Mom and Brad's Visit: Thanksgiving Segway Tour!

Turkey, smurkey.  This Thanksgiving we decided to forego the more traditional coma-inducing feast (mostly because France isn't really into the whole turkey/gravy/cranberries/pumpkin pie thing) and do our own thing: Segway tour of Paris!  In case you aren't familiar with segways, here's a little video: what not to do on a segway/what Brad did.

Invalides at night.

Me, trying to get a picture of everyone else riding their segways - while I was riding mine...

Ferris wheel outside the Tuileries Gardens.

Place de la Concorde 

Brad, listening intently to our tour guide.  This picture is post fall.

Mom standing outside of the Louvre.

Brad and Mom in front of Invalides. 

Mom and I in front of Invalide.  It was so incredibly cold that none of us could feel our appendages.

Mom and Brad's Visit: Musée Marmottan Monet

There's a museum really close to my apartment that Beatrice is always telling me to go to, and I finally went with Brad and Mom.  It's a large collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art, including the world's largest collection of works by Monet, all housed in what used to be Marmottan's private residence.  One of Dad's colleagues, when I had dinner with him, told me that they used to not get many visitors and then they tacked "Monet" onto the title and admissions have soared...

Mom, looking at "The Japanese Bridge" (one of many entitled that).  We found out that Monet had cataracts as he got older, which greatly contributed to the blurriness in his paintings that he's famous for.  If you compare them to his earlier work, before all of the water-lilies and stuff, you can really see the difference--they are much crisper and clearer, and some actually look like they could be photographs.

More Monet's in the staircase. It's kind of blurry because we weren't supposed to be taking pictures.  (Don't worry though, I didn't use flash)

Mom outside of the Museum.

Mom and Brad's Visit: Friend Dinner

My friend Sara's parents were here at pretty much the exact same time that Mom and Brad were here.  So Sara decided to put together a little dinner party for all of us and some of our friends one night.  It was delicious and fun.

The Eiffel Tower right before dinner and right after it had stopped doing its 5 minutes of sparkling.  That blurry blob on the left is Brad.  Looking good, no?

Ferris, Mr. and Mrs. Atalay, Mom, Brad, Rachel, me, Kelsey, and Sara at dinner

Rachel, Ferris, Kelsey, me, and Sara in front of the Eiffel Tower after dinner.

Kelsey, safely helping Mom and Brad make it back to their hotel.

Mom and Brad's Visit: Galeries Lafayette

So I know that I've already put up pictures of Galeries Lafayette, but it's one of my favorite places, so here's some more photos...

All decorated for Christmas!

Mom and Brad at the champagne bar.

Mom and I at the champagne bar

The three of us

More pictures of the Champs Élysées.

Mom and Brad's Visit: Invalides

We stopped by Invalides, which used to be a hospital/retirement home for the cities war veterans, but is now has museums and monuments, all pertaining to the military history of France, and is most famously known as the resting place of Napoleon.

Huge doors to Napoleon's entrance of the church/dome and where he is buried.

That's Napoleon in the red coffin, which I think is something like 5 layers thick, in the fashion of the Egyptians.  There's no getting through that thing...

The dome inside Invalides, which apparently when Louis XIV saw, said that it was too high, so they built another lower dome within it and then repainted the ceiling.

The alter thing for Napoleon. I'm not exactly sure what everything is because we didn't take the audiotour and that didn't have sign anywhere.  And it was under intense renovation.

Mom, chilling with a knight.

Three barrel guns, for when you're really in the massacring mood.

A small knight suit.  For a child, I think?

I'm pretty sure that this armor stuff was from Asia.

Armory.

This statue is entitled "Vive la France!"
View of the courtyard at Invalides
This is kind of a bad picture due to the scaffolding, but you get to see the dome of the church better than in any of my other pictures.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving (even though I still had class today).
Word on the (online) street is that there was a jump rope team from Strongsville and one of NYU's theater groups in the parade today. Sounds like a good parade to see/bad one to miss.

