Comme les Français, j’adore le TGV!

This weekend five friends and I went to Strasbourg! It is actually kind of funny because Jackie, Lauren and I planned our trip separately from the other 3 girls who ended up going. It was nice to have a bigger group to do things with though.

I have to start by RAVING about the TGV, or bullet train. The French are so smart when it comes to transportation. This train got us to Strasbourg in just over two hours! The seats were comfortable with personal reading lights, cup holders, a tray, a foot rest and a mini trashcan. I didn’t get to sit by my friends on either trip because we booked our tickets separately but I was thrilled by the train ride the entire way there and back. I’m so excited to take it a few more times while I’m here, especially during the day when I can see the countryside.

Ok, raving done. Strasbourg! It is a quaint city very close to Germany. The German influence is thus very heavy. The tram system was really easy to use which made getting around the city stress free. We stayed in a hotel that cost 18 euro a night, not too shabby. Friday night we got in kind of late and asked the lady at our hotel where we could eat. She told us that most places stop serving food by 10pm, such a change from Paris!

Saturday we started the day by touring the Cathedral. It is one of the tallest Cathedrals I have ever seen! We got to see the demonstration of the astronomical clock. They played a movie beforehand that wasn’t very informative and therefore not really worth it but still amazing how they were able to make the figures move way back in the day (At a nearby museum on Sunday we saw the original rooster that was on the clock, most clocks like this have a rooster on it. The rooster happens to be the oldest automated object in the world. I included a picture!) After the Cathedral we took the canal tour around the historic part of town. Like Paris, part of the city is surrounded by rivers. The tour was very international. You could listen to the narration in ten different languages. We saw all around the city including the European Parliament establishments that are in Strasbourg.

After the tour we ate at a German restaurant (that we ended up back at on Sunday) that was so cute! I got to eat my cheese spaetzle that I was hoping to find since Strasbourg is so close to Germany. I would describe spaetzle as the German mac and cheese. My German friend Anne’s mom made it for us one of the first nights we were in Germany a few summers ago. This wasn’t as good as hers, but still exciting.

Continuing the eating spree… we went to a chocolate museum! The museum was on the outskirts of the city but was easy enough to get to. We saw how chocolate is made as well as how it traveled to Europe. The museum had some creepy automated figures that we spent a lot of time laughing at and posing with. At the end, one of the chocolatiers shows you how they make the molds of chocolate and gives you free samples. Before we left we purchased some chocolate beer. I wouldn’t really recommend it… but it was worth it just to try.

Sunday the weather turned on us a little. Apparently the Alcase region in France has extreme weather, either really cold or really hot. Sunday was pretty cold and rainy. Luckily, we started the day by climbing the tower of the Cathedral. Remember I told you it was one of the tallest I’ve ever seen? Well yes, it was painful. We took frequent breaks up the winding stone staircase. But once we got to the top it was totally worth it! (See pictures.) The rest of the day we spent in museums and buying cookies at a really cool traditional gourmet shop.

The trip was great because it was very stress free. We felt safe in the streets and even felt like we knew them by the end of the weekend. We all traveled together really well. It was a nice break from the hustle and bustle of Paris, but at the same time made us appreciate the city we are studying in. General observation of Strasbourg: the people are incredibly incredibly nice. Every person we ran into was patient with our French, willing to help us and one lady even offered to take a picture of us jumping on top of the Cathedral. I really enjoyed my weekend and I’m excited to travel more in Paris! We’re going to Bretagne in two weeks.

In other news: I, like everyone else in program, have a cold. It’s really not bad at all and I’m glad I’m getting it now rather than later. My host parents are really caring and are always asking how I’m doing and gave me weird French medicine. It’s funny to hear what they believe will cure a cold. For example, my host dad told me to drink some wine before going to bed… maybe I’ll try it tonight ;-)

The beautiful cathedral of Strasbourg. Check out the detail on those portals.

Stained glass inside the Cathedral. I get really frustrated when I'm in a Cathedral because it's impossible to capture the grandeur of it in a picture... guess you guys will just have to visit it!

The astronomical clock we saw!

One of the buildings of the European Parliament in Strasbourg taken from the boat tour.

The chocolatier at the museum showing us how he makes chocolate cats and trains!

An area of Strasbourg called Petite France. It was so pretty lit up at night.

Taken from the window on the windy staircase going up the Cathedral during one of our many breaks.

The view from the top!

The six girls on the trip.

I had to include our jumping picture. It's fantastic :-)

Palais Rohan. Inside there are three museums.

