Hi.
First of all, sorry for the month long hiatus. I've been busy with class, papers, and living in France.
Secondly, it has been brought to my attention (by my parents) that there are some family members wanting to subscribe to my blog so they don't need to keep checking this page. If you have a google account, it should be as easy as clicking "follow this blog" and adjusting the settings so you get e-mails. Otherwise, if you want me to just e-mail you when I update, let me know and I'll put together an e-mail list. Now for the updates:
Paris is incredible. Aside from the fact that it doesn't smell that great (public restrooms are few and far between plus you have to pay), I have no complaints.
I feel like I've become a metro master (though evertime I ride with my friend Paul I realize I'm still a novice).
I've been trying to do little tours of the arrondissements when I get the chance. So far I've been to the 11th, 5th, 4th, 19th for thorough explorations, and shorter visits to the 12th, 13th, 6th, and 10th.
A couple weekends ago one of our professors lead an expedition to Fontainebleu, a small town and chateau outside of Paris. It's very beautiful, and there are lots of pictures on facebook under "Paris, je t'aime" (album title).
We're done with classes now so I was on vacation last week. I went with 5 friends (Paul, Yuan, Anna, Jennifer, and Lily) to the south west of France where we stayed in a gite in the small town of Guéthary. We did a few day trips and had 3 days of beach. We went to Biaritz (a small village to the north), San Sebastìan (in Spain), and hiked a bit in the Pyrénées, about 2.5 hours East of where we were. All the pictures are on facebook and should be open for all to see.
It was a fabulous time and I highly recommend taking a vacation there if you are interested in going to France.
I also had so much duck! It was absolutely delicious. I regret every time I never ate it before.
Today was my first day of work. As was to be expected, they had no idea what to give me at first. So I wrote this blog entry in my journal =D
The department is huge! And it seems easy to get lost in everything, especially the elevator system. Some elevators skip the bottom floors, then others stop at all, etc.
Also the rez de chaussé is not the main floor, the 3rd floor is. Then if you want to get to the lower floors there's a specific elevator for that.
I have my own desk, computer, and phone, but I share an office with potentially 3 other people (right now it's just two).
Everything is pretty spiffy.
I'm surprised at how casual the workplace is, I've seen multiple people wearing jeans, including my director.
Still yet to discover what exactly I'll be doing, but the project is on the redevelopment of certain economic areas in l'île-de-france. I'm going to be working from an environmental perspective, which should be right up my ally.
My supervisor and some other coworkers invited me to have a picnic with them for lunch so we ate our sandwiches in the only park at La Défense. It was cool because David (my supervisor) explained the style of urbanism that la défense was designed with and why it doesn't work. Yay learning!
Okay, this blog is getting long. I'll try to be better about updating!!!!
Monday, October 3, 2011
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Politics and Gardens
This week went even faster than the last. Classes continue to be very interesting. I'm currently procrastinating two homework assignments (the only I've had so far) by writing this blog. Yay habits that never go away!
Last Sunday I went with a friend, Paul, to see an old Italian movie about the German occupation of Italy during world war II. Foreign films are just as vague and open ended in France as they are in America. It was still a fun experience though. We walked back by the Pathéon, which is a mausoleum where many important people are buried. It's a very beautiful area.
This week we went to the assemblée nationale, which is located in the old palais bourbon. The building itself is absolutely stunning, but it was also a really interesting way to learn about french politics. The history of the french government is one that is fairly complicated. Unlike the American revolution which resulted in one republic that has essentially stayed the same for 200 years, the french have had 5 different republics and intermittent emperors/ kings. Many were named Napoléon or Louis.
Anyway, that was a very fun trip. The other place we went to this week was the Shoa memorial. Shoa is the french/ hebrew term for the holocaust, being derived from the hebrew word for catastrophe, rather than the greek word for sacrifice. There's all sorts of political arguments for one term or the other. While the museum itself was very well put together, it was a very tough visit as you can imagine. Whole sections of the city were emptied when the Nazis demanded the deportation of French jews. They have memorials to all those who were deported, and especially those who were deported as children. Only 200 of the children deported returned alive.