Eat an extra slice of pumpkin/pecan/sweet potato/all three pie for me!

And, you know what Thanksgiving means...time to start listening to CHRISTMAS MUSIC!

Speaking of Christmas, here's a little gift from me (and Oprah) to you.

ps. this is only slightly related, but the other day Dianne introduced me to the most hunger-inducing website ever. warning: don't try to view site while you're sitting in a turkey-induced coma. it will only cause more stomach pains...
foodporndaily.com

Mom and Brad's Visit: A Day in Montmartre

Mom, Brad, and I took a trip to Montmartre (the area where Sacre Coeur, among other things, is located).

Le mur de "Je t'aime". The wall of "I Love Yous" This is a really cool art project that Frédéric Baron thought of when he asked his brother to write down the words "I Love You" on a piece of paper. He continued collecting "I Love Yous" in as many languages as possible and he ended up accumulating more than a thousand writing samples. From those, he turned 311 of them into a wall of glazed tiles.

Mom and Brad enjoying the Mur de Je t'aime

The whole wall. Can you find the English phrase?

One of the two remaining windmill in Montmartre. There were originally 14 on top of this hill.
We walked up this hill. It was really steep.
Another window of a different kind...Moulin Rouge (translates to Red Mill)


Brad with a little wind in his hair

Both of us by the Moulin Rouge. We were standing over a vent, hence the hair.

Expansion on David Sedaris, as requested by Dad

He started off by reading an essay from his new book, which you can read an excerpt of here and the full thing if you have a nytimes.com subscription. Interestingly enough, it's not in his French translation of the same book. I think that his stories are definitely funnier when he reads them aloud, though I went with 2 French friends and even though I would qualify them as fluent in English, they definitely didn't catch all the jokes (especially when he talked about Costco). In fact, during the Q&A session, someone asked about differences in translations. Lucky for us, the guy who is currently translating his new book was in the audience and had just sent David a list of questions regarding the translation. Also, David had just been in some Asian country where he had an interpretor reading along with him and he said that he never realized how difficult it was, just because a lot of times people in different cultures don't even understand things, like what a typical house in a typical American suburb would look like, or something along those lines.

After the book excerpt, he made another NYU girl who was in the audience come up to the front and sit in an unoccupied chair that was directly next to him (and presumably for anything that he would like to put there, or if he needed to sit down), since he said that if he was in the audience and was standing, he would just be staring at that one empty chair, wishing he could take it. Following the chair interruption, he read the New Yorker article that I mentioned in the last post. Guess you'll just have to wait for it to be printed to read it, but it was about going on a book tour and about the little gifts that he gives to fans, as well as some of the weirdest stories that he has heard from them. I also mentioned that it was currently in its 14th draft and even while he was reading it, he had his pencil out, making occasional notations. Looks like there'll be at least one more...

Lastly, he read us some excerpts from his diary, which he has read before on NPR. I can't really remember what he read, but they were funny and to me, sounded just like the way he writes his essays and articles. Then there was a short Q&A, where aside from the translation question, I didn't really think any of the questions were too interesting (some people just asked annoying questions, trying to be funny, and failing miserably). When the reading was done, everyone lined up to get their books signed. I wanted to buy one but of course by the time I got to the front of the line, they said that they were all sold out :( I had him sign one of my friend's books (she had to leave early), so at least I got to meet him.

The audience was filled mainly with Americans who were familiar with his work already and I think that because of this, he was funnier. Had it been a more French audience, even if they were fluent in English, I think a lot of the jokes would have not made quite the same impact. The thing that boggles my mind about his books though is that they're all events that have happened to him. I'd say that I lead a fairly interesting life, yet why is it that I never meet French sex offenders with metal plates in their head who keep inviting you into their cottage for coffee to show you his disability train card that gets him 75% off because you're the only person in your small village who will even look at him?

