pretty small.) The Mass was in Latin, except for the readings, which were done in different languages because the saints were from all over the world. One of them was done in English, which was neat – I felt welcome! The best part was the singing – it was the most beautiful singing I have ever heard in my entire life. (I started crying; it was that good.) And at the sign of peace, oh my gosh, it was so cool. (For the non-Catholics, it’s the part of the Mass where everyone turns to one another and wishes each other peace.) Everyone in the square turned to each other and was saying “Peace be with you” in their own language, and there were people from all over the world there. I mean, imagine people saying “Peace” in Spanish, French, Italian, German, English, Russian, Chinese…It was so moving, I just, oh I wish you all could have been there! It is truly something I will never forget.
The rest of Sunday pretty much paled in comparison to the morning. Madi and I were going to go to Perugia, a small town two hours outside of Rome, because they had a chocolate festival that day, where the whole town celebrated chocolate making. Sadly, by the time I was done with Mass, the next train to Perugia would have been too late for the festival. So, instead, we walked around Rome and tried to find something to do, since I had pretty much seen everything and I was going to the Vatican and such the next day with my friends from Paris. We decided to try and find a movie theater. We walked all over and finally found one with “Little Miss Sunshine,” which we both really wanted to see. So we bought our tickets, and they guy at the counter was like, “You want two together?” And we said, “No, no, we want to pay separately.” He kept asking us if we were sure and we said yes, of course. (Only, he was talking in Italian and we were talking in English, and even though we clearly did not speak Italian, he refused to stop.) So we bought our separate tickets and went in and sat down. Once we got in the movie theater, we sat down and after a couple minutes the man behind us was like, “You realize this movie is all in Italian? It’s okay, you learn, you learn.” Yeah, right. Crap. Can someone please explain why they would not change the title of the movie into Italian if it is, in fact, shown dubbed in Italian? Or at least mark somewhere that said movie is not the original version? So then we had to go communicate in sign language that we needed a refund, and the man only yelled at us in Italian and shook his head. We then tried to sell our tickets to people in line, but, guess what? They have assigned seating in Italian movie theaters. What the…? All of a sudden, the man’s puzzled look when we asked for separate tickets made sense. Thus, no one wanted to buy our tickets because I was in C4 and Madi was in F11, and no one goes to the movies by themselves. I was feeling pretty down on Italy at this point. The rest of the night is scarcely worth mentioning – defeated by life, we slunk back to Madi’s apartment and ate takeout spaghetti.
The next day was much, much better. I met up with my friends from Paris (who stayed at a hostel), and we went to St. Peter’s Basilica (which I hadn’t actually been in at that point). It was absolutely breathtaking, even after the zillion churches I have visited in France. The Pieta was in there, which I think is one of the most beautiful sculptures ever. It was really interesting, because I eavesdropped on a tour guide as he was talking about it. If you look at, Jesus is actually about half the size of Mary, which doesn’t really make sense, until you realize that Michelangelo wasn’t sculpting Mary holding her dead son. The sculpture is actually of a vision Mary had, when she was holding Jesus as a child on her lap, and she envisioned his death on the cross and holding him then. Therefore, Jesus is actually child size, and Mary’s look of serenity is actually her accepting what is to come, not actually experiencing it. Does that make sense? It did at the time.
After St. Peter’s, we got in line for an hour to go to the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican Museum was not at all what I expected, but in a good way. It was absolutely gigantic! It actually reminded me a little of the Louvre, because it had all different kinds of collections – ancient sculpture, Egyptian treasures, paintings, tapestries, modern art, etc. Pretty amazing. It was frustrating though, because there was tour group after tour group and they would stop in the middle of the hallway and block everyone. (There was also really only one way to go through the museum, so they couldn’t be avoided.) Oh well. The Sistine Chapel was beautiful beautiful beautiful. The one annoying part was that the guards in the chapel tried to get the hundreds of people in it to be silent by clapping their hands and saying “Shhhh” really loudly. A bit counterintuitive if you ask me, since they were actually louder and more obnoxious than the murmur of the crowd.
After the Vatican and such, we just wandered around the city and finished up with dinner in Piazza Navona, the city’s most beautiful piazza. Lovely!
We got on a plane yesterday morning, and here I am back in Paris. A great weekend, all in all.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter. - e e cummings

