Week 3

While catching up I've attempted to just summarize everything into highlights. Things aren't exactly chronological, but more or less.

Highlights of da week:

*Parc des Buttes-Chaumont - holy crap that place is beautiful! It's a pretty sizeable park in Paris and makes for a very nice place to go for a run. I've went a couple of times to jog and played frisbee with Matt too. We're definitely going to have a picnic there sometime soon.

*L'Etoile d'Or - went here in search of the best chocolate in Paris, and were not disappointed. The lady there was worth the visit in and of itself. I asked her how long she's been working in that chocolatier and she said 38 years, and boy does it show. But she was super nice and very enthusiastic (in fact probably about too much) about the chocolate and talked to us in Franglais for a while about which are the best.

*Nuit des musées - every year in May, there is a night where all the museums are open and free to the public, plus there is a bunch of cool special events that take place. We decided to go to this perfume bubbles and music event in the Grand Palais and then another event in the Palais du Tokyo. We got to the first one, and saw that there was a giant line, so we decided since there were so many people waiting it will have to be something good, and I even asked someone else in line if it was the right one and they said yes. Couple hours later, we are getting to the front and I realize that no, this was not the right line, and we were standing in line at the Petit Palais for a Yves Saint Laurent exhibition... fml. After checking it out for a bit, since we were basically at the front of the line by that point, we went across the street to the Grand Palais (for which there was effectively no line at all..). It was pretty interesting, there were different areas with different scented bubbles coming out of the ceiling into this giant exhibition hall, and all accompanied by music. After that we went to the Palais du Tokyo, which was pretty cool too - there was live music and these naked ladies wearing Grenadier guard-like outfits put on a short show.

*CROUS – Even though we’re not technically students (although we kind of technically are now, because we also just received student IDs and an email address) we have access to the university cafeteria which is really nice. The whole dormitory scene is set up pretty differently in France than in the States to begin with, and there aren’t actually any dorms on any university campus. They have centralized dorms, in which universities can reserve space for their international student. Cafeterias are run by CROUS and can also be found scattered around Paris, and one of them is at the university I work at. We also have access to the administrative cafeteria, which has better food than the student cafeteria. It’s also heavily subsidized so a full meal (appetizer, entrée, dessert) costs only 3 euros (less than $4). I go with my lab group there almost for every lunch, and it’s awesome. They also sometimes have somewhat exotic things there (at least for American tastes) like du lapin (rabbit), boudin noir (blood sausage). The other day they had chicken nuggets (des nuggets du poulet), but they were pretty gross.

*Vélib – A portmanteau of vélo (bike) and liberté (freedom), this is a really awesome and convenient bike renting system implemented by the city. There are over 1500 stations in all of Paris, and you can just come up and rent a bike for the whole day for 1 euro. Since there are bike lanes on a lot of streets, it can be the fastest way to get around especially during rush hour. It’s also ridiculously fun to bike through the streets and in between the cars, and to traverse the giant roundabouts.

*Cimitière du Père Lachaise – This is a giant cemetery in Paris where a lot of famous people are buried. It’s also just really interesting to walk around and look at the graves, because pretty much every single one is different. As for the famous, we saw the graves of Jim Morrison, Gay-Lussac, Chopin, Molière, Wilde, Edith Piaf, and some others. They also had really unique WWII and Holocaust monuments.


TBC

Week 2

So I already was pretty behind, and then almost three weeks went by on top of that. I am going to hastily catch up to the present and earnestly attempt to keep this blog up. It’s just been hard to do that since I’ve been behind since I got to Paris…

Two and a half weeks ago, Matt came and completed our little Parisian family. We had to get up hella early since his flight got in at 7:30 in da AM, but the lady here who helps us out was able to do drive us to the airport to pick him up, which was nice. He actually was supposed to come a day earlier, but that silly little Icelandic volcano pushed his flight back. It actually ended up being better because it was a jour férié, which means we had a day off work and then we took the Friday off too, so we had a nice fourday weekend. That night we went to a cute little French bistro nearby called Chez Mamy. It was very homey and they literally had one menu (on a chalkboard), so we had to wait for the other table that was also full of Americans, but they did not know any French so they took forever to figure out what they wanted. Thankfully Phoebe is really into cooking and knows all the food terms, so between me and her we were able to not figure everything out. The food was really good. I got l’entrecôte which is basically a steak. I read that meat was supposed to be ordered à saignant in France, which basically means bloody (i.e. rare). I was under the impression that it was more a medium rare, so it was a little too much for my tastes, but not too bad. I learned that next time I should order à point.

Oh, the night before I met up with Kelsey and Irine, two girls that I lived next to my freshman year in the dorms. Kelsey has been studying this semester in France and Irine came to visit her, and so we all met up. That night I was on the way to a friend of Kelsey’s apartment, when I ran into 4 Michigan people on the metro. That was kinda crazy. On the way to the apartment I found myself right in front of the Eiffel tower, all lit up at night. I’ve seen it before, but seeing it all of a sudden that night was really cool, even if it is pretty cliché. That night was also the first time I used the Noctilien bus system (Knight Bus anyone??). As I’ve said the Parisian transportation system is very impressive, and especially the buses. They have a whole fleet of routes that run during the times the regular transportation is not (between the hours of 1-5am). It’s very convenient.