From the TOP!

La Tour Eiffel

Versailles

Last Weekend in Paris

It's true. Today is our last day in Paris. We've been here for four weeks now. Tomorrow morning we are leaving on a week long bus trip in the north of France and in the West. We will be visiting Normandy, Mont-St-Michel, and a LOT of castles. The week after that we will be flying to Nice and enjoying the beach! It is sad that we have to leave Paris now, but I can definitely say that I have done everything and seen everything that I wanted too! I can't even tell you how many museums I have been to. Over 20 I think. We went to about five a week. Crazy huh? But I really enjoyed them. I went to the Musee d'Orsay yesterday because I hadn't been there yet and it was amazing. I loved that I recognized a lot of the pieces and the artists! What they teach us in school actually exists! Haha. It was mostly impressionists, which are my favorite. On friday we went to Versailles again because the first time we didn't get to go to the gardens because it was raining, and a trip to France isn't complete without seeing the gardens at Versailles! The view was incredible. We said when we were taking pictures that the backdrop didn't even look real because it was so perfectly kept. It could have been a screen with the gardens projected on it in the distance and I would not have been surprised. Unfortunately they were still in the process of planting flowers, so there weren't too many out, and they didn't have the fountains on either, but it was still very beautiful. That night we went to the Eiffel Tower and we went to the top! Amazing view! I persuaded everyone to take the stairs up with me haha. It was a lot of stairs!! The stairs only take you to the second floor and then an elevator takes you to the very top. Needless to say my legs got a good work out from the stairs! We had our last dinner with the Boissy's tonight and they made us crepes, which were delicious. Today is the French Mother's Day so we bought Madame Boissy some chocolate and wrote her and Monsieur Boissy a thank you note, which they were very pleased with. They have really been impressed with how good our french is. They told us we are the best students at french that they have ever had stay with them, and they've been having students for 13 years! Maybe they were just being nice haha. Anyway, that's my update for now. I have to pack everything tonight because we're leaving early in the morning. I'm not sure how much internet I'll have because we're staying in bed and breakfasts and small hotels during our bus trip. I'll add some pictures and videos here and some more to facebook. Je vous aime! Au revoir!

Facebook

If you're interested, I have a lot more photos posted on my facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=223105&id=540243083

Au revoir!

Wicked!

Big Ben, Parliament, Thames, Candy!!, London Bridge

Faffy London Excursion

What a weekend! We just got back a couple of hours ago from our weekend trip to London...which was awesome!! We left early Friday morning (flight at 8:50, so we left the house at 6) and got back today, Monday, (flight at 6am so we left the apartment at 2:15!). It was crazy. It was really cool to be able to travel by ourselves and without our big group. It was just me, my roommate Meridith, and Britt. We stayed with Meridith's older brother's mission companion who is married and lives just 30 minutes in an apartment outside of London. His name is Julian and his wife's name is Kimber (she's from california and he's from england) and they were super nice and very helpful! They met while Kimber was doing a BYU study abroad in London and then got married two years later after a long distance relationship and summers together. Anyway, they are a very cool and very nice couple. They were actually visiting family saturday and sunday so they left us the keys to their apartment and told us to make ourselves at home. We had to take a bus (a double-decker red one!) to the underground or the tube that would take us to the city. On Friday we saw the London Bridge, the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, Portabello Road, and the National Art Gallery Museum. The museum was very cool because it included pieces from a lot of the painters that I had learned about in humanities and french class, so I could recognize a lot of them. We came back the apartment with Julian and Kimber and she had made pizza/spaghetti/noodles dish for us and we watched episodes of Arrested Development because they had them all on DVD and its their favorite show. We got up Saturday and had some interesting experiences with the shower...For some reason Europe just hasn't figured out how to get water to work right. We had to flip three switches to turn on the hot water and you had to turn it on an hour before if you wanted an hour's worth of hot water. Then you had to barely turn the hot knob, then turn the cold knob all the way to get a lot of pressure, and then adjust the temperature with the hot knob again. Yeah, it was bizarre and we didn't have much luck with it. Saturday we went to buy Wicked! tickets first thing because none of us had ever seen it and that was something that we really wanted to do. Then we went and saw the Parliament buildings, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye, and the Millennium Bridge. Meridith was very excited because they shot a scene from Harry Potter on the Millenium Bridge on the Thames. It was basically like fair grounds around the London Eye and there were a lot of street performers. One guy was balancing a soccer ball on a stick coming out of his mouth and then a bottle on top of the ball and another ball on top of that and another bottle on top of that! They were fun to watch. We missed the visiting hours for Westminster Abbey, so we couldn't go in, but the outside was very pretty. Then we to eat dinner at a place Julian and Kimber recommended to us called Wagamama's, which was very good. It was like ramen meals and asian plates. Then we went to Victoria station and saw Wicked! and it was awesome!! Seriously, such a good show. I thought it was very good. The costumes were awesome and their voices were incredible. I really recommend that everyone see it. I still have the songs stuck in my head. Then we went back to the apartment and tried like 8 different kinds of candies that we had never seen before--all good, and we watched more Arrested Development. Sunday we had some more fun with the shower and then we headed out to see more of London. We went to the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, and back to Westminster Abbey to hear an organ recital (it was the only way we could get inside, but it was still very cool!). The British Museum was very cool because it had a huge variety of things to see from every part of the world and every time period. We saw the Rosetta Stone, mummies, money from all over the world, Egyptian statues, Greek and Roman statues and columns...just everything. Buckingham Palace wasn't too exciting, basically just because it was so hot! They didn't have any of the guards with fluffy hats out for us to mess with, but it was a pretty building. Then we went back to hear the organ recital and then we took a nap outside of the cathedral. We didn't go to sleep last night because we didn't want to not wake up, so I'm pretty tired right now. We had to leave at 2:15 am to get a night bus, to get to another night bus, to get onto the train, to go to the airport, to get on a plane, to get on a train, to get on another train before walking home. Needless to say we were exhausted and it was a long trip home. We had a lot of fun together though and it was a terrific weekend!