Mmm…I just had a delicious dinner. We had these sautéed mushrooms called “Septs” or something like that for dinner. They were really big and really delicious and apparently they are “le roi de champignons” (the king of mushrooms). We had them with an omelette and then we had grapes and this delicious cheese called Mont d’Or, which was like a combination between brie and butter (that sounds nasty, come to think of it, but it was so good, and not at all smelly.)
Jean-Claude was over for dinner, which means I really got to practice my French because he loves to talk politics with me. We talked about everything from D-Day to Monicagate (“Mo-neeka Lee-ween-skee”) to September 11. Apparently, Jean Claude is enamored with Rudy Giuliani – every time he comes over he somehow manages to work the former mayor into the conversation. Cracks me up.
Anyway, that’s not why I’m writing. I just have a jewel too good to pass up:
I have found the best home-stay story ever. My friend Ronnie, who goes to AU, is staying with a single older woman like me, except Ronnie is a boy, making it slightly more awkward. This lady, Monique, is 68 (she informed him) and her favorite past time is tanning – she is a permanent shade of orange. (Ronnie is allowed one shelf in the medicine cabinet; the rest are filled with every type of bronzer known to man, he informed me.) My favorite FAVORITE part of this story is that Ronnie can not use his house key – he has to knock on the front door, because Monique informed him that she likes to do gymnastics in the living room in her “petites culottes” – underwear. So, if you are ever having a bad day, you can just think of my poor friend Ronnie walking in on 68-year-old Monique turning cartwheels in the living room in her underwear.

There you have it. Compelling and rich.

Next weekend: Roma!

"You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and the present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden." -Allan Ginsburg

Last night in Paris was something called La Nuit Blanche. It's basically a modern art showcase that the mayor's office puts on, and it is so cool! Basically, everyone stays up all night, and different quarters of the city stay open (museums, restaurants, churches, etc.) All around the city there are art installations and exhibits, music concerts, acting showcases, and so on, that go on all night! The metro stays open and there are free buses that take you from one quarter of the city to another. This is the fifth year Paris has done it now, and it was amazing. My friends and I stayed out all night and wandered around the city.
In the church of St. Eustache, there was this huge sculpture of a crown of thorns made out of barbed wire, and this guy was putting on an organ concert - it was really creepy organ music and combined with the imposing size of the church, it was really powerful. In the Tuileries gardens, they had sculptures made out of snow, and they set up an ice skating rink with speed skaters going around and around it. At le Petit Palais, they had this electricity installation thing going on, so the light kept pulsating over and over, making the building look really cool - it was crazy. Across the street at le Grand Palais, they had this installation this guy did with thousands and thousands of pieces of candy, and it was supposed to be "living art" where everyone was supposed to participate and take a piece of candy. (They actually have the same thing at the Dallas Museum of Art, so it was neat to think the artist made it all the way over to Paris!) They lit up the big obelisk in the Place de la Concorde with a blue light. Anyway, the city was just chock full of crazy off-the-wall stuff like that, and even though I don't understand a lot of modern art, it was so neat to participate in!

“The supreme moments of travel are born of beauty and strangeness in equal parts; the first panders to the senses, the second to mind.” –Robert Bryant

