If only "Hung Up" rang true in Paris. Alas, time does not go by so slowly, and I find myself feeling mournful that it's almost week five, almost May, especially because I'll be traveling three weekends next month. Even though I'm excited to see more of Europe it means time in Paris is growing precious. Quel dommage! To console myself I have gotten a delicious (though 5-euro! Oh, the price of happiness...) double-café and, as the French would say, "installed myself" at a lovely café with wireless. We discovered it a few nights ago. Anyhow, to console myself further, and to make Paris seem less wonderful in my head, let me indulge in a list of Things The French Simply Don't Understand.

:: Scarves are no longer appropriate attire when the weather's in the eighties. I don't care how eurotrashy you want to be. No.

:: I thought the Age of Rollerblades was happily behind us, but not in France; everyone's always rolling down the rues on skates. I've even seen people wearing them on the métro and rolling between trains, as ludicrous as that sounds.

:: Cold coffee drinks can be delicious. But no, coffee is always hot in France (well, never quite hot; closer to lukewarm). I can't even tell you how much I'm craving a Frappuccino as the temperatures climb higher and higher! But I've sworn I won't go to Starbuck's more than once, and that the one time will be sometime after week six, and only if I really need it. Considering how unbearably hot it already is I probably will, though.

:: If I want to do my laundry at three in the morning I should be able to, dammit! What's the point of having laundry machines sit idle and useless for ten hours a day? What's the point, indeed, of pretending that France goes to sleep at 12:30 when the amount of people around each night clearly shows otherwise?

:: I am capable of buying eyedrops. I do not need to have a long, involved conversation (broken French on my end and broken English on his) with the Pharmacien about the dryness of my eyes. Seriously, France. Similarly, I don't need help picking out medicine. Maybe if I'm really sick. But I should be able to breeze into the store and get some Day-Quil if I want it.

:: Littering is not cool. Seriously. What a strange contrast! Here the lights and showers are on timers and the people supposedly care about the environment, but French people leave litter behind like Hansel and Gretl leave bread crumbs. They also seem to think that the space between the subway platform and the subway is an appropriate place for their garbage.

That's just the beginning. They can be a puzzling people! I am still shocked by how different France feels. I just assumed rich Western cultures were fairly homogeneous, but being here feels much more foreign than I ever thought it would.

All that aside, I'm obviously still having a wonderful time. Paris has many good qualities, and I still think its physical beauty is enough to make me forgive all its sins. The French, too, are more good than bad. There are many things I think they do better than any other country, and I've had enough nice interactions with French people. For example, my friends and I went on Wednesday to the train station to buy tickets for our upcoming trip through France (more on that later! Get excited for that blog entry :D) and the man at the ticket counter sat with us for literally forty minutes helping us plan. He was incredibly nice, even though it was obvious we were complete fools; he played with the tickets and stops to make it much cheaper for us (doing things like booking one segment as a long trip with a layover instead of two separate trips) and spoke French, even though his name tag said he spoke English, too. I think he found us amusing, and a little ridiculous. But better than finding us annoying! We all laughed a lot. It was more fun than buying train tickets should be.

Dammit, now look at me, making the French look good again! I need to console myself more. Time for some gelato.

À bientôt, beloved readers!

I stayed in a castle this weekend!

Yes, somewhat ridiculous to throw that out there right away, but I have to. When else in my life am I going to be able to say that? Probably never. So there it is. And let me tell you, I damn well deserved a castle this weekend. Last week kind of sucked. I won't bore you with the details. I just had real work to do, serious work, and it totally was not fun. I'm not in Paris to work!

We did actually have one fantastic adventure last week. Madame Bing sent us all to the ballet, which was lots of fun -- Prokofiev's Cendrillon (Cinderella) in the Opéra Garnier, the famously ornate opera house that inspired The Phantom of the Opera (the real version of that notorious crashing chandelier was right over our heads!). I've never seen a ballet before (besides The Nutcracker) and I enjoyed it more than I thought I might... the music was elegant and evocative, and the story, though confusing (why is the fairy godmother a movie director / pilot? why are there 12 men in red thongs running around?), was surprisingly entertaining. Also, the Opéra Garnier is an extremely satisfying place to see and be seen. Just sweeping down the grand staircase in our evening finery was fun.