We visited the Musee des Arts Decoratifs. We saw the apartments in this Palace of different French kings including this Napoleon I. I believe Marie Antoinette slept in this room once.

The original rooster on the clock. The oldest automated object in the world!

I took this specifically for you Uncle Tommy. There was a random exhibit of a collection of toys one man gave to the museum in the earlyish 1900s. I saw these old cars and thought of you!

La Saint Valentin a Paris!

I have never seen as many couples in one place as I did in Paris on Valentine’s Day ! The metro was packed with people from all over the world coming to the most romantic city. It was cute but a little nauseating at the same time. Anyway, I wanted to share with you how I spent my Valentine’s Day in Paris.

I had my friends Jackie and Lauren over for lunch at my apartment. We made sandwiches (baguettes with jam and cheese, something Emma introduced us to in Spain.. you would think it’s gross but trust me, it’s amazing!) and drank the good tea I bought at Les Mariers Freres. Afterwards we headed to Le Petit Palais where we snuck into the art exhibits. We aren’t sure what exactly Le Petit Palais was used for before it became an art gallery, but the art they feature in the palace is from many time periods. There was one sculpture in particular that I found beautiful. They also had some Monet’s and Courbet’s. The ceiling and the floor were fantastic themselves. I put a picture of Jackie and Lauren in this post so you can see some of what I’m talking about.

From Le Petit Palais we walked to the Louvre! This was my first time going and my first time seeing the famous glass pyramid. I have to admit I was freaking out (in my head and verbally) because that is just such a sign of Paris for me. And secretly, I love the DaVinci Code and it reminded me of that book. We didn’t see any artwork because we went kind of late, but Lauren and I got our student cards that we can use to get into the museum free at any time. This way I can take my time through the exhibits. Apparently, the best way to do it is in one hour increments with snacks in between or you get too overwhelmed.

Saturday night we met up with our friends Lauren and Kavita (so yes, there were three Laurens). Lauren was with her friend from Paris. He studied at American University through the Washington Semester program last spring. Lauren was friends with him during that semester and when he found out she was coming to Paris he was excited to show her around. We met up with some of his friends and they took us to a less touristy part of the city where a lot of students hang out. We ended up at a pub and played pool (poorly, although I did get one ball in!). It was really chill and really fun. Most everyone knew English but we spoke only in French. One of the guys didn’t seem to understand that he needed to slow dooowwwnnn when he spoke to us so it was a little bit difficult to speak with him. But otherwise we had some decent conversations!

Embarrassing story number 2 for you: When we were walking to meet up with the friends of Lauren’s friend from Paris, I somehow ended up on the other side of a narrow road from everyone else. So I crossed the road and saw that we were meeting up with his friends. As I’m walking to meet them I tripped HARD CORE over a bump in the sidewalk. I lost my shoe and everything. A boy and a girl saw it happen and laughed and said “Attention! Attention!” I really thought they were just a couple walking along. Turns out they were two of the people we were hanging out with that night and they spent the first part of the night laughing about me tripping. It was really funny, but yes, really embarrassing.

Besides learning where we should be hanging out on the weekends (not in the touristy area), I observed something about Parisians (at least Parisian students on the weekend) while hanging out with them. They had a destination in mind of where they wanted to take us to but they had no intention of getting there anytime soon. We meandered through the streets and took our time crossing roads. I’m naturally a fast walker so to slow down and really take time to get somewhere was different for me. I liked that they weren’t rushing to get somewhere like we normally do in the States.

Today, a bunch of us met up for lunch after classes and ate at a Crous restaurant. Crous is a group of University restaurants run by the Sorbonne. You use a card that you charge money on and you are charged based on the number of points your meal adds up to. The typical meal is 6 points which is only 2,85 euro!!! I had a pretty large personal goat cheese pizza, a banana and a little thing of chocolate mousse all for 2,85. What a deal!

If you have never been on the Paris metro before then you wouldn't know that some of the trains are kind of old school and you have to open the doors yourself either by pressing a button or pushing up a lever. The lever is the trickiest one and takes a little bit of man power. I've been a little timid to do it because I think I look stupid trying to push this lever up and usually just step back and hope someone else who is getting off at my stop will do it first. But I am proud to say that this weekend I, for the first time, felt really confident when I opened the door myself. Pretty lame, but I had to share. I'm feel myself getting more and more comfortable in the city. Right now I'd say my comfort level is about a 6.8 out of 10 :-)

One last good bit of news: We have Spring Break plans!! Grete, Jackie and I spent a good part of our day Sunday booking plane tickets to Prague. We will be there over Easter weekend, the first weekend of me and Jackie’s break, and then we will head down to Switzerland and see Geneva and Interlaken. I’m beyond excited!