Oh, this weekend! How is it possible that each one gets better and better? I went to Normandy and Brittany with the Accent Center. (Translation: 40 students and one annoying chaperone on a charter bus.) To be honest, I wasn’t that excited about going beforehand, but it was one of the best weekends I’ve ever had. We left Paris really early on Friday morning. Our first stop was the Peace Memorial/Museum in Caen, as a sort of introduction to D-Day before we went to the landing beaches. The Peace Museum, ironically enough, was all about war – not really my cup of tea, but all I could think of was how much my Dad would like it! It did, however, put D-Day in perspective, since I didn’t really know that much about it beforehand. I realized how absolutely terrifying it must have been – I’m pretty sure I would have started crying and refused to get out of the boat and go on the beach, were I in that situation. After visiting the museum, we got back on the bus and drove to the American cemetery, which overlooks Omaha Beach, one of the major landing beaches on D-Day.
The American cemetery (which is actually American territory, donated to us by France) was very pretty, but very similar to Arlington National Cemetery in DC (lots of white crosses, etc.) It was neat how it overlooked Omaha Beach, though. I’m sure it is very moving for people with relatives who are either buried there or participated in D-Day. So, that was Normandy.
After the D-Day stuff, things got fun. We drove to Saint Malo, this tiny town in Brittany right on the coast. Oh, how I adore Saint Malo! It was unlike any place I’ve ever been. It is a medieval town surrounded by ramparts (big walls). It’s chock-full of quaint, twisty streets, and lots of anchor memorabilia! (An anchor is my sorority’s symbol, for those who don’t know…) I could go on and on about how much I love the town – it is so beautiful, because it is right on the beach, and you can basically walk all the way around the town on the ramparts which give you a fabulous view.
Anyway, we found out that they ran out of room at the hotel where all the Accent students were supposed to stay, so the AU students were told we would be staying in a different hotel around the corner. (There were several different universities participating in this trip through Accent, and there were seven of us from AU.) We totally lucked out! Our hotel was so nice – the rooms were really big (for a French hotel) and it was really clean and modern, with a fabulous breakfast in the morning!
So, we were given free time once we got to St. Malo. We (the AU students) went to a market around the corner from our hotel and bought bottles of wine, then went on the beach and watched the sunset and enjoyed the wine. It was sublime – one of those one-of-a-kind moments which nevertheless happen so often here! After a long time on the beach and a lot of wine, we went to a seafood restaurant, one of about fifteen on a single street. The Brittany region is known for their seafood and their galettes (buckwheat crepes filled with anything you can imagine.)
The next day, we went to Dinan, another medieval town, even tinier than St. Malo. It was so cool! There was this one really picturesque street lined with beautiful old buildings and shops – honestly, I felt like I was on a movie set. It was so quaint! We lunched in Dinan, then headed back to Saint Malo to play. When we got back, we walked around the village and did some shopping (again, lots of anchor stuff – I was in heaven!). After shopping, my friends and I went back to the beach and walked over to this island called Le Grand Bé. It’s a very, very tiny island, and when the tide is low you can walk on a narrow pathway from the beach at St. Malo over to it, but you have to be really careful to watch the tide, because it comes in so fast that you can get stranded! (Apparently this happened a couple of years ago to a few Accent students and they had to be rescued by the Coastguard.) Anyway, this island is really cool because you can climb it and get a great view of the ocean and St. Malo. Also, the author Chateaubriand is buried at the tippy top. (He was born in St. Malo and he requested to be buried on Le Grand Bé because he wanted to be “between the ocean and the heavens.” Honestly, his final resting place is as beautiful as he made it sound.) There were wild blackberries on the island, too, that we picked and ate – so cool.
That night, we went out to dinner in St. Malo and went and bought wine (it’s exciting to be legal!) and went to the ramparts. We drank the wine and listened to the ocean and talked nonsense and it was amazing. We then tried to go to a karaoke bar and were quite pissed off when they told us the machine was broken. (I’m pretty sure they just didn’t want to hear a bunch of tipsy Americans singing Journey’s Greatest Hits.) We ended up going to the other hotel where the rest of the Accent students were staying, because it had a bar with (gasp!) a bartender who loved Americans. It was a great night.
The next day we got up horrifically early and left St. Malo (tear) to go and visit Mont St. Michel. Mont St. Michel was, in a word, unreal. If you don’t know what it is, you must look at pictures on the Internet, but basically it’s an island with a huge beautiful monastery at the top. The site dates back until something like the 700s, and it is one of the most beautiful places ever! My only complaint was that I didn’t get to spend enough time there – we had to take a guided tour of the monastery which lasted an hour, and then they only gave us half an hour for lunch. It was pretty sad – the tour was interesting enough I guess, but I would have much rather have had time to explore it myself. There’s also a village on the island that surrounds the monastery, and we only had time to walk through it on our way back to the bus. Sad day. But, all in all, I’m so glad I at least got to see it, because it is truly magnificent.
Here are some cool things about Mont St. Michel, though, to prove to you that I do actually learn things here and that I do more than just drink a lot of wine:
-The Mont St. Michel was built after the archangel Michael appeared to the Bishop of Avranches (a nearby town) three times in a dream, asking him to construct a pilgrimage site on the top of the island. The first two times, the bishop figured it was just a dream and not a vision, but in the third dream, Saint Michael directed a beam of light at the skull of the bishop. When the bishop woke up, he could feel a hole under the skin on his skull where the beam of light had been pointed. The bishop took the hint, and a grotto for the veneration of St. Michael was built on top of the island shortly thereafter.
(They actually still have the skull of the bishop with the hole in it, in a museum in Avranches.)
-In the Middle Ages, Mont St. Michel was a huge pilgrimage site – people would leave their homes and their families and travel on foot for months and months just to have a chance to worship there. Over hundreds of years it grew in size to become a giant Benedictine monastery.
-Mont St. Michel is really only an island when the tide comes in, but it comes in so fast that pilgrims used to say it came at “the speed of a galloping horse.” (It really only moves at about two miles per hour. However, if you were a pilgrim walking to the island, you’d have to time your walk exactly right to avoid drowning. Even then, when the tide is out, the island is surrounded by quicksand, which apparently actually is deadly. I thought it might just suck your leg under a little, no big deal, but if you step in it you can actually be swallowed whole and suffocate. Fun. Needless to say, I stuck to the paved footpath!)
Anyway, after Mont St. Michel, we got back on the bus and made the six hour drive back to Paris. I’m so sad the weekend is over!

Happy belated birthday, Papa!