Sacre Coeur

I don't really have a lisp...

Jardins, Sacre Coeur, Cabarets, Moulin Rouge

It's Finally Warm!!

I don't know about the US, but it has been far too cold here the past two weeks! Even my host family has said that this "froid" is very rare for Paris in the spring. BUT, fortunately, yesterday it finally started getting warm, and now it is warm enough not to wear coats, which is awesome. Our director told us not to bring long sleeve shirts besides a sweatshirt and a light weight coat, so no one has had warm clothes to wear the past two weeks and we had to wear our coats instead of our cute spring clothes everyday, sad huh? Finally the sun has come out and we were able to lay out in the Jardins du Luxembourg today and get some color. The past few days have been very eventful. We have this thing called a "Walks Book" which includes 21 "walks" around Paris that we have to do while we're here. The walks were written by our french teachers and they are basically tour guides to both well-known monuments and the less-visited parts of the city. Today we did the Montmartre walk, which was absolutely gorgeous. The Basilica of Sacre Coeur is the "white church" that sits on top of Montmartre hill. From the top you can see the whole city. We climbed some 200 steps up to the top. There were a lot of people enjoying the sun, their lunch, and the entertainers sitting on the steps. One man was dressed all in silver and he had painted his whole body silver and he was posing as a statue of an elf. Two others were white monks. We went behind the church and saw the rest of Montmartre, which was very cool. It is a lot of narrow, cute streets-all cobblestone. Montmartre is home to the first cabaret in Paris, Le Lapin Agile, as well as the homes of Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, Renoir, Picasso, and it includes the Moulin Rouge (SO cool!). We went and saw all of these places. Cool huh? The streets were very pretty, except now the area has become filled with tourist shops and vendors. Yesterday we went to the Monet museum, which was very cool to see. We saw a lot of his famous pieces like Lilypads, the Haystack, Japanese Bridges. It is awesome to be able to see the original version of the pieces that I had learned about before coming here. We were also able to see some of the original posters by Toulouse Lautrec and the actual place where Renoir painted Le Moulin de la Gallette. We have had dinner with our host family the past two nights and it has been very good. Madame Boissy is a very good cook. Yesterday we had chicken with creme fraiche sauce and pommes de terre purées (mashed potatoes) and une tarte citron (lemon tart) for dessert. Today we had spaghetti with cut up ham and parmesan and le fromage blanc for dessert. It has definitely become easier to talk with my host family over the past couple of weeks. It kind of surprises me how up-to-date they are will global and french politics and with the history of France. We come home and tell them about what we learned about that day and where we went and they always know what we are talking about. It makes for good conversation. They told us that we probably know Paris better now than most parisiens; which makes sense because I can say that I know Paris better than Chicago or Milwaukee. Anyway, that's my update for now. We are leaving for London on Friday and I am very excited! I love you all, bisoux

Flares on the field and the manifestation

LOVES European Football!!