I now seem to have contracted a cold, so I missed class yesterday (due to the fact that I couldn't sleep, I'm not complaining I'm simply justifying my truism) but I met up with friends later to go over our homework assignments and plan our papers. French style of argumentation is much different than American, so this is going to be an interesting project in more ways than one. We got together as a group to make couscous later (thank you very much to the barbary fig for the inspiration of the included vegetables and spices) and then we went out to the bar where I take my coffee every morning.
I like that I already am starting to have a routine. The woman at Wake Up Paris (the bar I go to everymorning for espresso... which I chose largely due to the fact that it's name is in English... despite the fact that it is a Brazillian bar) already recognizes me and knows exactly what I'm going to ask for. I leave the dorm at the same time every morning, am the first to arrive at class so I can read the newspaper, and eat basically the same thing for breakfast and lunch. Quotidienne.
Today I've been mostly doing homework, but I also went for a walk around a couple parks in Paris and through the Jardin de Luxembourg.
Alright now you get to know my big embarassing slip up of the week:
For our only homework assignment in my afternoon class, our teacher asks us to read the newspaper everyday, and share a few articles with the class. I chose to share about how there has been a notable decrease in the number of police officers in France over the past few years. The author blamed Sarkozy for this. The term for this is "baisser," used in a sentence, "Sarkozy a baissé la quantité de policiers en France" Instead, however, I said "baisé." Go ahead and type that into google translate. Yeah. Pretty bad.
No pictures, I keep forgetting my camera >_< but hopefully some next week!
Last Sunday I went with a friend, Paul, to see an old Italian movie about the German occupation of Italy during world war II. Foreign films are just as vague and open ended in France as they are in America. It was still a fun experience though. We walked back by the Pathéon, which is a mausoleum where many important people are buried. It's a very beautiful area.
This week we went to the assemblée nationale, which is located in the old palais bourbon. The building itself is absolutely stunning, but it was also a really interesting way to learn about french politics. The history of the french government is one that is fairly complicated. Unlike the American revolution which resulted in one republic that has essentially stayed the same for 200 years, the french have had 5 different republics and intermittent emperors/ kings. Many were named Napoléon or Louis.
Anyway, that was a very fun trip. The other place we went to this week was the Shoa memorial. Shoa is the french/ hebrew term for the holocaust, being derived from the hebrew word for catastrophe, rather than the greek word for sacrifice. There's all sorts of political arguments for one term or the other. While the museum itself was very well put together, it was a very tough visit as you can imagine. Whole sections of the city were emptied when the Nazis demanded the deportation of French jews. They have memorials to all those who were deported, and especially those who were deported as children. Only 200 of the children deported returned alive.
I now seem to have contracted a cold, so I missed class yesterday (due to the fact that I couldn't sleep, I'm not complaining I'm simply justifying my truism) but I met up with friends later to go over our homework assignments and plan our papers. French style of argumentation is much different than American, so this is going to be an interesting project in more ways than one. We got together as a group to make couscous later (thank you very much to the barbary fig for the inspiration of the included vegetables and spices) and then we went out to the bar where I take my coffee every morning.
I like that I already am starting to have a routine. The woman at Wake Up Paris (the bar I go to everymorning for espresso... which I chose largely due to the fact that it's name is in English... despite the fact that it is a Brazillian bar) already recognizes me and knows exactly what I'm going to ask for. I leave the dorm at the same time every morning, am the first to arrive at class so I can read the newspaper, and eat basically the same thing for breakfast and lunch. Quotidienne.
Today I've been mostly doing homework, but I also went for a walk around a couple parks in Paris and through the Jardin de Luxembourg.