Oh best news - I got a fabulous deal on airfare and I'm going to Dublin for my birthday. The airfare was - get this - 20 Euro round trip, but it ended up being about 50 Euro with fees and taxes and everything. Still, a really good deal. I'm excited.
This weekend I'm going to Normandy and Brittany through the Accent Center. It should be fun.
Nothing much new to report - classes are good. I met up with one of the French ice hockey players, Matthieu, for a drink the other night. It was fun, but interesting because neither one of us is fluent in the other's language...And now I think I may have accidentally told him I have a boyfriend, because I was talking about my friend Patrick who also plays ice hockey, and I said "mon ami Patrick." Literally, that means "my friend Patrick," but apparently if you say "mon ami" it means your boyfriend - you must say "un ami," (a friend). So now, I think he thinks I was talking about my non-existent boyfriend. Ugh! Frustrating. Also, I've learned it's very difficult to come up with clever things to say in another language. But, practice makes perfect!

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air’s salubrity.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh, how I love traveling! I just spent the most wonderful weekend on the Côte d’Azur in the south of France. Scrumptious!
I was visiting two of my sorority sisters, Jill and Darcie, who are studying in Antibes. My friend Blair and I took the train down on Saturday morning to go stay with them. We took the TGV (Train à Grand Vitesse), which is very speedy, apparently, although it didn’t seem to me to move any faster than a normal train. It was, however, so much nicer than any train I’ve ever been on in the U.S. – two levels, very clean, very safe and non-sketchy, etc., etc. Blair and I, since we booked separately, were assigned seats in different cars, but serendipitously a man asked to switch with me, and his seat was in the same car as Blair!
The train ride was about five hours long, and absolutely breathtaking! At first, Blair and I decided that the French countryside wasn’t that different from driving through the Midwest, save for the occasional chateau or castle one passes. Once we got to the coast, however – oh rapture! It was literally the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I’m not sure if that’s because I don’t get out a lot or what, but oh my goodness, I was in awe. Huge huge cliffs with beautiful pastel houses (red tile roofs) all up and down them, with the Mediterranean crashing on the rocks below. Fabulous! (Look at my pictures – a lot of the scenery ones that I took were from the train, although they don’t quite do the view justice.)
Needless to say, by the time we got to Antibes, I was jumping up and down in my seat, I was so excited. Darcie and Jill live in this adorable apartment with another girl from AU named Rosie. Their apartment is a five-minute walk from the beach, not a bad set-up for study abroad! Luckily, they had two couches for Blair and I to sleep on. When we got there, it was immediately decided that the beach was the best option! Darce graciously lent me one of her swimsuits, and we headed down to the beach. I can now say I’ve been in the Mediterranean, and it was frickin’ freezing. I thought it would be pretty warm, it being the end of the summer and that the sea is a “smaller” body of water…no dice. The beach itself was an experience, though. Toplessness is quite okay, apparently. I won’t go into detail, but I saw some pretty shocking anatomy, including a rather obese English woman who took her top off right in front of her teenage son. Awkward. In addition, an eight-year-old boy, completely naked, playing leapfrog with his bits and pieces bobbing all around. Pretty disturbing. Okay, I guess I went into detail. Sorry.
That night, we walked around Antibes and had dinner in the town’s open-air market. We had moules frites (mussels and fries), which I guess are somewhat of a regional specialty. I devoured them all, of course – yum! After dinner we went to the first absinthe bar in Europe, because none of us had ever had absinthe and apparently the bar is famous. It was really neat, if only because it was different – when you order absinthe, they bring it to you in this glass and then you take this spoony/strainer thing and put a sugar cube on it and rest it on the glass. After that, you put drops of water from this decanter thing onto the sugar cube on the spoony thing and it dissolves into the absinthe – very scientific. (See my pictures if you need a visual.) Unfortunately, this does nothing to remedy the foul taste of the absinthe itself – something in between grape Dimetapp and liquid Good ‘n’ Plenty, although it’s actually green. Foul. We drank it anyway, naturally. I hallucinated all night. (Only kidding – I’m pretty sure the hallucinogenic properties of absinthe are removed for it to be legal, although I did see this weird greenish fairy thing floating around…)
The next day, it was off to Monaco! We literally went to Monaco and back for 4 Euro and 80 cents. Amazing!
Monaco is, well, the type of place that makes you think marrying for money might not be such a bad idea. It’s everything you’d think – gorgeous yachts, gorgeous cars, gorgeous mansions, gorgeous people. While there, I toured the Royal Palace (small-ish but opulent), the Cathedral where Grace Kelly was married and is buried (shame on my friends who are reading this and asking why she’s buried in Monaco), and I saw the famous Monte Carlo Casino. (Note: the casino in Monte Carlo is so different from the ones in Vegas – you have to pay 10 Euro just to get in, and there is a dress code - a coat and tie is required in many of the exclusive gaming salons. Unfortunately, all of us were too cheap to pay the 10 Euro cover charge, in addition to the fact that our flip flops were quite unacceptable.) Outside, cars were lined up: Mercedes, Bentley, Bentley, Mercedes…it was funny, but typical. It was a really fun day.
Today, Blair and I took the train to Nice because Jill and Darcie had class, and our train back to Paris left from Nice anyway. Nice was…not nice. This morning was basically a torrential downpour – not the best weather for touring. When we got to the Nice Ville station, we got a locker to store our bags in, then went next door to the tourist office. We decided to take this Open Tour bus (due to the rain) that goes all around Nice and drops you off at key locations, for a mere 15 Euro. We trekked what seemed like miles to Musée Marc Chagall, where there apparently was a bus stop for this tour. By the time we got there, Blair and I were completely soaked, and lo and behold – no bus stop, and the museum was closed for renovation. Brilliant. After a few expletives, we decided to turn back around and head back toward the train station. (You don’t understand. This wasn’t rain. This was RAIN.) We stopped in a boulangerie for coffee and carbs, then at a shoe store where I got some black boots. (No judgment please – when I feel upset, buying something usually cheers me up. I was much perkier after I acquired some new winter footwear! Plus, they were very inexpensive.) Then, we went back to the train station where I was able to change out of my wet squishy tennis shoes into my fabulous new boots. (See? A both fashionable and practical purchase.) Après ça, we spent the afternoon in the train station. (Pretty much anything worth seeing in Nice is conveniently located really really far away from the station, and Blair and I were easily defeated by the fact that we couldn’t feel our feet anymore.) Needless to say, Nice was not my favorite. Ironically enough, the rain let up and it became a beautiful sunny day, oh, about 40 minutes before we had to catch our train – giving us just enough time to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING without missing our train. So, I am now very familiar with the Nice train station (it costs 50 cents to use the restroom and the price of a sandwich and Coke is 5 Euro, a café crème is 2.50). Oh well – it was an adventure, and Blair and I had a good laugh. I also happen to know where you can get very cheap chic boots.
One last thing to add to the adventure – I haven’t had a voice for 48 hours now. When I try to speak, all that comes out is a raspy squeak reminiscent of a 13-year-old boy in the throes of puberty. It’s fun, let me tell you.

