Midterms

So I know that I haven't been posting very much, but that's because I haven't been doing very much. This week and next are midterm week, so my days have been mostly filled with studying and writing papers.

Just wanted to let you know that I'm still alive though...

Tour of my Neighborhood and My Weekend with Dad

Dad visited Paris this weekend and I took him on a tour of my neighborhood.  And he insisted on taking my picture in front of every store.  

First stop: a chocolate shop that makes bouquets of chocolate so that it looks like flowers.  Delicious flowers.

The seafood market.  I'm standing next to real, live oysters.

The fresh produce market.

Another chocolate store.  This one had marzipan that was shaped like pumpkins and cheeses.

The flower shop. But blurry.

The fromagerie.  Yuck.

The butchers.  With really amazing smelling rotisserie chickens.

My school.  We were going to go inside but apparently it's all locked up on Saturdays.

This is Tarte Julie, a really delicious tart restaurant by school.

This is a really delicious chocolate store that is nowhere near where I live but deserves documentation.  Not sure if you can see all of it, but in the window there is a giant box of chocolates on the left, a chocolate statue on the right, and their chocolate collection for this season in little jewelry boxes in the front of the window.

Same store, different window.  With really amazing pastries.

This is my favorite metro station entrance.  It's right by the Palais Royal and the Louvre.

And this is the Place des Vosges.  It's the oldest square in Paris and is a perfect square, with perfect symmetry. 

Class Visit to Versailles Gardens

Today, for my Paris Monuments and Political Powers class, we took a tour of the gardens at Versailles. A little background info on the palace: It was built by Louis XIV, the Sun King, though it was originally the hunting lodge of Louis XIII; the palace is 1/4 mile long; there are 2143 windows. Though it was grey and freezing (try taking notes outside for two hours), the gardens are really cool and I can only imagine what they would look like in the spring/summer with all of the leaves and flowers and sun. The pictures below are mostly just photos of fountains (of which Versailles has 32, which is a multiple of 4 - which is considered the "human" number and tons of things are found in 4's, while 3 was considered the divine number, think Holy Trinity), but they all have a meaning and a message.

View of the female quarters of Versaille. The queen had the left wing, while the king had the right and they would meet together in the middle in the hall of mirrors. Also, those big arches underneath the garden is where the royal greenhouse is located, which was a symbol of the King's power over nature. For example, they would grow lemon trees, lime trees, potatoes, peas, none of which were available to the people of France yet.

The royal greenhouse leads out onto this Italian garden. The lake on the right was called the Queen's mirror, because she could look out at it and see the reflection of the palace. Also, everything, including this lake, is completely man made. Louis had the Swiss guards who were supposed to be protecting him dig the lake because he didn't need their protection but still wanted them to be working.

This is a fountain of a giant being pummeled and killed with rocks by Zeus, after the giants threw rocks at Zeus. It's a message to the nobles ( = giants), that if they throw rocks at the King ( = Zeus), he will throw back and kill them.

This is a fountain of Apollo, the god of light, sun, and truth. He's either about to take off to make the sun rise/set, or just landing. Apollo represents Louis XIV, and the really cool thing about this fountain is that on August 25, the feast day of Louis XIV, the sun sets exactly on it.

Concerts used to be performed here, including a performance by Mozart. The statue in the middle is of Persephone, who created the seasons. There are 32 (multiple of 4!) of everything in here, including the arches, the columns, the fountains, the urns, and the diameter.

This fountain depicts winter, and if you look closely, you might be able to see that there are seashells and mussels around the bottom of the fountain. Why seashells and mussels? Winter was the only time they could eat them because there was no refrigeration. There are also fountains for the other 3 seasons. (Here's the number 4 again)

This was really, really cool and I don't think the picture can do it justice. This was an outdoor ballroom. On the right was a waterfall, with seashells from Madagascar, which were incredibly expensive. The nobles would practice a ton to make sure that their dances were perfect; to mess up would be social suicide.

This fountain was recently restored and all of the fountains would be this gold and bright when they were first created. It depicts Triumph and shows Louis XIV defeating the Hapsburgs and Spain.

This is a fountain of the dragon and was one of the first fountains made for Versailles. According to mythology, Apollo saved his mother from a dragon by slaying the dragon.