Alright now you get to know my big embarassing slip up of the week:
For our only homework assignment in my afternoon class, our teacher asks us to read the newspaper everyday, and share a few articles with the class. I chose to share about how there has been a notable decrease in the number of police officers in France over the past few years. The author blamed Sarkozy for this. The term for this is "baisser," used in a sentence, "Sarkozy a baissé la quantité de policiers en France" Instead, however, I said "baisé." Go ahead and type that into google translate. Yeah. Pretty bad.
No pictures, I keep forgetting my camera >_< but hopefully some next week!
Sunday, August 28, 2011
One week flown by
Hello again! If any of you were disapointed by the lack of blogs this past week, allow me to explain: I am only going to update this blog once a week. This is to limit my extensive use of English, keep blogs interesting, and make the blog easier to maintain.
This week has been amazing. I'm rapidly getting to know the city around me in small doses and feeling like I can truly integrate myself into this culture. I live on the Île Saint-Louis, which is a small island in the Seine south of Île-de-la-cité, where Notre Dame is located. Paris is divided into 20 "arrondissements"or basically legal neighborhoods. But then there are smaller unofficial neighborhoods within that. Generally the nicer richer areas are in the center of the city, and you move your way out it becomes more immigrants, more students, etc.
Since we started at IFE this week, I've been spending time with a few other girls (and one boy) exploring the neighborhoods together. The metro is really the first thing to master. Not all the lines intersect, of course, so figuring out where to hop on and off has been interesting. It's not always convenient. It's for this reason that I walk 20 minutes to school every day. There is a metro stop really close to me, but it doesn't connect with the metro stop by IFE. I could walk to a further metro stop to go to IFE, but that would be a 10 minute walk, then a 5 minute metro ride to a stop that takes me 15 minutes to walk to, followed by a 5 minute walk that I would have had to do anyway. All in all I'm going to choose exercise over the metro fair.
Wine is ridiculously cheap here (the 2 Euro bottles are even good!) so we've been having a lot of picnics in parks and along the Seine. I'm not always going to have to cook my own meals, but the kitchen in my dorm is closed right now. We've also been going to cafes, buying fruit, making gourmet pasta (because when you're in the country of gourmets, the ingredients are not nearly as expensive). Most of our explorations, now that I think about it, have something to do with food or drink. I'm going to have to start walking more.
Classes are interesting, we're learning about contemporary French History (so the french revolution til now) and in the afternoons we have work on our speaking ability. My class has 3 oral presentations that we'll have to do, all having to do with modern french events. We also do the occasional visit to places in Paris. Last Thursday we went to the BNF- Bibliotèque National de la France (French national library). It it a very large building that has millions of books, and a very complicated system for retrieving them (all mechanical). I'm probably going to live there when it comes time to write my thesis paper on my internship.
This week we'll be going to the National assembly and the Shoah memorial.
See you next week!
This week has been amazing. I'm rapidly getting to know the city around me in small doses and feeling like I can truly integrate myself into this culture. I live on the Île Saint-Louis, which is a small island in the Seine south of Île-de-la-cité, where Notre Dame is located. Paris is divided into 20 "arrondissements"or basically legal neighborhoods. But then there are smaller unofficial neighborhoods within that. Generally the nicer richer areas are in the center of the city, and you move your way out it becomes more immigrants, more students, etc.
Since we started at IFE this week, I've been spending time with a few other girls (and one boy) exploring the neighborhoods together. The metro is really the first thing to master. Not all the lines intersect, of course, so figuring out where to hop on and off has been interesting. It's not always convenient. It's for this reason that I walk 20 minutes to school every day. There is a metro stop really close to me, but it doesn't connect with the metro stop by IFE. I could walk to a further metro stop to go to IFE, but that would be a 10 minute walk, then a 5 minute metro ride to a stop that takes me 15 minutes to walk to, followed by a 5 minute walk that I would have had to do anyway. All in all I'm going to choose exercise over the metro fair.