‘til next time,
Squeaky

"Everybody's workin' for the weekend..." -Loverboy

Oh! What a wonderful weekend I had! I am having the most fun. Friday night, immediately after class, my friends and I all met up on this street called Rue de la Huchette, which is a twisty little side street full of fun bars and restaurants. The best deal is always to get a formule or prix-fixe menu, where you get an entrée (which is actually an appetizer), a plat (the main course), and dessert for somewhere around 10 Euros. Not bad! We ended up going to a Greek place that was really yummy, then we all went to Happy Hours (yes, they’re plural here) at a couple of different bars. Happy Hours usually end around 9 here, and we’re never done eating by then, but if you’re a girl they sometimes give you Happy Hours prices no matter what the time, so it’s quite nice. (However, it’s still impossible to get a cocktail here for under 6 Euro, which I guess is something like $8. Not cheap.) So anyway, we ended up going to this Irish pub called Shiwawa. Long story short, I met Sean, this adorable English boy from Cornwall in line for the toilets (co-ed toilets are the norm, here), and he introduced me to his two friends, both named Stuart. (I called them Stuart 1 and Stuart 2.) They were just finishing up a road trip around Europe before heading back to university, and so I introduced them to my friends and we hung out for the rest of the night. It’s so fun to meet people here and learn about how they live and compare life stories, etc. (Not to mention, I am such a sucker for an accent!) Sadly, they went back to Cornwall today, but we’re going to be pen pals, apparently. In any case, now I have friends in Cornwall!
Saturday was a bit of an adventure. I was asked out for coffee by this French guy, Pierre (not even joking about the name), that I met last Tuesday night. He is half French and half Moroccan and not at all my type. I didn’t want to be rude, so I said yes and we met up. It was fun, though! We walked around Paris and he showed me Le Marais, which is this beautiful old part of the city. Traditionally, it is a very Jewish quarter, although now it’s becoming more of a gay area – the Dupont Circle of Paris, if you will. In any case, it’s filled with lots of quaint side streets and there is this beautiful park called Place des Voges that is kind of tucked away – amazing! I’ve said this before, but walking around Paris yesterday I was struck yet again by how full of surprises it is. Yesterday in Place des Voges there was this whole brass band that just set up right there and started playing patriotic music. Along the Seine (right where we ate dinner on that boat, Mom), there was a huge food market that featured delicacies from the different regions of France. (Lots of smelly cheese, wine, and foie gras, obviously.) People were picnicking on Pont des Arts, one of the huge bridges that spans the Seine. You just don’t get that kind of stuff in the U.S.!
One of the coolest (if most bizarre) things I saw though was something called Love Parade, which Pierre told me about. It’s basically these huge parade floats that are tricked out with crazy decorations and have turntables on them with a DJ. They blast (I mean BLAST) techno and house music and drive all throughout Paris. Young people dress in crazy outfits and just follow the floats all throughout the streets of Paris dancing to the music. It was one of the neatest (albeit a little scary) things to watch. Granted, most of them are in an altered state of consciousness due to various illegal substances, but it’s so funny to see how crazy the people get and how they just let loose and parade throughout the streets in the complete middle of the afternoon. People were climbing up street signs! Oh, it was crazy.
Last night (Saturday), we went out to another pub called the Long Hop. This one had more of a club feel, with dancing and two floors. So fun! It was a great mix of French people and Americans. (Oh, and what I said about French men all being shy – that’s not the case! Some of them are actually quite friendly.) The most fun, though, is going dancing with all my American girlfriends. Europeans and Americans dance very differently. As anyone who has ever been to a club in DC can attest, American dancing, is, well, not PG-rated. French people dance very politely and unfortunately very goofily, making it extremely amusing when my friends and I all get out and go crazy on the dance floor. I’m pretty sure the French guys have no idea what is going on and are probably a little frightened. Great fun.