WOW!! What a day! Probably my most exhausting day of the trip so far, but it was incredible!! I just got back home from the soccer game: Paris Saint-Germain v. Montpellier. It was absolutely amazing. We went to the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris so obviously Paris SG was the home team. We went to the stadium yesterday and bought the cheapest tickets (30 euros) and figured we would just take whatever we got, but we could not have picked a better place to sit. True we were pretty far up, but we were right in with all of the crazy people cheering the entire game! I think soccer here is a bigger deal than any sport is to the US. We took the metro there and there were people singing the team songs and yelling and just getting so pumped even two hours before the game and when they started singing their songs everyone on the metro sang along with them. It was interesting to see how the people here reacted differently to the game than we do. They pay really close attention to the game, but it is still very social and they chant and sing and scream without stopping the entire game, but they don't really make a huge deal about calls that the refs make and they didn't get really anxious when our team was getting close to scoring. They just kept on chanting. PSG ended up losing 1-3 to Montpellier, which made the fans very mad. Whenever anything went wrong or if someone on our team made a mistake they would boo their own players very loudly and everyone would raise their arms waving the middle finger to them. We picked up on some of the cheers. The tunes were almost all from familiar chants and nursery rhymes so if we couldn't understand the words, we just yelled things that sounded similar. Who knows what we were saying. The section we were in was called the Kop of Bologna and it was absolutely crazy. The same people come to the same sections for every game the entire season so a lot of people knew each other. They had a leader with a microphone and they had set up speakers around the Bologna section so the Bologna leader would start chants and songs and everyone would follow in. We didn't know this ahead of time, but this was the last game of the season, so it was even more crazy than normal. I took a video of it and I'll post it, but on the other side of the stadium the fans set off at one point around 10 flares in the stands and they started throwing them down onto the field so they had to stop the game! someone lit a flare just two rows directly in front of me too. And there were several others around the stadium. I bought a PSG scarf and it is very cool. Everyone at these games has a scarf and they hold them up like banners for certain cheers. We were around some very interesting people. They guy next to me was rolling stuff in with his cigarettes and was blowing his smoke in my breathing area--didn't really appreciate that. The guy in front of me was at one point smoking a cigar and then he moved on to a rolled cigarette and then smoked like 3 more cigarettes during the game. There was a lot of smoke everywhere.
The game was really cool though! Montpellier was definitely the better team. PSG didn't get very many good looks at the goal, which made the fans more upset. I tried to get some pictures of it, but we could see the Eiffel Tower lit up in the background behind the stadium and it just made the whole experience incredible! Oh! and there was a "manifestation" as we were walking to the game. Basically hundreds of people filled the street and were demonstrating by chanting that they didn't approve of something the Ligue 1 was doing. So cool to see!!
For one of the chants we had to put our arms around our neighbors and all link in huge lines across the stands and then we would jump repeatedly to the right and then to the left with the beat. That was a fun one because I was next to the guy who was rolling cigarettes. After the game finished, the entire Bologna section stayed in their seats and the leaders kept leading cheers for another hour after all of the players had left the field. I think this was because it was the last game and they didn't want it to end and also because they were still mad for losing. Anyway, it was absolutely incredible. Just how I had imagined--it was so crazy!! I love european football!!

Latin Quarter, Seine River, Saint-Denis, Cobblestone streets

Busy busy days!

