week three, monday

I can’t believe it’s already been three weeks since I’ve been here. You know the saying time flies when you’re having fun, well in paris time flies no matter what you’re doing because that’s how amazing paris is. Here’s a recap of the past week.

Monday: I don’t actually have class on mondays but I really wanted to change my french level from elementary two to three so I decided to go to another lady’s class and ask her to add me. She didn’t. She didn’t even let me sit in her class for the day. So I got up early, dressed, took the 30 minute metro to school just to be rejected and go back home. I felt like I was doing a school walk of shame.

When dorene got home from class we decided to go to st. michel to buy folders and notebooks for class. We went to gilbert jeune which is basically the french version of borders and staples combined. They have a small basement full of every french school/office/art supply you could ever think of. Dorene just bought one folder (they use a4 paper here, so none of our notebooks or folders from home fit the photocopies our teachers give us) and I bought three folders, three notebooks, a pad paper (which I found out later was graph paper and not even a4 size!) and two pens. Don’t worry, I bought the cheap brands though so I didn’t spend more than 10 euros. I swear school supply shopping in paris beats any kind of shopping in la.

After spending an hour choosing folder colors we headed upstairs to the book part of the store. The first level was reserved especially for comics, bandes dessinées, as the french call it. The second level had all the kid/teen books, including harry potter and twilight. Dorene found this picture book that was super cute. It was about a duck and a rabbit. I think I might end up buying it for her for christmas because I’ve never seen her that excited since we’ve been here, well besides all the times she’s eating fresh baguette.

The third level had actual novels, romans as the french call it. Dorene was determined to buy a french book to read. The french read a lot of books. Everyone reads on the metro. I don’t know how they do it. I can barely find a spot to stand, focus on what stop we just passed and actually “pardon” my way to the door when I need to get off but they can do all that and more while reading a book! Dorene decided that she would need to read her french book at home but still felt the need to buy one. While she was off figuring out what book she could attempt to read, I looked through the used book section for fun and found gossip girl, in french! I was so excited, excited enough to take a picture of it.

Dorene ended up buying le petit nicholas, a famous children's book in france. They actually just made a movie based on the book so it’s everywhere here. She opted to get the kids version which includes more pictures but still a big props to her attempting to read a french book. I also found the perfect postcard at gilbert jeune which I made both of us buy.

Still in the book buying mood we went to another bookstore nearby and looked through their used book collection. I found the lion king and thanks to my new found Disney obsession felt the need to buy it. It was only 50 cents (they call it cents here too, not euro cents or anything weird like that) and totally worth it.  

Since we were near the st. michel fountain we decided to go find this panini place mike told us we had to try. He apparently lived off this panini when he was here last summer and I’m always up for a food adventure. 10 blocks and 93 bbms later we finally found this “red awning” he told us to look for. Excited by the fact that we were finally there I asked for two poulet mexicain (mexican chicken, random I know but I trusted mike) and the guy who took my ordered asked “sandwich?” and I said yes assuming my other choice was salad or something else. So this dude hands us these two not exciting looking sandwiches and then I remember mike told us to ask for oil olive and lettuce. So we ask for it and the guy gets pissed off for no reason but puts oil and lettuce on our sandwiches. It’s at that point that I realize wait, these aren’t paninis! I swore I said paninis. Long story short, after a lot of time of me just standing there not accepting the crap sandwiches when I wanted paninis and the guy saying I said sandwiches he agreed to press our sandwiches a little to make it panini-like.

On the bright side we need to go back now to try the real panini poulet mexicain, assuming the guys that work there don’t deny us service. All in all was the sandwich worth it? Definitely. The adventures me and dorene have even if its just for a panini make everything worth it.  

loire valley day two

If I ever run a hotel I’m going to include breakfast with the price of the room because free breakfasts rock! Who knew breakfast could be so amazing at a holiday inn?! I’m telling you, everything in france is better. I had baguette with butter and bonne maman raspberry jam from the cutest little jars. I really wanted to steal one but there was this scary old waiter guy who watched over everything you did and I didn’t feel like being yelled at so early in the morning. I also had mini chocolate croissants, a hard boiled egg and some salami but nothing truly says good morning like a great tartine (what the french call baguette with butter and/or jam.)

After breakfast we all got back on the bus and headed to leonardo da vinci’s french home.