Beyond that, though, it was just a matter of waiting for the interminable week to finish and our fun adventures to begin. This weekend was our Bing trip (if anyone doesn't know, Madame Bing pays for every overseas program to take some crazy trip each quarter) and we went to the Loire Valley region of France, a flat and garden-like region filled with calm rivers and yellow flowers, as well as the kind of villages you expect France to have (I felt like Belle in Beauty and the Beast! Little town... it's a quiet village....). The region is also the heart of France's château country, where the nobles all built their elaborate palaces as the Italian Renaissance drifted northward.

We stayed in one of these châteaux, and it was by far the coolest place I have ever stayed. It really was a castle, perched up on top of a hill, with wisteria draped all over its gray walls. Being a castle, each room was unique -- one was in the former stables; one was a former outbuilding; one was literally in a cave where the chateau's wine must have been aged at one point; and ours was pretty much the penthouse suite, a grand antechamber looking out over the entire Loire Valley and the beds in a round turret room. I can't even believe I slept in a turret. And somehow this is school....

Anyhow, that was the first of several châteaux we visited. Each one was absolutely ridiculous in its ornateness; I feel like I understand why the French Revolution happened when the wealthy were rich like this. Each one has some outrageous gimmick. Chenonceau straddles a river; Amboise contains, for some reason, the grave of Leonardo da Vinci; Chambord is the largest of all and yet was only inhabited for five weeks before the king grew bored with it. They are lovely, but somewhat exhausting; they are such a strange blend of opulence and discomfort that I find them hard to take. But I am glad I got to see them. My favorite part of the châteaux visits, however, came with our free afternoon at Chambord. That château occupies a huge estate with lots of rivers and forests and other natural wonders. For a treat, we got to go rowing on the river. It was so patrician, but so wonderful! Imagine a warm afternoon, sitting on a rowboat, lazily rowing, with one of France's largest castles there in the background, slipping in for a quick swim and then drying in the comfortable sun... I can't even tell you how lovely it was.

Bing trips are supposed to have delicious meals, but only one of ours was really great, a Saturday night dinner we had at our château. (Vegetarian menu: asparagus almond soup, pasta with fresh vegetables, and an astonishing dessert including wine sorbet and white chocolate mousse, all accompanied by fresh bread and local wines). But we got to go to a cave for wine and cheese tasting on Saturday afternoon, which was amazing. The Loire Valley is known for its wine, and Madame Bing chose a pretty classy place for us... the cheese was prize-winning and the wines were too, I think. At any rate, I felt like I became a better smarmy person because this visit actually did increase my appreciation for wine. We had three glasses each, but they were all the "same" wine, just from different years (one was forty years old!). I couldn't believe how different they were! I also discovered that Comte cheese is unutterably delicious. We were encouraged to take this seriously and try all three kinds of cheese with all three kinds of wine to discover the best combinations, which was as fun as it sounds.

As classy as that was, we had a totally unclassy experience to balance it out on Saturday night. During the day some people had walked to the river by our château for a swim and said it was nice; for some reason, Vicky, Nafis, Silvia, and I convinced ourselves that going to the river in the middle of the night would be even better. Imagine the scene... the totally dark countryside, more stars overhead than I've ever seen, and us picking our way through paths, gravel, roads, and railroad tracks, pretty much in total darkness, and scaring ourselves senseless when some dog started barking at us. It was kind of a dumb decision. But we did make it, and hacked open the bottle of wine we'd brought with a hotel key (don't judge, I forgot my beloved corkscrew) and enjoyed it. We also tried to go swimming. Now imagine that scene... total darkness, a steep bank, slippery rocks underfoot, uncertainly-dirty mud squishing between our toes as we try to pick our way into this river. And because we were near a bridge the water was only ankle-deep! So no swimming for us. But we waded, at least, and all got stabbed by some ferocious stinging plant on the way out of the water. It was a good adventure.

But now I am back in Paris. It's been a weird day... I will spare everyone the details, but let's just say it involved a crazy man accosting us in the garden, being robbed by the school for deaf-mutes, a stressful project involving interviewing the French about the election (which has actually been really interesting to observe! But not to ask people about), our host school somehow transforming into a 1920's Chicago speakeasy in décor (this doesn't make any sense even with the whole story), and me getting the start of a cold. But I did go the Louvre and stumble around a little with my pass, which was nice -- I only saw a teeny corner of it, French Neoclassical sculpture, but enjoyed it a lot. As strange as this may sound it gave me a new appreciation of feet. I hate feet and think they're awful, but the marble feet on every statue, with their veins and supple cruves, were surprisingly elegant.