Wine is ridiculously cheap here (the 2 Euro bottles are even good!) so we've been having a lot of picnics in parks and along the Seine. I'm not always going to have to cook my own meals, but the kitchen in my dorm is closed right now. We've also been going to cafes, buying fruit, making gourmet pasta (because when you're in the country of gourmets, the ingredients are not nearly as expensive). Most of our explorations, now that I think about it, have something to do with food or drink. I'm going to have to start walking more.
Classes are interesting, we're learning about contemporary French History (so the french revolution til now) and in the afternoons we have work on our speaking ability. My class has 3 oral presentations that we'll have to do, all having to do with modern french events. We also do the occasional visit to places in Paris. Last Thursday we went to the BNF- Bibliotèque National de la France (French national library). It it a very large building that has millions of books, and a very complicated system for retrieving them (all mechanical). I'm probably going to live there when it comes time to write my thesis paper on my internship.
This week we'll be going to the National assembly and the Shoah memorial.
See you next week!
Saturday, August 20, 2011
L'arc de triomphe... et moi?
WELCOME to blog number 4 on the Meg O'Halloran blog list. The others have included my environmental blog (which I hope to continue to add to), the Macalester EcoHouse blog (which contained all of my environmental blog's entries), and "Look what you're missing Simon!" a blog designed to make a certain Simon sorry that he'd ever abandoned his friends in Minnesota.
This blog is to narrate my time abroad in Paris, France (as opposed to the equally appealing Paris, Texas). The title of this blog "Parisienne ou vie quotidienne" is translated as "Parisian, or everyday life." The hope is that in my time here, this blog will not merely be about my life attempting to be Parisian, but about my transition into truly living here, and no longer visiting.
I'm here! I've been fed (thanks to the lovely boulangerie down the street), have successfully obtained wifi for my room, bought a cellphone, and taken a tour around my neighborhood. People are really nice, and they don't automatically assume I'm American! I think that's a good thing.
When I finally managed to figure out how I was going to get to Paris (silly me didn't read the nice instructions IFE gave us) I still didn't really believe I was in Paris. Sure, everything was in French, all the women looked like super models, and everyone wanted my Euros, but the country side didn't look that different. And everyone was driving on the RIGHT side of the road, not the left. Is that only in England? I'm on this big bus, totally at a loss to where I'm supposed to be getting off, only that when I do I HAVE to find a taxi. We stop once. Not my stop. The nice french man looked me in the eyes and said "Place d'étoile, le 15me arrondissement." (Place of the stars, fifteenth district). This was not that. The people got off. The taxis drove away. Was I even in the right city? The bus pulled away again. The architecture was shabby, old, cheap. The streets were dirty. Where was this Parisian Paradise I'd been promised?
And then we were driving around l'arc de triomphe. Suddenly it struck me, "Oh God I'm here!" And I finally felt excited to be embarking on this adventure.
I guess what they don't tell you in Study Abroad orientation is that you haven't really left until you're off the plane. Until then, you're still in the United States, or some sort of international buffer zone. But when I saw l'arc, I knew that I was here. The carved stone statues along the side towered over even the tall bus, gazing off at nothing, at everything. There were gates around, and a whirlwind of vehicles desperately trying to navigate around each other, in a traffic circle where lanes don't seem to exist.
The taxi was waiting for me right off the bus. It took me straight to my new home, a foyer in the 4th district, five minutes from Notre Dame. I became scared again, since the doors to the building where large and wooden, and the place didn't seem very inviting. But when I pressed the buzzer and opened the doors, I found a beautiful garden waiting for me.
I live on the 5th floor (they say it's the 4th, but they also say the 2nd floor is the 1st, so I know what they're up to). There's no elevator, so it's a great source of exercise (so I'm telling my aching thigh muscles and my puffing- out of breath lungs). The single is slightly smaller than my room in the EcoHouse. I have a sink in my room, a bookshelf, plenty of closet space, and a small window looking over a playground. They also don't tell you how adorable it is when little children are screaming in French.
After napping for 5 hours after I arrived yesterday, and sleeping for 13 hours last night, I hope that I'm sufficiently recovered from my travels and that jet lag will not plague me.