 I didn’t even know that he had lived in france but then again I pretty much don’t know anything about history which makes me the tour guide's best friend, because I'm the only one that actually listens.  Anyway, we went through da vinci’s house pretty quickly because it was relatively small compared to the castle we saw the day before. We saw the room da vinci died in as well as the underground pathway from his house to the nearby castle. Da vinci was good friends with one of the french kings, so the king wanted da vinci to have a private way to reach his castle which was one mile away.

Da vinci’s house had different quotes of his in every room. Near the little chapel in his house I found my favorite quote, as well as the only quote I fully understood since they were all in french. The quote was “l’amour triomphe de tout”, in english, love conquers all. Who knew da vinci was such a romantic!

The walk through his house ended in the basement where they had descriptions and little models of all the brillant ideas da vinci had. I had started to take pictures of every idea and model in order to show my dad later, but then I realized da vinci had more ideas that I even had the patience to take pictures of. Don’t worry, I still took pictures of the cool ones.

Once we were done inside, we realized it was pose time at da vinci's house. I wonder what his thoughts would be about our parisian pose. 

After the walk through his house, the group decided it was time for a photo shoot in the garden, and by the group I mean our photo director dorene. The garden was apparently full of models of da vinci’s inventions that you could play with but we didn’t have enough time to discover them all because we were off to chateau de chenonceau. 

When I told my dad that I was going to the loire valley he hope that I would see this castle and I did! It was beautiful. At first when we got there and were walking down the forest like path I kept thinking, where is this water everyone talked about? I had heard that this castle was partly famous for being built on top of water but I wasn’t seeing any water!

It wasn’t until we actually got near the castle, at a diagonal view, that I saw the water and fell in love. 

This castle is not only built on top of a river but it is surrounded by two beautiful gardens.

We didn’t have a tour guide for this trip but luckily somehow gabriel became a personal tour guide for our little group. He first took us to the chapel where he showed up this rectangle in the floor. He said that they used this hole to lower caskets once the funeral was over onto boats which were waiting in the river below. I never thought I would find a funeral fact so interesting. See, even funeral facts are better in france.

Then gabriel lead us through another few rooms, explaining some things I didn’t quite understand/thought he was making things up as we went along but of course I still enjoyed it. Each room had a really nice floral bouquet of sorts. I might have ended up taking more pictures of the flowers inside then the actual rooms so it only makes sense that gabriel asked me why I liked flowers so much.

Towards the end of our “tour”, Gabriel took me, dorene and melinda (at that point we were the only ones left) down to the basement. The basement served as the castles kitchen area. Even though I know it had been renovated, it was still the prettiest concrete kitchen I had ever seen. I adored the arches in the ceiling and kept thinking about how I want my dream kitchen or maybe even house to be inspired by a french castle. Since I always plan ahead I felt the need to take a picture of the ceiling to show my future architect. I had forgotten to turn my flash off and somehow out of no where a lady over some sort of intercom asks me (in french) to not take pictures with flash but there was no one around! I am convinced that either they have a surveillance camera and some one sitting there just waiting to tell people their flash is on by mistake or that there is some sort of censor that just knows. Regardless I was shocked and a bit embarrassed, maybe my future kitchen ceiling wasn’t worth all of that.

After going through the castle which was bigger than da vinci’s house but smaller than the chambord castle, we ate lunch and then walked around some bit more until we had to leave for paris. On our way back I was thinking about how nice it will be to get back to our apartment. As excited as I was to see all these beautiful castles and places, I was more excited realizing that I officially thought of my apartment in paris as home.

All in an all, c’etait un bon weekend! (It was a good weekend!)

my classes in a nutshell

French language: This is my main french class. We met three days a week, including fridays even though no one has class on fridays, for a total of nine hours a week.  It’s basically an ESL class but I guess since we’re learning french it’s a FSL class? There are a bunch of people from my program as well as other americans from other programs. The other half of the class consists of older people, almost all asian, who are trying to learn french.  They have the thickest asian accents though, and I honestly have no idea how my the teacher understands what they’re saying.  Props to my teacher, well kinda because I don’t really like him.  So my teacher’s name is pierre. He is middle aged man who is way too tan for his own good. He has a huge gap between his front two teeth and wears the same outfit everyday.  The outfit consists of these beige button down jeans that are officially yellow because he wears them so much, this brown belt that is literally going to tear any second, again because he wears it everyday, a cream color button down and these brown leather shoes that look like they came from colonial williamsburg.