And now I'm here, having just gone grocery shopping, and ready for some dinner. So, with that, I will bid you adieu! I feel like this was an excessively long entry as always, so thanks if you trudged through to the end.

Laundry day! The first, in fact, since I got here. And it took me a ridiculously long time to figure out how the machine worked. In fact, I might not have. I may go downstairs to find that my clothes just spun around for an hour without anything actually happening. Or, even better, that they all melted or combusted or met with some other spectacular death. We will see.

Anyhow, I promise that laundry isn't the only exciting thing I have to report. I actually had a ridiculously fun weekend. And, lucky you, you get to relive it with me.

:: If you've been to Paris before, you probably are familiar with Sacre Cœur, the fairy-tale white church on top of Paris's most iconic hill, Montmartre. The name refers to the sacred heart of Jesus, so this would be an extremely blasphemous place to get drunk. And yet that is what Parisian teenagers apparently do every weekend; we visited a week ago for a nighttime view of the city and saw dozens of groups on the grass and the steps, with the sound of breaking bottles every few minutes. Well, obviously we decided we had to go back and experience this tradition ourselves. So we had a little BYOB there on the grassy slope, the lights of Paris spread out before us. It was a warm and pleasant night, the cheap French wine flowed freely, and before long we were draining our last bottle.

The coolest part of the evening is that we actually talked to French people there on the hill. Several French teenagers came up and tried to sell us pot ("I have to make a living!" one of them indignantly told Silvia, in English), but we brushed them off. By two or so, however, we kind of melted into the group next to us. They were four or five French high school guys, and one of them came over to ask for a light, but we all ended up chatting. It probably had more to do with the three women I was with than with the promise of cultural exchange, but they were pretty nice, and it was fun to talk with them in a messy hybrid of French and English. We talked about Paris, and the upcoming elections, and probably a lot of other stuff I don't really remember. (As you can imagine, I wasn't really in tip-top mental form by that point.) So that was gratifying. Eventually, we tidied up our mess and all stumbled down the hill. We were ready to head to bed and so said au revoir to the others, and found our way to the night bus, the Noctilien. (The métro shuts down at night.)

As we rode, Silvia suddenly realized she didn't have her transit pass anymore. And so our adventures got an extension as we returned to still-lively Sacre Cœur to hunt it down. Miraculously, it turned up, and so we picked our way back down the hill and into the waiting arms of the Noctilien. After maybe an hour and dozens of encounters with endlessly freaky people (my god, the weird come out at night!) on the bus, we all made it home. It was about six when I finally went to bed.

:: Saturday was a day of rest. I had the triumph of finally finding that stupid human rights book in some bookstore in the latin quarter. I also had the pleasure of going to my first real French open air market, which was as lovely as I expected, and bought beautiful tomatoes and equally beautiful avocados. The real fun Saturday, however, came at night, with a delicious meal. We went for dinner in the Latin Quarter, on lovely Rue Mouffetard, but had some trouble choosing a restaurant, and finally settled on a Spanish-slash-Italian place. It was a little more expensive than we like, and when I saw the flamenco musicians inside, I thought, oh no. Tourist trap. But it wasn't at all! The place had a family feel; it seemed like everyone knew the owners. The waitress sat down and commiserated with us about being tired, and the food was absolutely delicious. With sangria, bread, appetizer, main course, dessert, and digestif the meal stretched into a relaxing three hours. It was lovely.

:: Sunday my friends and I finally went on our long-planned day trip to the Champagne region of France, where all "real" champagne by definition originates. The region is centered around the city of Reims (which is nearly impossible to pronounce right, by the way; we asked the woman at the tourist office to help us practice and are pretty close now, although she probably thought we were a little strange). Reims is a nice little country town, and I particularly enjoyed seeing somewhere else in France; somehow it's hard to imagine anything beyond Paris! Anyhow, it's very quiet and walkable, with the usual pretty little streets and churches, and an enormous cathedral which is actually quite impressive and arresting with its stained glass and impossibly high ceiling.

Lovely though they are, we were obviously there not for the visual delights of a French country town, but for champagne. A number of famous (at least, I think they are; I don't really know) champagne houses maintain their caves (literal caves, places where they let the wine age) in the town, so we went for two tours, one at Taittinger, one at Piper-Heidsieck. The Taittinger one was pretty much what we expected – trotting around the caves and looking at bottles as a guide narrated, and then a glass at the end. The second one, however, was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever encountered. They had the tour set up as a Disneyland-style "dark" ride, with little carts carrying us around the caves. Except this one didn't actually go through a working cave, but just carried us through dioramas and abstract purple-lit sculptures (which the narrating voice sternly forbade us from touching) tangentially related to champagne. The best part was when we went through a replica of a bar scene from Casablanca, because apparently they drank this brand in the movie, although we're just guessing -- they didn't really make it clear. There were also life-sized Oscar statues holding bottles of champagne. It was spectacular. As was the tasting at the end, I might add -- three varieties, including a pink one! Yum.