Last night we met some French ice hockey players. I didn’t know ice hockey existed over here, but apparently it does. I was really confused at first because this guy kept telling me he played “eye-zooky,” and I had no idea what he was talking about until he explained that when water freezes it makes ice and people play a game on said ice with sticks. Ah, the world makes sense again.
The funniest moment of the night was when I was standing outside the pub waiting for a cab with my friends. (Note: cab drivers are unbelievably rude here – before they let you get in the cab you have to tell them where you are going, and if they don’t like the way it sounds they just speed off. One cabbie told my friend last night that he wouldn’t take her home because it was too far and he wanted to go to bed. My cab driver yelled at me and my friend because we accidentally bumped the back of his seat when we were getting in the car. Nice.) Anyway, I was standing with my friends, and all of a sudden these French guys run over to me, pointing at me and saying, “Oh my God, it’s Emma Daumas! Emma Daumas! You are Emma Daumas?” I had to explain that no, I was not Emma Dumas. Apparently, she’s some famous singer over here and they thought I was her. It was pretty funny! (I did some research, and I don’t think I look anything like her.)
Today I went to Mass at this church I found for English-speaking Catholics in Paris, and it was so nice to know how to respond to the priest! (I went to Mass in French last week and felt like a total jerk sitting there in silence because I didn’t know what to sing or say.) The priest was this old Irishman and was absolutely adorable! After Mass I went to one of the many open-air markets in Paris. I met up with my friends and we bought baguettes, brie, all kinds of fruit, pastries, and fresh apple juice and went and picnicked under the Eiffel Tower. Does life get better?
A word about the markets, or marchés (since this entry is of epic length, anyway): never go if you are uncomfortable with your food looking like it was breathing five minutes ago. Any animal part your heart desires can be found at these markets. Hmm, today I saw whole dead chickens complete with black bulging eyes, gigantic cows’ tongues that were probably removed this morning, various livers, kidneys, intestines, ears, feet, tails, you name it. On the flip side, there is no better place than an open-air market if you love good food. Walking down an aisle, for example, you pass the following: a boulangerie stand (50 different types of bread, assorted pastries, muffins, cakes), a poissonerie (any type of fish you can think of, in addition to mussels, clams, shrimp, lobster, etc.), a stand completely dedicated to olives (20 different varieties and various tapenades), a charcuterie stand (any type of sliced meat as well as patés, foie gras, etc.), a fruit stand (the freshest fruit you will ever taste, including my beloved Reine Claudes ), a fromagerie (smelly cheese) and so on. All the vendors call out to you and want you to taste and smell. I love the smells – all except the stinky cheese, of course.
This weekend was also what is called les journées du patrimoine. This happens once a year, and for two days only, hundreds and hundreds of state-owned buildings in France that are usually closed to the public are opened and people can tour them for free. People line up for hours and hours to walk through the Senate, l’Assemblée Nationale, and the Palais de l’Elysées (the President’s residence), among other buildings. My friends and I tried to go see l’Elysées and maybe get a glimpse of old Jacques Chirac, but the wait was literally three hours long to get in and it would have been closed by the time we finally reached it. An opportunity missed, but it sure made me appreciate Capitol and White House tours a lot more!
Tomorrow it’s back to the daily grind with classes and such, but next weekend I am going to Nice to visit some of my sorority sisters who are studying there. My friend Blair and I are taking the TGV (the high speed train), so we’ll see how that goes…

“Back to school, back to school, to prove to Daddy that I’m not a fool.” –Adam Sandler as Billy Madison