I’ve asked him to switch me down to elementary level two about three times now and he’s denied my request every time. He thinks I know enough to be in his class even though I don’t even remember present tense at the moment. I think the only reason why he doesn’t want to let me go is because everyone else in my class is afraid to participate and I’m the only one who actually says something, even though it’s always horribly wrong. At one point in the class he asked us if we had any questions for him and I had found out that he liked watching american classics so I asked him what his favorite classic was. His response, breakfast at tiffanys, he said “j’aime breakfast at tiffanys” in fact. I’ll leave it at that, but lets just hope I find a way to switch out his class.

Fashion in france: I cannot even begin to describe how fabulous my teacher for this class thinks he is. Try to imagine the most stereotypical, straight out of a movie french gay guy who studies fashion, times that by ten and then you have an idea of what my teacher is like. It is so surreal that I asked dorene if he was for real at least four times during class.  The actual class part wasn’t as fun as he was but his accent made all the historical crap he was telling us a little interesting. He can’t pronounce the sound “th” so instead he says “z.” So when he introduced himself in class he told us that he was “zee” best. All I remember from class so far is why girls are associated with the color pink and boys with the color blue (orphanages wrapped babies in red or blue blankets accordingly, and the red color would wash away overtime resulting in pink blankets), why the wedding dress is white (some royal girl was being forced to marry someone she didn’t want to marry and white was designated as the color of mourning so she decided to make a statement and wear white to her wedding instead of maroon) and prostitutes used to wore bright red (explains the song “roxanne” now, kinda.) Speaking of the song roxanne, my name wasn’t on the roll so he asked me what my name was and when I told him he paused for a moment and said, isn’t that the name of a song? I looked over at dorene and saw her trying so hard not to laugh out loud.  The french know the police repertoire well.  I’m looking forward to what else is he going to say and/or teach us.  I’ll try to sneak of picture of him and pierre soon.

Contemporary Art:  This class is taught in english, just like fashion in france, but it’s taught by two guys instead of one. My teachers are like jay and silent bob, one talks the entire time, the other one basically just sits there and mumbles something to the talker. They’re both relatively young and not bad looking. The talker has a french/british accent when he speaks english so its fun to listen to. My class is four hours long but I have dorene, melinda and brittany there to keep me company. Also, we only really stay in the classroom for about 2 hours, the last two hours we actually go visit different museums in paris. Sounds really cool I know. We have to write a paper for that class and give a presentation about a certain topic. This week we’re going to the musee d’orsay so our topic is impressionism and orsay. I told dorene that we should go first so we can set the bar high (yeah right) and get one our assignments out of the way.  We’ll see how it goes.

My name wasn’t on the roll for this class either so I had to spell my name, first and last for my teacher. When I finished spelling my last name my teacher said “wow, that would be so many points in scrabble, you have the letters W and Z.” Then I asked him if Z was really ten points in french scrabble because you can get the letter z from conjugating almost any verb in the formal second person tense in french. Apparently it still is ten points. I later asked how many points the letter k was (because dorene had mentioned something about there being no k’s in french) and he said it was ten points as well. Then I asked him what words in french have the letter k in them, he said “ski, kiwi and whiskey.”  They all sound like american words to me but okay.

Gastronomy: This class is by far my favorite class even though it’s taught in french and I don’t understand half the things my teacher says. This class is all about the history and culture of food in france. I have a feeling I’m going to learn a lot in this class, if only I understood everything she said! In my first class I learned all about french dinner parties, which are kind of a big deal here.  The big french nono’s I learned about so far are you never drink white and red wine from the same glass, you never eat meat before fish and you never go over to dinner at someone’s house without bringing something with you. I’m excited to learn about what the different parts of france are famous for in the food world and hopefully tasting a few new things. I couldn’t have asked for a better class to take in paris, well maybe an actually cooking class would be better but I’ll take what I can get.

Overall, I think all my classes will definitely contribute to future blog posts. What more could I ask for?

PS when I said my classes in a nut shell I obviously meant in more of a walnut versus pistachio shell. 

loire valley day one

This past weekend my program had a little weekend excursion to the loire valley. The loire valley is a little town west of paris, two and a half hours away by bus. It's famous for its castles and "sprawling countryside" or something like that. We had to meet everyone at the bus at 7:30am, which was even harder than it sounds but luckily we all managed to fall asleep on the ride there.