Anyhow, we stumbled around the town for a while after that, but it was extremely hot (still is) and so we settled into a comfy outdoor café and rested for a while. (The people of Reims apparently understand comfortable seating much better than the wicker-loving Parisians.) After dinner at France's fast food chain, Quick (in which I got to put my French skills to the test when they gave me the wrong sandwich, and probably wouldn't have tried without Vicky's support :D) we headed home, all of us sleeping on the train.

And now I have actual homework to do! And laundry to get! Zut alors! So I will bid you adieu, and of course thank you if you read this overlong entry.

As I write this I am sitting outside, by a beautiful fountain (there are copper turtles spitting water at some naked people!) in a park whose name I don't really know... something about explorers and Marco Polo if I remember. It feels like summer, by the way. It is hot and hazy; it must be near 80. I read somewhere that climatologists predict (can they? I guess they can) that 2007 may be the hottest year ever. So buy your fans now before Home Depot runs out.

Anyhow, Paris. I'm still having a great time. I've also settled into "classes" -- although I do have to read 320 pages of French before next Thursday for an exam, which will be legitimately challenging. But other than that I can say my life is free of academic obligations. My class at the Louvre is such a joke... we went this past Wednesday only to find that the antiquities wing was closed. So we went to look at some random rugs instead. And my French class has only met once, even though it's the end of the second week. Whew. Life is hard.

So here's what I've been doing....

:: Going out every night, for one thing. Oh, man, the exotic life of Paris. Actually, it makes me think of The Sun Also Rises all the time... if I find reason to say "Oh darling, I'm so miserable" or whatever that silly tart in the book was always sniveling about it will be perfect. But yeah. The way those lost generation kiddies just went out, out, out, night after night after night... that's our life!

Most of the time if we go out it's just to some café-slash-bar kind of place, which is fine with me. It's nice because you can linger at the tables for as long as you'd like, and they're just comfortable and pleasant. Well, not comfortable in a squishy-loveseat kind of way... they have hard wooden chairs and little round tables. But they're comfortable in the dim, smokey sense, because no one's really doing anything besides talking with their friends, and that's all we really want from our evenings sometimes, so it works out well.

Last night we tried to go to one of Paris's most celebrated nightclubs, LE QUEEN. Alas, something went wrong and we were all denied entrance! I think it was because our group spiraled into an enormous clot of Americans, and they might have just been like, no. It was sad... all of us on the sidewalk while bright pulsating disco lights and campy Madonna songs drifted out the door. Whatever. We'll try again.

:: I've had some adventures trying to find the books I have to read for next Thursday. For some reason, the Stanford Center only sells English books to us, and we're left to find our French language books in the city's bookstores, which is harder than you might think. There's this one book that none of us can find... apparently there was one copy of it at FNAC (a big French chain), but now it's MIA and might in fact be a myth. Anyhow. I did find the other book I needed at this magnificent bookstore called Gibert Jeune, which is so enormous it sprawls over 7 stores in the Place Saint-Michel. Too bad none of the seven had a single damn copy of La Revolution des droits de l'homme.

:: I have become a patisserie addict. Oh my god, I know we know this, but French pastries are delicious. Holy god. I'm also addicted to a candy bar called Balisto... so good!

:: I continue to live in my prison-like dorm, and it's okay, although I desperately need to do laundry. The biggest annoyance recently is that there are people who practice their instruments (a clarinetist and a saxophonist in particular) nonstop! The saxophonist especially spent, I'm not even kidding, three hours doing scale exercises each day this weekend. And on Saturday I left my room at maybe one in the afternoon and came back at nine and the person was STILL practicing! Is that what dedication is? I say this as my French horn lies rusting in a storage closet thousands of miles away from me....

:: I think I'm getting to like pigeons. Parisian pigeons are actually kind of pleasant and dumb, like miniature cows, and I like the sound they make. It might have more to do with the setting, though... Parisian parks are in general outrageously nice (the Jardin de Luxembourg is one of the loveliest places I have ever been in my life, and surprisingly green for how early in the year it is), so maybe even garbage-can-sized centipedes would look pleasant in them.