I'm sorry for not keeping up with writing on here and telling you about all of the awesome things I have been doing here! Instead, I have been out doing awesome things haha! Seriously our days are so long. We get up around 8 and leave for class in Paris and then we don't come back home until after midnight. We've been doing this everyday so we carry around our backpacks everywhere and we eat from vendors on the streets most of the time. Everything is so interesting and this has been an incredible experience so far. The problem is that I'm taking two classes out here at the same time and it is difficult to keep up on all of the reading and writing that I am supposed to do for the class. Today after class (yes everyone here goes to school on saturday) we came back to our house in the suburbs and we have spent the day getting caught up on homework and journal entries. I just wrote 9 pages worth of journal entries because part of our class is that we have to write reports or summaries on the different "walks" that we do around Paris. I just finished writing about our trip to Chartres a couple of days ago, our visit to the flea market, our walk around the Latin Quarter, and our walk through the Jardins du Luxembourg. There are monuments and historic things around every corner here. The people are very interesting too; not necessarily in a good way though. There are four things about Paris that I do not like: 1. EVERYONE smokes, even young teenagers and old people. The streets and sidewalks are covered in cigarette butts and people smoke in buildings and restaurants and just everywhere. It's gross. Fortunately the museums are smoke free, but I think I permanently smell like cigarette smoke all the time now. 2. The metros smell like urine, which is just gross. This brings up another interesting thing. There are hardly any public restrooms in Paris and if there are you have to pay to use them. So one of our french friends told us that a lot of men just pee where ever they want, especially the corners of the metros, because they don't have restaurants around. Our director always tells us to "start on empty" because there are few places that have free and functioning public restrooms, called toilettes. 3. There is so much nudity in Paris! Posters, post cards, signs, movies...it's also gross. It's one thing when it's in art in museums, but it's different when it's posted on a wall on busy streets in the city. 4. Everyone drinks a lot. There aren't any open-alcohol regulations so people drink on the metros and in front of cathedrals and places like that. It makes walking around the city at night difficult because there are so many crazies out. Okay, I think I'm done venting for now. Those are just some things that are not so great about Paris, but there are plenty of good things! I really like the Latin Quarter, so named because it has some of Paris's largest universities there, because there were a lot of students there and shops that weren't too expensive. I think I've seen a new cathedral or basilica everyday that I've been here. Yesterday we went to the Basilica of Saint-Denis, which was awesome. I'm thinking a lot of my pictures are starting to look the same because they are all from the inside of churches, but really they are all so different and there is so much symbolism in each one! We had an amazing tour guide yesterday who showed us around Saint-Denis. She spoke very fast in french, but her pronunciation was great so I really understand the majority of what she said. It was a really interesting tour because the Basilica holds the bodies of almost all of Frances kings and queens so by talking a little bit about each one it was basically a review of all of the french history I have every learned, so it was really cool. I have made some really good friends out here and we have a lot of fun together. Unfortunately we have a 9:1 girl to guy ratio, so no prospects there haha. We do have a great group though and a great director. It has been great getting to work really closely and get to know our director. He's a a little man but he's a big ball of stress and I think it's funny. Anyway I have to take an exam now so I better go study! I'll try to keep more posts coming! Bisoux bisoux

Champs-Elysees, L'Arc de Triomphe, Jardins du Luxembourg

Trip to Chartre

Cathédrale Chartre

Another wonderful day! We went on a field trip today instead of having class. We went to the Cathédrale Chartre. It was about an hour and a half train ride outside of Paris. I don't know if this is possible, but it may have been even more beautiful than Notre Dame in Paris. They were in the process of cleaning the inside and the outside of the cathedral, which you can see in the contrast between the white and the black walls in the picture. It looks amazing after it has been cleaned. It would be really interesting to see how the whole thing looks when they are finished cleaning it. Apparently while cleaning they have found that the stone used to be entirely painted in color during the middle ages. It wasn't always the dark gray that we see now. They showed us some sections that were a faint yellow, blue, red, and green. The stained-glass windows look incredible, but especially after they have been painted. They used to use the windows as teaching tools because the majority of the christians making pilgrimages to this cathedral could not read. Each of the windows tells a different story from the Bible. Our British tour guide spend an hour describing only a couple of windows on two of the faces of the cathedral. They told the story of Adam and Eve being sent out of the garden and of the Good Samaritan. It was interesting to see all of the little details that I would have never recognized myself. Like how at the bottom of the window there are images of the people who donated the money needed to build the window. One that we looked at had men making shoes at the bottom of it to signify shoemakers. Another had farmers. We followed the pilgrimage path around the ambulatory of the cathedral and looked in all of the side chapels and the different artwork and shrines. Unfortunately it has been very cold in France the last two days, so it was very cold inside of the cathedral and we didn't stay for as long as we would have liked. The outside is especially interesting because it represents both romanesque architecture and gothic architecture. The steeple on the right is romanesque and the one on the left is gothic. The cathedral experienced several catastrophic fires that resulted in it having to be rebuilt in several sections over the years. During one such fire the right steeple stayed up, but the left burned down, so they replaced it with a gothic steeple. We decided to walk around the outside even though it was very cold, and we saw the back of the cathedral and the view from behind it. It was incredible! The flying buttresses look amazing. After looking around the cathedral we walked around Chartre for a while. We went down some really pretty side streets and ate crepes and a baguette at a boulangerie/patisserie. We spent four hours in Chartre and then we took the train back to Paris and ate dinner at a cafe on a road next to the Champs-Elysées. It was too crowded to eat right on the Champs-Elysées. We saw the Arc de Triomphe right when we came out of the metro, but we didn't stay to look at it because it was too cold. We are going to go back next week to visit that and la tour eifel. I'm not exactly sure what it was that I ate for dinner. I put a picture of it on. It was fine, not my favorite, but I didn't understand what the words meant, so I just ordered it on a whim haha. Well I really hope it gets warmer because I want to be able to spend more time outside! But I am really loving my stay here! A bientot!