Métro-boulot-dodo. This is a phrase the French use to describe the daily rhythm of life in Paris: first you take the Métro, then you go to your job (un boulot), then you go home and go to sleep (dodo). Although my days aren’t quite like that, I’m settling into somewhat of a routine as well. I had my first real day of classes today, although I probably won’t post this entry until tomorrow, so really it will be yesterday…you get the idea. I am taking five courses in five different buildings in five different areas of the city. The Sorbonne, I have quickly found out, does not really have a campus. It has very many buildings spread all around Paris, making the commute an utter joy. Especially on a day like today – high 80s, no air-conditioning (ANYWHERE), crowds, questionable stenches, oh and to top it off the handles on the tote I was carrying my books in broke. Off. However, Paris seems to have been constructed in such a way so that the moment you feel you’ve reached your breaking point and you’re ready to kick a random Frenchie in the shins, you turn the corner and suddenly you’re looking at a gorgeous monument, statue, or building. Then you kind of forget why you’re pissed. Unless, that is, you’re carrying around a 25-pound tote full of books in your arms – then you remember really quickly.
But, I digress. My classes are as follows: I’m taking two conférences, which are lecture courses (in French) that meet only for an hour once a week. One is a survey of French literature in which I’m not actually required to read anything (not quite sure how that one works out), and the other is Art History (about which I am very excited). Another class, taught in English, is the history of Paris. This one is awesome – half the time is spent in the classroom, but the other half is actually spent out in the city visiting different neighborhoods, historical sites, etc. That meets for two hours twice a week. So, those are the fun ones. Here’s the kicker: I have to take 3 hours of French grammar and phonetics…wait for it…EVERY DAMN DAY. Oh yes. And luckily, I tested into the level “supérieur,” which in French, of course, means, “the one with the most homework.” Ah, c’est la vie.

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
and I am Marie of Romania."
-Dorothy Parker

They don’t call Paris the City of Love without reason. Everyone in Paris is in love. Couples make out in the subway, in cafes, on the street, under bridges, in the toilets. Think of the most un-romantic place possible, and I can almost guarantee you a Parisian couple is making out there this very moment. If you ever find yourself recovering from a bad break-up and think that a vacation to Paris might cheer you up, think again. Your singledom will only be bolded, highlighted, and underlined the moment you step out the door.
The French men who aren’t attached do not provide much help, either. They are actually quite shy, according to Anne-Sophie, the French intern at the Accent Center, and my own personal observations have confirmed this. They won’t come up and start a conversation with you, and I’m sure not going to go up to one and start talking to them, considering the fact that I have the French vocabulary of a five-year-old. Sometimes a French guy will say “oh la la” or some such nonsense when you pass in the street, but that’s no way to actually meet someone. Besides, would I really want to be with a guy who says “oh la la?”
It’s really other foreign men who are the forward ones – especially the Italians, of which there seem to be a lot of in Paris, oddly enough. They hit on you and don’t even try to hide it. Take today, for example. I was meandering around the Carrousel du Louvre, the mini-shopping mall under the Louvre. (My friends went to Giverny today, but I stayed in the city as I had already been and wasn’t willing to shell out the 63 Euro for a repeat trip.) I stopped to get a café crème at a little self-service café. As I was waiting in line, this Italian waiter ran up to me saying “Bella! Bella!” and told me he would help me. He ushered me inside the little coffee shop and made me a café crème himself and asked if I spoke English. This is how the conversation went:

Me: Yes, I speak English.
Waiter: You are so beautiful.
Me [caught off-guard]: Thank you…?
Waiter: Where are you from?
Me: Texas.
Waiter: Oh I love-ah your accent. Texaaaahs. You stay and drink coffee wiz me?
Me [silently praying my café crème will be ready immediately]: Um…Actually I can’t, I’m meeting friends.
Waiter: Oh. What is your name?
Me: I’m Kate.
Waiter: Ohh, like Kate Whiz-late?
Me: Excuse me?
Waiter: Kate Whiz-late.
Me: Ah, Kate Winslet. No, I’m no Kate Winslet.
Waiter: Yes. You Kate Whiz-late, I am Leonardo diCaprio.
Me: Haha.
Waiter: Ah, you smile, you smile. Please tell me how old are you?
Me: I’m 20.
(This elicits a big smile from said waiter.)
Waiter: You are married? Have boyfriend?
Me: Oh, I have a boyfriend. (Ah, what a wonderful phrase – whether it’s true or not, in saying it, you can immediately turn down a man and it’s nothing personal.) He’s very large and could probably break your neck. (Okay, I didn’t add that part.)
Waiter: I wish the best to you and your boyfriend. I hope to find someone as beautiful as you to be with forever.
Me [grabbing the café crème]: Hehe…okay, I’m going to go now, thanks!