Well, with that I will wish you bon week-end! Thanks for reading if you did. :)

At last, I have internet access chez moi and can start my long-promised blog. Because I'm sure my adoring fans are dying of anticipation....

So I've been in Paris a week now. Strange to think about... it feels like much longer. If I had to give a one-word answer for what Paris is like I would say "astonishing." It is not perfect; far from it. But it does really astonish me at every turn.

I think my favorite thing about Paris is that it seems to be, above all else, a city of small pleasures. Despite its size, history, monuments, and everything else, my favorite parts of being here involve small acts. It is a fantastic city for reading. My first day here I was walking around and I told myself, "never again will I be without a book in Paris." I feel like there are places everywhere that just beg you to sit down and read. I have Middlesex with me and spent a lot of this weekend reading it, a hundred pages here, a hundred pages there; a café in Montparnasse, the sculptured gardens between the Palais Royal and the Louvre, and (my favorite place of all) the banks of the Seine.

Can I talk for a moment about how much I love the river? I'm a sucker for any water city. This one, however, is particularly charming. Can there be a better place to stroll than the stone quays lining the banks? Especially at sunset, they're impossibly lovely. It's not just a tourist thrill either; the Parisians clog the banks for walks. Young people bring down their wine bottles and spread out blankets; hippies play guitars. It's pleasant. I finished Middlesex there this afternoon. Anyhow. I like how the river is literally the centerpiece of the town, and how it defines the city as well. I've always heard of the Right Bank and Left Bank of Paris, but I didn't realize (though it seems obvious now) that they are oriented to the current of the Seine, and the way the city would appear if you were just floating through.

Life here is extremely pleasant. There are flowers everywhere, walkers take precedence over drivers, it's easy and manageable to get around, etc. For me it is especially pleasant because I have no class yet, more or less. I think my schedule is going to be Monday through Wednesday, and we didn't start class until Wednesday next week, and we have Monday off this week because of Easter. I can't believe that I'm lucky enough to spend time here and call it school!

Anyhow. I'm being kind of serious and guidebook-esque right now and not saying too much specific. It's been such a busy week! Let me jot down at least some details of my actual life here.

:: My language partner totally ditched me. We all got to choose from a list of activities to do with our language partners, and the people at our host school (ISEP, a really selective engineering school, pretty much the Caltech of France) chose from the same list, and Stanford matched us up that way. I chose "Gardens of Paris" for my activity. Anyhow, the people at the host school pretty much treat the language partner program as a dating service, which works well (from their perspective!) because the Stanford program is almost all girls and ISEP is almost all guys. I think mine probably chose "Gardens of Paris" thinking it was a sure bet to get some ditzy girl, and then got my name and decided it wasn't worth it. Whatever! Screw him. :) I'll visit the damn gardens by myself. And talk to myself while doing it. In broken French. Hell yeah.

:: Kinder Bueno bars are the most delicious candy bar in the history of the world, and the vending machines on the Métro platforms sell them in discounted double packs. I am in heaven. But these very same vending machines have eaten my change on two separate occasions... I fear they are very much Tragedy and Comedy in vending machine form.

:: I can't decide if my dorm room is more like a solitary confinement cell in a prison or an insane asylum. It is not pleasant. The floor, for example, is a mixture of hard square tiles and cement. Except some of the tiles are shattered into pieces and tumble around whenever I walk across the floor. The mattress is perhaps two inches thick; it makes a Stanford mattress look like a Serta. But the room is private, and I get a sink, and it's a big, bright single, so whatever. They put me here because they didn't think a host family would be able to handle my vegetarian ways, and I'm enjoying making my own food; if I can find a way to practice my French I think it'll be a good situation.

:: Tonight I went out to eat with some friends and, when I ordered in French ("la penne au pistou, s'il vous plaît," or something along those lines), she responded in English, "that's just pasta with basil, okay?" This illustrates two frustrations. One. Why did she answer in English? This happens to us all the time (even the people who speak French pretty damn well). It's like, lady. If I speak to you in French I want to hear an answer in French. Not English. Ça va? Anyhow. This is also the attitude towards vegetarianism I have encountered. Notice the undercurrent of speechless horror. "It's just noodles! And herbs! No meat!!!" Yes, je sais bien. Oh well. I suppose that's why I cook for myself in this freakin' dorm.

Hmm, disjointed, I think; this whole blog thing is new to me! I think that'll be the first entry... thanks for reading if you did.