There were statues depicting the 4 (!) continents that were discovered at the time. This statue is of America.

This is a statue of Apollo's mother, Leto. She was running away from Hera, Zeus's wife, and she stopped in village with her 2 children (Apollo and Dianna) to drink some water. The villagers threw rocks at them and into the water, to make it muddy and in return, Zeus turned them into frogs. The story parallels that of Louis XIV when he was little and the people of Paris revolted against him and his mother. Because of this revolt, Louis hated Paris and this is why he built Versailles, so he could live far away from the city.

Picture of the gardens with Versailles in the distance, on the left.

And that was my trip to Versailles. Though afterwards I got so incredibly lost looking for the train station and I ended up walking around the town for a good hour before I finally found it. After that though, I safely made my way home.

My First Opera!

Last night I got to go see Rigoletto at Opera Bastille with NYU. It was the first opera that I've ever seen and it was in Italian with French subtitles. Needless to say, I was glad that my professor who organized it had given us an extensive summary in English. I would try to summarize the story for you too, but it's way too long and complicated. If you're interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigoletto

And everyone knows this song (scroll down to the bottom of the page to listen to it, but read the lyrics too):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_donna_è_mobile

For the first half of the show, we got there right as it was starting and sat in the very last row (6 stories up!) because those were the only empty seats we could find. For the second half, there was a couple sitting in my friend Sam and my seats, and when we asked them to move, they told us to go talk to the usher, but then the curtain fell. So we watched the rest of the show from the aisle :(

Anyways, the opera was really good, and I still have no idea how they can sing like that. And the orchestra was amazing too. I'm also going to another opera later on in December, so I'm looking forward to that!

Comments!

So, I think I just successfully (hopefully) made comments open to everyone, not just people who have blogspot accounts.  So if you have something to say in response to my post, all you have to do is click the comment button at the bottom of the post and write away!

My French Language Exchange Friend

As I mentioned earlier today,  I met my Language Exchange Friend.  Basically, NYU sent out an email asking us to send them an email if we wanted to meet with a French person so that we could improve our French and they could improve their English.  As you might have guessed, I signed up for it and sometime last week I got an email telling me that I was paired with Sophie.  We met today for the first time and went to a tea salon to hang out for a little bit.  She brought a friend with her who is also paired up with an NYU student.  Turns out they both went to college in Normandy (where they're from) and they studied English there.  Sophie spent a year in the UK while her friend spent a year in the US.  So needless to say, they both speak English really really well, while I speak French not so well.  Anyways, hopefully it will help my French and at any rate, it's nice to have a French friend (or two).  A bunch of Sophie's other friends are also doing the language exchange program so I think that we'll be doing a lot of group dinners, which should be fun.  I'll let you know how it goes...

My Weekend in Bourgogne

This weekend, NYU took us on a trip to Burgundy (or Bourgogne in French), one of the 26 regions in France . As you can see from all the pictures below, we got to visit a bunch of really cool places and see lots of really cool things. We took the TGV (really really fast train) from Paris to Dijon and then we hopped on a bus to take us into the heart of Bourgogne. A little bit about the region: it's renowned for its rich cuisine, world-famous wine, beautiful countryside filled with vineyards, medieval villages, and sites dating back to the Roman and Celtic Antiquity, as well as some going as far back as prehistoric times. During the Middle Ages, Burgundy was not a part of France, but an independent duchy ruled by the Duke of Burgundy, and it extended to Flanders and Holland. For this reason, many Flemish artists worked in Burgundy in the 15th century, bring with them many novelties of the Renaissance and some say that the Renaissance arrived to Burgundy before the rest of France!

WARNING: I took a lot of pictures...

Vineyards! We saw a lot of them out the bus window.

Our first stop was the town of Beaune (pronounced like "bone"), where we toured Les Hospices de Beaune, a medieval hospital built for the poor by Nicolas Rolin, the Prime Minister to the Duke of Burgundy, as a way to gurantee his spot in heaven.

The hospital opened in January of 1452 and remained in operation until the 20th century. In the picture below, beds lined the left and right side of the room (the red canopies) and there was 2 people per bed, which was quite the luxury since other hospitals usually had 4 or 6 people per bed.

The kitchen where the nuns would cook for the sick. Most of the time they served soup.