This weekend I will be in Strasbourg.

Je souhaite que tout le monde a eu une bonne saint valentin ! (I hope that everyone had a good Valentine's Day!)

Le Petit Palais

Lauren and Jackie in Le Petit Palais. Check out the mosaic floor and marble walls!

The Louvre! The Louvre! Exactly what I was freaking out about on Saturday...

My Valentine ;-)

This was last night: a group of us met at Lauren's apartment (the Lauren on the very left) to make dinner because her host family is gone for two weeks on vacation.

Les Classes et L'americain laid

It is only the first week but my classes are going well so far. My grammar class is SUPER easy right now. The first two classes we spent conjugating verbs in the present tense… I’ve actually been a little bit frustrated because I came here to challenge myself and become really familiar with the language and so far I have been learning stuff that I learned in middle school. I spent the week debating about whether to try and switch up a level in classes. Apparently that is pretty difficult to do at the Sorbonne and it could potentially really mess up my schedule. Also, I really really like my current professor. She speaks really clearly and lets us practice speaking in class. She’s approachable and young. I went up to her after class yesterday and asked about switching up and she gave me the final exam from last year and told me to look it over. If I thought the exam looked easy we could talk some more. I did think the exam looked easy but after talking to some friends and finding out a little bit more about what we are going to learn this semester, I decided to stick with this class. If nothing else it will be a good refresher for me and an easy A.

Something that is different about this grammar class is that it is taught entirely in French. Since I am in a French class designed for foreigners, it is not guaranteed that everyone speaks another similar language. In my class we have two other Americans, several people from Asia as well as Latin America. The professor is incredible at coming up with different ways to describe a word or verb we might not know. I should be a beast at synonyms in French by the end of the semester!

My Paris Civilization and Culture class is taught at the Accent Center in English by a really young professor who came here in 2000 from Berkley to write his dissertation on French literature and never left. He’s incredibly smart. The class is designed around reading about particular time periods and monuments in class and then visiting them the next class. For example, this coming Tuesday we have to read some of Victor Hugo’s writing on Notre Dame and then on Thursday we are going to visit Notre Dame! I think this is the best way to learn a subject, direct interaction. I am a little surprised at how literature based the class is but I think once we start our visits it will become less so.

I am taking a conference course (a giant lecture at the Sorbonne) on 20th century France and the French but that doesn’t start until two Mondays from now. I will also be taking a phonetics class that starts that week as well.

Everything at my homestay is going alright. It’s still a little bit awkward because I feel so much like a guest in their home. We have had a couple good conversations at dinner though which made me feel better. One night my host mom asked where my dad worked. I tried to explain that he works for Pfizer, a big drug company that produces medicine. She really wasn’t understanding until finally it hit her… “Oh! Fitzer!” She pronounces it the German way. She knew Pfizer well and even knew Merck, Pfizer’s competitor.

I found out my host dad is a philosophy teacher at a philosophy society in Paris. He spends a lot of his days typing up lectures from books he has. He was telling me about a lecture he gave this week that had to do with China and early religion in the country. He’s “an intellectual” as my host mom likes to say and is very up-to-date on news. He loves to talk to me about history but I don’t know a lot of the vocabulary that goes along with history so it is difficult for me to understand sometimes. Jackie told me my French has improved since I got here though so that is exciting!

I had dinner with a friend who lives in the same town as me in Connecticut last night. Her name is Kassie and she is here for the semester as well. She’s studying business at an English speaking university and lives with three other girls in an apartment. I saw her apartment and met her friends. It’s really nice to know someone else in Paris!

Today is Friday the 13th but apparently that isn’t bad luck in France. It also means that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. How cool to be in the city of romance for Valentine’s day! My friends and I just decided we have to avoid the Eiffel Tower so we don’t get depressed by all of the proposals that are bound to happen…

Last night on the train ride home I experienced “an ugly American”. This man gets on the metro and as soon as he steps in says VERY loudly and in a very southern accent, “Does anybody speak English on this train?” He wanted to know how to get to the RER (another metro line). A French couple sitting by the door knew English and helped him out but I was just astonished at how obnoxious he was. He really could have been quieter and more polite to figure out directions.