The first castle we went to was called the chateau de chambord. We had a tour guide take us around the castle telling us some fun and some not so fun facts. 

(A normal picture for all those who hate on the parisian pose. )

One fun fact I remember was her showing us the first "microwave." She said that the kitchen was far from the kings's bedroom, which was where he ate his meals, so they had this room next to his bedroom where they could reheat plates of food. They would build a fire in this cabinet looking thing and put the plates on top of the holes so that the food would warm up from the heat of the fire. 

The castle is famous for its double spiraling staircase which was designed by leonardo da vinci. Horrible picture I know, forgive me. 

Here's what the staircase looks like looking up from the middle of the first floor.

We saw the queen and king's rooms. The furniture and wallpaper in the queen's room was changed every spring and winter. In the winter time the walls were covered in velvet!! Sounds like pure hell to me. It was freezing inside the all stone castle so me and my california weak skin had to bundle up. Apparently the king couldn't handle the cold either because we found out that the king would actually go into this little closet like looking room to sleep because it was warmer. I realize that was probably a run on sentence but I'm writing this blog post while sleep deprived on the bus ride back. Go me and being efficient.

After we went through the castle we had lunch and then went for a little boat ride on the moat/river next to the castle. Even though we had the worlds slowest motorized boat it was a lot of fun and really pretty. I'm glad we were lazy and opted out of taking a row boat because knowing me I would have given up halfway through.

I just looked over at dorene on the bus and she's sleeping with her mouth wide open. She must eat 20 spiders while asleep over her lifetime as opposed to the average 8 everyone else eats. Thank you snapple top facts.

Anyway back to the chambord castle visit. Since we took awhile eating lunch and going around in our "speed"boat we basically had to meet back at the bus when we got off the boat but me and dorene had bigger plans. We had decided that we needed to buy these super cute mini chambord liquor bottles we had seen back at the castle's giftshop. (Don't worry I had already bought my 5 euro keychain from there the first time we went through.) We figured our friends could stall the bus from leaving without us and the little bottles were worth even the slight chance that they couldn't. Long story short, mission accomplished, even though I'm sure we looked like fools attempting to run towards the bus sweating and running out of breath.

On our agenda for after the chateau visit we had a "surpris' (the french don't write the e) and we all had guessed/heard that it would be wine tasting and it was! We visited this small wine factory in what seemed like the middle of no where on a really narrow street. We didn't actually see the vineyard but saw the caves where they let the grapes ferment over time.

These caves are holes leftover from all the places where they carved out stone/rock to build all the nearby castles. They said that the temperature in these caves never change despite the weather outside which is perfect for making wine. I would hate to be grape juice, it was really cold in there.

We saw also where they labeled the wines and then we had a fun wine tasting party! We started off with a rose wine, then a white then we had two reds. The rose and the second red were the best. After that we tried the champagne (even though technically it's not called champagne since the grapes weren't grown in champagne so I think its just called brut?) we tried our last wine of the day, a white dessert wine which was my favorite because I love sweet wines.

In between all the sampling we also had some goat cheese and pork pate with baguette. Gabriel said that loire valley is famous for their goat cheese and pates. He said that there are over 360 different kinds of goat cheese made there. Of course the cheese tasted amazing, I really liked it even though I'm not usually the biggest goat cheese fan. I even made goat cheese pate sandwiches which bothered dorene but I'm always up for trying weird combinations.

Four glasses of wine later I decided to buy three bottles of wine to take back home with me. How I'm actually going to manage that I have no clue but it seemed like a great idea at the time. I also got a bottle of the rose for me and dorene to enjoy at some point while we're here. It was very good and cheap since we were buying it from the factory so I thought why not! A big good luck to dorene who has to carry my four bottles back to our apartment using the metro. I would carry them but I have the world's weakest arm muscles. Yes I know, I'm the girl in our relationship.

"Meet me at the hotel, motel, holiday inn" because that's where we stayed the night! We didn't do anything exciting at night time because we were super tired from waking up early, being on our feet all day and drinking wine. I must say, it's a hard life. We all just walked a few blocks, found a hippopotamus (a chain restaurant in france) and had dinner. I got the grossest creme brulee for dessert. Who knew the french could make a bad brulee. 

We went to bed around 11:30 after watching some french fear factor. Some of the shows these people choose to translate into french is beyond me. 

sorry my blog hates me...