The pharmacy with every imaginable animal part ground up into some sort of paste, powder, or other potion. You can't see the rest of the room, but every wall was covered with these same cabinets.

This is the altarpiece depicting the Last Judgment and was created by Roger van der Weyden, a highly renowned Flemish painter. It used to be over the altar at the end of the room with all the bed in it, where they kept the sick, but has since been moved to a light and temperature controlled room.

This was in the same room as the altarpiece and is a tapestry from the same collection as the famous the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry.

This was a really cool restaurant that we ate lunch in. We got to eat in their cellar amongst all the bottles of wine. Sorry about the size of this picture and the other one of the hospital, but I stole them from a friend.

Next stop was the Grottes d'Arcy-sur-Cure, an ensemble of caves with traces of prehistoric human occupation.

So, here is the only picture I got to take before the guide told us that we were absolutely not under any circumstances allowed to take pictures of any kind and if he saw a camera he would stop the tour. Anyways, this was one of the coolest things I have ever seen because we got to see cave paintings that are over 33,000 years old (33,000 years!!), making this the second oldest painted cave in the world that has been discovered. Our tour guide was really awesome and an incredibly enthusiastic archeology student. We saw humongous stalactites and stalagmites, some of which are broken because people used to take them for souvenirs. We also save a couple of cave paintings, including a buffalo, a deer, a cave bear, and a child's hand print. At one point in time, someone decided that it would be a really good idea to power wash the paintings in the cave, subsequently destroying about 80% of the discovered paintings in that particular cave. Once every year, archaeologists come in and look for/hopefully uncover more cave paintings. Turns out that cave people didn't actually live in these caves, but just used drew in them. Also, we saw 2 lakes in the caves and one of them was completely still, which until you see it, is incredibly weird and cool. Because of this, the calcium deposits that form on the top of the lake (and are also all over the rest of the cave) creates a white layer, kind of like how milk forms a skin when boiled.

After our tour of the cave, we got the chance to walk around a little bit and we discovered all of these little tiny caves hidden in the side of the hills.

Me, in the cave.

View from our hotel window at Vézelay, a cute little medieval village perched on a hill and surrounded by fields and vineyards.

There's the town.

And the fields.

We took a pre-dinner walk of the town. And then we went back and had some escargot! (By the way, it was delicious and I highly recommend it)

This is la Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine. The church is the focal point of the town and as you can see it's built at the very top of the hill. During the Middle Ages, it was highly frequented and a favorite place to take pilgrimages to thanks to its possession of relics of Mary Magdalene (though the Pope later discovered that those weren't real relics). The church is really cool because it was built in three different parts and looks very distinctly like 3 different pieces. Part of it is Romanesque, while another part of it is Gothic architecture and the inside has really cool striped arches that were reminiscent of the famous Mosque in Cordoba (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Mosque_Cordoba.jpg) which I visited when I went to Europe with People to People. I wanted to post a picture of the inside of the church but my camera died.

We walked behind the church and good thing we did...

...because it was one of the prettiest views that I have ever seen.






The next morning we got a tour of the city, but it was so incredibly foggy that when you looked out at the same view behind the church, all you could see was clouds.

I'm so glad we got to see the view the night before!

Vézelay was a fortified city and you can still see most of the wall that surrounds it. Here is a picture, albeit foggy, of one of the entrances to the city. Ever hear stories of how people in the Middle Ages would throw boiling oil on their approaching enemies? Well, in Vézelay, at least it wasn't true. Instead, they would throw down calcium oxide powder, which when mixed with water created a great plaster, but when without, sucks out all the water in your skin if you come in contact with it. Ouch.

Our last stop of the day was Flavigny-sur-Ozerain, where we ate lunch at a restaurant that only uses local products. I think we saw our lunch clucking out back. More importantly though, it is where the movie Chocolat with Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche, was filmed. Unfortunately though, this town was a major disappointment because it was literally deserted. I don't think that I saw any actual townspeople, and we only found 1 store and a restaurant.

The view was pretty nice though. And there were a lot of cows in the valley.

Overall, it was a really great trip and I'm so glad I got to go on it. If you ever get the chance to stop in and see the cave paintings or the view from behind the church at Vézelay, DO IT!

Whew, my fingers are tired...