WAIT A SECOND, I ACTUALLY LIVE HERE?

This last week (I wrote this mostly Sunday)–
Well I’ve spent just about a week in Paris now for real, and I love it! This is the first time in forever that I don’t have any real obligations, since I don’t start school until February. It’s quite unlike my typical life equation (18 hours of class+20 hours of job+club presidency+club vice presidency+friends-sleep=stressed out Lena). So I have plenty of time to get my stuff all organized, figure out my dorm, figure out my neighborhood, and chill with people ☺ After hanging up my travelin shoes, I realized just how temporarily I’d been living. My suitcases were still unpacked, my fridge was empty except for some cheese and crackers, and I was still using my coat for a blanket on top of just a travel sheet.
I have to give a BIG thanks to my mom for making sure I had a set of travel silverware and food for the plane. The food continued to be part of my meals until about Monday. That’s two weeks of relying heavily on cashews, craisins, crackers, apricots, and a bunch of tea bags hehe. When I’m in travel mode I really don’t need much. I hadn’t used real shampoo, conditioner, or a brush since I’d left Margaret, because a bar of soap works decently and is easier to fly with!
At some point that life gets a little trying, so I’ve spent the week making my dorm into a real home. I unpacked Monday, decorated, did some grocery shopping, and lots of wandering around in the days since. I’ve checked out 4 of the grocery stores within a couple blocks of me, which all have their strengths or deals on certain things over the other ones. I wanna start going to the boulangeries, epiceries, and boucheries, etc. soon, but I’ve gotta look up a little more vocab hehe. I got signed up for my classes, filled out some dorm paperwork, got my cell phone working, etc. K I’ll give you some key moments from the last week.

Monday - I met Antonia after school and got to check out “le Catho” – my new school. L’Institut Catholique is in the 6th arrondissement, so I made my way over there and Antonia showed me around. It’s pretty cool, an old style and a bunch of buildings all built up around courtyards. We went for coffee with Jordan and talked about traveling, and Paris and learning French. I can’t wait till I can understand French as well as they can, they seem confident that a month or so down the line I’ll be fine. I do feel like I’ve learned a lot this week already. I guess we’ll see.
Monday night – I tried to plug my extension cord into the converter in a new plug, it exploded, I screamed a bit, and all the lights went out. My room and the one next to me went dead thanks to my American plug hehe, but it was a great excuse to have a conversation with the girl next door. I forget her name, but she’s from the east of France, and I’d just learned the word for electrical socket (prise) earlier that day, so I could sort of explain what happened, and she could explain to the worker guy in better French.

Tuesday I cooked my first real meal – pasta, tomato sauce, cut up fresh tomatoes, and sautéed onions and red peppers, and milk. Mmm ☺ It was a bit haphazard though. I cut up the onions and red peppers and realized I had no oil, so I had to go back out and get some. The pasta was done, but I had no way to strain it. Fortunately there were a couple girls in the kitchen, and one said it was cool if I used her strainer and also her dishsoap afterwards. Ooo best part of the meal though I found the most amazing milk of my life. The company’s like all proud to have only French cows and French processing n stuff, it’s called “j’<3 le lait d'ici" or "I love the milk from here" how cute! and damn good milk. My electricity went out again after I just turned on some light, so I had to go back downstairs to get it fixed.

Wednesday morning – there’d been some misunderstanding when I went down to get my light fixed the night before, so a worker came pounding on my door in the morning to replace what he thought was a broken light. I woke up all confused and answered him in English till I realized where I was and switched to French. It’s times like that it hits you, wait a second I really do live in France now.
Wednesday – I went to a “centre commerciale” with Yoko to buy a blanket. We were just chatting online and she said she was bored, so I said I was gonna go “chercher un couverture” and asked if she wanted to come. But apparently I should have said “trouver,” otherwise it means “do you want to sleep with me?” hehe we had a good laugh about that. So we went to a mall by her dorm, got a cheap quilt for a wonderful 18 euro, and wandered around a few other stores checkin out the goods. Then we went back to the dorm and cracked open a bottle of wine. It was a really good time. I get some good practice with my French hanging out with Yoko. She’s really fun too. It was a bit easier though when Laura came back from class, cuz she could help translate.