...and likes changing its font and font size in a way so that I can't change it back to normal. so a big sorry for my last post looking so random and weird. i don't think I'm cut out for this blogging world. 

the "first" day of school

I pretty much don't get any credit at ucla for the classes I’m taking while in paris. I already took farsi for two years  so I have more than enough language credit. And I've taken all my lower div classes so I'm basically doing this whole study abroad thing for the experience. The only thing I can potentially attempt to get credit for is contemporary art so I wanted to make sure that I was enrolled in that class no matter what.

Of course when I got my schedule last week at orientation the first thing I noticed was the fact that I wasn’t enrolled in the one class I needed! I tried to remain calm and politely asked/demanded to decrease my french class hours (who am I kidding, I’m not going to learn french in three months) so that I would have time to take the art class. The woman program director (who happens to be gabriel’s wife, remember he’s the guy who cracks me up for no reason?) said that I would have to wait until after the oral placement exam to make sure I’m in the right level.

After the exam, I reminded her again that I needed the art class instead of the extra french class and she said that she would try her best. The next day I happened to be in her office and figured I would ask her for my new schedule only to find out that she had forgotten to change it for me! She said she would give it to me the next day, friday, the day we went to versailles.

On the way to versailles I see this other lady who works for our program handing people their new schedules. Surprise surprise, she didn’t have mine. I asked her to have the office email me my schedule so that I would know where to go on monday. She said that she would, but didn’t. Come monday, I was schedule-less. Having no idea what to I figured I would just follow my old schedule assuming that not much had changed.  I’m done assuming things while in france.

So I get to class and sit through the introduction waiting for the teacher to take role. Apparently learning about our horoscopes in french can’t wait a minute so she decided to skip role and jump straight to our first activity. Luckily I started to doubt what I was doing there so I went and asked her to see if my name was on her list, it wasn’t. She made me wait an hour, until after our horoscope activity, before I could go to the administrative office.

By the time I was finally allowed to leave I go to the office only to find another 20 international students sitting there just waiting. Even though there was only an hour of class left by the time the secretary printed out my new schedule I figured I should still go so that I don’t get marked absent. I asked her where my class was so she looked at my schedule, told me the room number and then paused. Turns out I don’t have class on mondays.

Of course I had told cell phone-less dorene that I would wait until she got out of class at one so that we could go home together. I figured I would try to be productive during the three hour wait and catch up on some blog entries. I found a sign for a library and just headed in assuming I was allowed into the university’s library, being a student at the school and all. Again, never assume while in france. I got the worst stares from the two librarians there, one who was beyond cross eyed so his stare really freaked me out. They didn’t speak any English but I was basically told that I was not allowed into that particular library.  By then I had decided to give up and found a spot on the bench in my school’s cute little courtyard and started writing about my trip to versailles. I guess waking up early for no class was worth it in a way, not.

After wandering around school for a bit, me and dorene decided it was time to do something we couldn't do in los angeles. I was going through a healthy period that day so I asked dorene if we could go running around the park below the eiffel tower. Apparently it is the most anti-bizarre parisian exercise and it was still really nice out so  I thought I would make the most of it. Since we were running low on metro passes we decided to figure out how to walk to the eiffel tower from our apartment. 

While I was tying my shoelaces dorene decided that she wasn't going to run with me because she was tired. She also decided that having a bowl of ice cream before our little adventure would wake her up a bit. I then decided to document the fact that she was wearing exercise clothes while eating ice cream. She then decided to take awkward pictures of me attempting to stretch.

After our 25 minute walk to the park I was already a little tired, but not tired enough to not enjoy the beauty that is the eiffel tower. I don't know why me and dorene are obsessed with the eiffel tower. I think its because it makes us realize that we're actually in paris. Once we got over the fact that the eiffel tower was in front of us, dorene found a bench to scrapbook on while I went for a run. 

I ran around the park twice, with a five minute break in between. And by run I mean a slow jog but still I didn't stop! At first I found a runner and just followed him to figure out what the exact running path was, but by the second time around I was a pro. The top part of the path is the sidewalk right across from the tower, where all the tour buses and tourists are. I had to weave in and out of tourists! How parisian and cool am I?! 

It was so much fun. I can't believe I just used the word fun to describe a run but I mean seriously it was perfect. I hope the weather stays the same so that I can go again next week. Maybe next time dorene will actually join me, maybe.