Also, while googling him for more info, I found a list of books that he recommends. And now I want to read all of them. Looks like I now what I'm going to be doing this winter break...

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Mom and Brad got here today and their hotel is on the Champs-Élysées, which is beautifully decorated for Christmas already. You don't really get the same effect in photos because you can't see the icicles in the trees blinking.



And then I walked down the Champs-Élysées while listening to Les Champs-Élysées. Classic.
ps. when you click on the link, make sure that you watch all the way to the end. there's something special if you make it to the 2:24 mark.

David Sedaris!

Tonight, at the American Library of Paris, they held a program called "An Evening with David Sedaris" In case you're unfamiliar with his work, (though if you were really reading my blog carefully, you would have listened to him reading his essay on NPR about going to the movies in Paris) he's a humorist, writer, comedian, and frequenter on NPR. He came out with a new book of essays that came out this past summer and tonight he read an essay from the new book, an article that he's in the process of writing for The New Yorker (he's on his 14th draft), and some excerpts from his diary. It was quite the enjoyable night and the library only had room for about 50-70 people, so it was pretty intimate and definitely not something that you could have ever found back in the US, where he's way too famous.

Now, back to the homework!

C'était un rendez-vous

While writing and researching my response paper (a weekly assignment) to our class at Sacré Coeur for my Paris Monuments class, I came upon this 8 minute short film called "C'était un rendez-vous" (It was a rendez-vous/appointment) that was made in 1976. The whole film is an uninterrupted drive through Paris early in the morning and ends at Sacré Coeur . Then I found that Snow Patrol (a really good UK band, if you've never heard of them) used the last 5 minutes of the movie as the video for the song "Open Your Eyes". It's really cool and you should check it out if you have 5:50. Here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybr8Z6pzVs0

Alright, have to go finish that paper...

Weekend in Stockholm

I went on my first not NYU planned trip this weekend and I went to Stockholm, Sweden. It was kind of a random choice - cheap flights, none of my friends had been there, etc. But anyways, it was a really good trip and I don't think I've ever seen so much blond hair in my life. Oh, and I don't have any pictures of it, but all of the food was soooooooo delicious. We ate reindeer, lingonberries, cloudberries, and meatballs (and nachos at one point, but that's not very Swedish).

A square that we passed through on our way to the Vasa Museum.


View of the water.

More water.

We visited the Vasa Museum, which is devoted to the Vasa ship, which sunk in Stockholm harbor in August 1628. The wreck was salvaged in 1961 after 333 years under the sea.

This is the diving suit that the divers wore when they were salvaging the Vasa.

View of the back of the boat. The Vasa is 95% original and originally painted lots of different colors.

Cannon port. All of them used to have lions heads on them, but a lot of them either fell off or are only half left.

Front of the Vasa

Skeletons of one of the victims from the crash.

They reconstructed the heads of some of the victims based on their skulls. They were incredibly real looking, as you can see in the picture below.

There were pores and it even looked like they were sweating. It was so creepy and real.

Another view of the Vasa.

More Vasa. Though I would imagine that the rope is part of the 5% that was reconstructed.

Before we took our ferry ride (which is part of their public transportation system!)

Gamla Stan, or old town, which was really cute and really touristy.

The Royal Palace in Gamla Stan.

Another picture of the Old Town.

Sara and I next to a gnome outside of a gnome store in Gamla Stan.

View of Gamla Stan.

More Stockholm.

Guess what time it was when this picture was taken? 5pm, and it's pitch black. Right now, the sun rises at about 8 and it's completely dark at 4pm. Apparently, in wintertime, there's only 6 hours of daylight.

Stockholm at night.

More Stockholm at night.

Trying to get a picture of myself, but it was too windy and cold to get any good pictures.

Kelsey, Rachel, Sara, and I, trying to stay warm.

Art in the center of town.

View from the pedestrian bridge leading into Gamla Stan.

Other side of the bridge.