Holy Moses. All this while getting a coffee. You have to admire the straightforward-ness, at least – American men would never say things like that! Maybe life would be that much easier if we could all just go up to a potential partner and say, “Hello. I think you are the most gorgeous human being I’ve ever set eyes on. Are you single? Can I get you a café crème?”

"It is impossible to overdo luxury." -French proverb

NOTE: This was supposed to be posted yesterday but Blogger wasn't working.

For those of you that haven't heard me wax poetic about my new living situation, let me share it with you. I am living with an older French woman named Mme. de Billy (pronounced DUH-BEE-YEE), in a neighborhood just outside the Paris city limits called Neuilly (NUH-YEE). It is phenomenal - the area is residential, with tree-lined streets and beautiful apartment buildings, but it still has a city feel. I am about a 5-minute walk from the Metro, on the same line as the Accent center, so it's super easy to get into the city!
Mme. de Billy is, in a word, wealthy. We live on the ground floor of this ritzy apartment building. Her apartment is gigantic by Parisian standards, and full of beautiful antiques. My room is the best, though - the walls are covered in beautiful red and yellow toile fabric, and there is a big couch in my room covered in the same fabric. I have a twin bed and several chests of drawers and a beautiful old desk. The walls have gorgeous paintings on them and gilt-framed mirrors. My favorite part, though, is that I have two huge French doors that open into a private walled garden. All in all, not a bad arrangement!
Madame, as I call her, is very sweet. During the week, we eat dinner together between 8:30 and 9 (she seems to have a very set schedule), and then she gives me breakfast in the morning. She's in her late 50s, early 60s I would say and she works in public relations, I think. She's incredibly skinny and very chic - une vraie Parisienne! She's been hosting students in her apartment for years. She always askes for a "nice young lady," so I guess I have to be on my best behavior!
Last night, she had one of her friends over for dinner, and we had dinner in the garden - it was incredible! It was one of those moments where I realized just how lucky I am to be here. Her friend is a widow who is a nurse in Paris, so we had a conversation all about the medical profession in France and I told her my mom was a nurse also, etc. She actually wrote a book all about nursing in France and said she'd give me a copy for my mom. She was very talkative and fun to listen to! According to her, everything was "sympa," or "genial," which means great/nice. We drank a lot of wine and when I hesitated to have more because I didn't want her to think I'm a glutton, she said, "Non, non, Katherine, we don't have a complex here. We are friends of Bacchus [the god of wine]!"
Meals here are so different - we had about 6 different courses last night. We started off with tabouleh, which is this amazing couscous salad with tomatoes, mint, raisins, etc. Then we had ham slices and bread, then a crepe filled with egg and cheese. After that was a green salad with olive oil and chives, followed by a cheese course. I'm not a big smelly cheese fan, but this cheese was amazing! There was this cheese from the Basque region of Spain that you eat with cherry jelly, as well as this really soft cheese with walnuts on top that tasted vaguely maple-y. Mmm. After cheese comes fruit - we had these tiny little plums called Reines-Claudes (I'm not sure on the spelling) that were the most amazing fruit I've ever put in my mouth. They look like tiny green apples, but they have a plummy texture and are super sweet and juicy. I've never seen them in the U.S., but if you ever get the chance to try one, don't pass it up! Finally, we each had a piece of fudge. Heaven!
I get the results of my French language placement exam tomorrow, as well as my class schedule. I also have my first French class tomorrow evening - classes here don't seem to start before noon, and my French class is from 5-7pm every evening.Basically, Paris is absolutely amazing (still) and plein de surprises (full of surprises)!ALSO, you can write to me (or send packages*) to this address:

Kate Sullivan
c/o ACCENT Paris
89, Rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine
75011 Paris
FRANCE

*My mom has probably freaked out and told you I can't receive packages because customs taxes are too high, but as long as you write "NO COMMERCIAL VALUE" on the box, it's fine. Also, please be sure to write AIRMAIL on envelopes/packages.

I am at the Accent Center, which is where the Paris study abroad program for AU is run. Everyone on my program is pretty much clueless as to what is going on, but I assume that's normal...Tomorrow we have an orientation all day, where apparently we find out the family we are living with, our class schedule, etc. But for now, they have stuck us in a hotel/hostel/merde-hole, with the misleading name Hotel de France. You'd think the Hotel of France would be luxurious, non? Non.
The elevator, (which is really just a black box attached to a string) goes up to the third floor. I am on the fourth. Picture, if you will, carrying a three-foot-wide, 68.7 pound suitcase up a narrow spiral staircase with no air-conditioning. Lovely. But, I won't complain - I am in Paris! The city of light, love, and expensive beverages! I will keep you posted as I learn more.