I’ve motivated myself to run the past couple of days. It is difficult for me to run in the middle of the day… I do much better when I can wake up and just go. But since I have class at 8AM every morning that isn’t an option this semester. It’s fun to run around my neighborhood and check out what I live near. Today I ran down Avenue Foch, the richest street in Paris. I have to keep up this running because unfortunately I am in love with banana and nutella crepes…

Reunited

Grete (one of my roommates from school) was in town this weekend from London! Jackie and I had SUCH a great time being a tourist with her. She’s been to Paris before so we decided to take the opportunity to explore our neighborhoods and go to a few places none of us had been to. We also caught up and laughed the entire weekend.

Saturday, it was rainy/snowy and cold. So after a few hours of putting up with the weather at a huge flea market I found (where we bought boots for 15 euro!), we went to the Musée d’Orsay. The Musée d’Orsay is in an old train station and houses a lot of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism art. I have studied several of the paintings I saw (work by Monet, Manet, Renoir, etc.) so it was really really enjoyable. The building is also incredibly gorgeous.

Sunday, Jackie and Grete met me at my metro stop and we explored the area around it. I live by the Palais de Congres which is a large building I assume they use for government conferences and meetings. The upstairs has a lot of conference rooms and theaters and the bottom two or three floors have a bunch of stores and a few restaurants. From my metro stop we walked to the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Elysees, across the river and all the way to Jackie’s neighborhood by Notre Dame. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Paris… that’s a long walk! Along the way we saw Sarkosy’s palace, the National Assembly and visited the best tea shop (supposedly) in Paris. Of course I bought some incredibly good smelling tea! Jackie lives close to the Pantheon. The Pantheon used to be a church and temple for Saint Genvieve but was turned into a burial grounds for all of the famous people in France. The crypt has people like Marie Curie, Victor Hugo and Rousseau. It was actually really creepy to walk around… some of the rooms with the boxes that had the bodies weren’t entirely full. It’s like they are just waiting for famous French people to die so they can put them down there. But anyway, it was a beautiful building with a large pendulum in the middle and lots of art.

After the Pantheon we walked in the Jardin du Luxembourg (which Grete claimed as her own since her last name is Luxbacher) and got amazing banana-nutella crepes! The large fountains in the garden are dry since it is so cold so Jackie and Grete decided to jump in one and pretend they were swimming (there were other people doing this as well). A French policeman started running towards the fountain, blowing his whistle and shooing everyone out of the fountains. I have never seen Jackie and Grete move so fast! The park will be beautiful in the spring but yesterday it was a little too cold…

Today, everyone found out the results of their placement tests for our grammar class. Most of us are placed in Elementaire, the 2^nd of 5 levels. Some people are bummed but I was told that here the levels are different than the levels in America and I should expect to be one lower than I thought I would be placed. Within each level there are several different classes but I am lucky to have one of my friends, Tara, in my class. That class is held every day from 8am-10am very close to where Jackie lives by the Jardin du Luxembourg. Lucky for me, that means I am going to have to wake up every day around 6am… yay. Our Paris Civilization and Culture class also starts tomorrow and is held at the Accent Center. Two more classes will start in the next few weeks.

I just wanted to point out a few things about Paris in general:

1) It’s EXPENSIVE. I was told it would be expensive however, it is even more expensive than I had prepared myself for. We have been able to find sandwiches for lunch around 4 euro but dinner it is almost impossible to find a decent meal for less than 10 or 12 euro. Drinks are also expensive. Grete was telling us about the cheap pints they get in London. Here beer starts at 5 euro… We are hoping that it is just the first week and we will find the cheap places soon.

2) The employees at the Accent center and my host family have really scared me about safety here. Paris is apparently a really safe city, however, I’ve been told to guard my bag very very carefully and try not to be out too late by myself. There is a large culture difference here with the way women are supposed to respond to men. If you are walking along the street we are told not to even look at the men because it encourages attention. I am used to smiling at people I pass on the street so this is difficult for me. As I’ve gone out more by myself and become accustomed to the metro I am feeling less and less nervous about going out by myself but it was something I was really worried about for the first week. I never felt that nervous about going out in Washington D.C. I think this experience is going to force me to become a really independent person and I’m excited about that!

Grete and Jackie in the fountain at the Jardin du Luxembourg just before being shooed out by the French police.

The outside of the Pantheon... the sky was incredible for pictures.

The pendulum in the center of the Pantheon.

Me on a bridge we crossed on our long walk.

Me, Grete and Jackie in front of the Arc de Triomphe.

The Musee d'Orsay!

I loved this pointlist painting...

Grete and Jackie dancing in the ballroom in the museum.

Anyone recognize this?? It's Renoir!