I've had plenty of adventures so far: Using the shower (the water would not get hot), finding a pharmacie where I could buy soap and shampoo, and finding a boulangerie where I could get some food. The big adventure was today, when I endeavored to buy myself a cellphone. This took me off the safe ile Saint-Louis and over into the 1st district. I found my first French Mall. It was huge... and pretty much the nice version of a target. And by nice, I mean NICE. Imagine if Nordstroms decided it needed a hardware store, kitchen department, electronics store, and toy store.
Tomorrow will involve me searching for more necessities, and hopefully braving the metro. More soon!
Pictures soon!
This blog is to narrate my time abroad in Paris, France (as opposed to the equally appealing Paris, Texas). The title of this blog "Parisienne ou vie quotidienne" is translated as "Parisian, or everyday life." The hope is that in my time here, this blog will not merely be about my life attempting to be Parisian, but about my transition into truly living here, and no longer visiting.
I'm here! I've been fed (thanks to the lovely boulangerie down the street), have successfully obtained wifi for my room, bought a cellphone, and taken a tour around my neighborhood. People are really nice, and they don't automatically assume I'm American! I think that's a good thing.
When I finally managed to figure out how I was going to get to Paris (silly me didn't read the nice instructions IFE gave us) I still didn't really believe I was in Paris. Sure, everything was in French, all the women looked like super models, and everyone wanted my Euros, but the country side didn't look that different. And everyone was driving on the RIGHT side of the road, not the left. Is that only in England? I'm on this big bus, totally at a loss to where I'm supposed to be getting off, only that when I do I HAVE to find a taxi. We stop once. Not my stop. The nice french man looked me in the eyes and said "Place d'étoile, le 15me arrondissement." (Place of the stars, fifteenth district). This was not that. The people got off. The taxis drove away. Was I even in the right city? The bus pulled away again. The architecture was shabby, old, cheap. The streets were dirty. Where was this Parisian Paradise I'd been promised?
And then we were driving around l'arc de triomphe. Suddenly it struck me, "Oh God I'm here!" And I finally felt excited to be embarking on this adventure.
I guess what they don't tell you in Study Abroad orientation is that you haven't really left until you're off the plane. Until then, you're still in the United States, or some sort of international buffer zone. But when I saw l'arc, I knew that I was here. The carved stone statues along the side towered over even the tall bus, gazing off at nothing, at everything. There were gates around, and a whirlwind of vehicles desperately trying to navigate around each other, in a traffic circle where lanes don't seem to exist.
The taxi was waiting for me right off the bus. It took me straight to my new home, a foyer in the 4th district, five minutes from Notre Dame. I became scared again, since the doors to the building where large and wooden, and the place didn't seem very inviting. But when I pressed the buzzer and opened the doors, I found a beautiful garden waiting for me.
I live on the 5th floor (they say it's the 4th, but they also say the 2nd floor is the 1st, so I know what they're up to). There's no elevator, so it's a great source of exercise (so I'm telling my aching thigh muscles and my puffing- out of breath lungs). The single is slightly smaller than my room in the EcoHouse. I have a sink in my room, a bookshelf, plenty of closet space, and a small window looking over a playground. They also don't tell you how adorable it is when little children are screaming in French.
After napping for 5 hours after I arrived yesterday, and sleeping for 13 hours last night, I hope that I'm sufficiently recovered from my travels and that jet lag will not plague me.
I've had plenty of adventures so far: Using the shower (the water would not get hot), finding a pharmacie where I could buy soap and shampoo, and finding a boulangerie where I could get some food. The big adventure was today, when I endeavored to buy myself a cellphone. This took me off the safe ile Saint-Louis and over into the 1st district. I found my first French Mall. It was huge... and pretty much the nice version of a target. And by nice, I mean NICE. Imagine if Nordstroms decided it needed a hardware store, kitchen department, electronics store, and toy store.
Tomorrow will involve me searching for more necessities, and hopefully braving the metro. More soon!
Pictures soon!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)