Thursday – I found this awesome park by my house. Parc Montsouris was created under Napoleon the 3rd to give Parisians a break from the city. They made parks in all 4 cardinal directions and Montsouris is the southern one. It was an old stone quarry, then when they moved some city cemetery, they put all the extra bodies in the area where montsouris is now. There’s also 2 train lines that go thru the park so it was a bit difficult to build, but they did a great job. It’s huge, there’s a pond, a hill, a waterfall, a lot of lovely grassy and treey areas, a restaurant, a merry-go-round, and a bunch of awesome statues. There’s also a monument to a guy who was killed in WWI by a german bomb in that spot in the park. I haven’t wandered the park completely because I decided to chill on a spot on the hill to write and people-watch. A newly-wedded couple by the pond was taking wedding pictures (aww), there were a bunch of people just going on walks with their dogs, with people, with kids, on their own, there’s a load of different bird types, and there was this great group of boys running around and wrestling on the grass of the hill just below me. They were funny to watch because one boy was videotaping it, and they’d get most ridiculous or dramatic when they knew the camera was on them.

Friday – I went to the Louvre with Antonia and her art class. AWESOME way to go to the louvre. I got to meet and chat with a bunch of students in French, and see the louvre and a bunch of amazing art. But best of all we got all the background info about the artists, the meaning of the art, and the historical time frame in which it was created. I learned a lot more about the rooms as they were as part of the palace than I remember learning before. If you can look some of these up please do, because I didn’t bring my camera when we went, but it’s likely I’ll go back a lot so I’ll probably have pics in the future. It’s just a sampling of the things I really liked or got a lot of notes about.
Apollo Hall – awesome, it used to be decked out with kings in all the important slots, but it was burned in 1661 at the start of the reign of Louis XIV (he was a bit traumatized), so they redid the room. All of the important slots got filled in with artists and architects instead, and the ceiling is decked out to represent the cycle of the sun (in honor of the sun king).
Les esclaves de Michelange, Canova’s Psyche et l’Amour (love this one, we have a magnet on the fridge parents), La victoire de Samotrace (French name for winged victory) – I never realized how rare it was to have a truly Hellenistic piece, since most work you see in the greek style is merely roman copies.
La Salle des Saisons, Thomas Hardy’s La religion et l’heresie, Pierre Puget’s Persée et Andromède, and another one by Puget with a lion attacking this guy, awesome but I forgot the title. Alexandre rencontre Diogène I think also by Puget.
The four corners of the statue from Place de la Victoire – HUGE statues of slaves with differing ages and levels of rebelliousness left on their faces. They represent territories conquered by France I believe: Brandebourg, Espagne, l’Empire, Hollande.
Lastly we went to this room with a bunch of statues that came from Louis XIV’s private palace, Marley. Versailles was too big apparently, so he made a private palace (still huge and impressive), and it was of course destroyed in the revolution, so the statues that survived were moved to Paris. There were 2 at the Place de la Tuileries, and 2 at the Place de la Concorde, but now they’re just copies and the originals are in the Louvre. I believe Coycevox was the artist and the back two were Mercury and Glory, but I don’t remember the other 2. Anywho it was awesome.

Interesting initial observations of paris/Parisians:
- everyone’s frickin stylin. Heels, or awesome shoes, nice clothes and coats and scarves, everything matches. Even the weird items of clothing you see can usually be pulled off well by the person wearing em. They sell awesomely stylish clothes everywhere too, even the cheap places. I don’t know if the clothes stores came first or the style, but its pretty cool. I guess it can get a bit heavy though, it’s hard to feel comfortable if you go out without having put together a well-planned outfit.

- berets and striped shirts – a very stereotypical French style, you do see these items a lot, though rarely together. Berets a lot, but I feel like they’re pretty popular in the states these days too, it’s also winter, so hats in general are a good idea. Stripes aren’t as common as certain circles in the states though I’d say.

- cigarettes – frickin everywhere. They did ban them inside for the most part in France, but most cafes/bars have either a plastic-enclosed porch area with heat lamps, or a smokey room in the basement or something for people to smoke in. You can smoke in the dorm rooms though not in the common areas. Oh, craziest part – every European airport I’ve been in has had either a ventilated room, or a spot to go on the roof or something so people can smoke. They definitely wouldn't allow that at O'hare, major security breach to allow people outside.

- Dog poop on the streets – watch out for that shit, especially when its raining.

- Diversity – Really surprising actually, there’s a great deal of diversity here. And the people of varying races have varying levels of economic standing too, it appears. The bums and the stylish businessmen are all shades. Granted there are issues with immigrants and religion and such in France, the law they wanted about la voile was a big deal last year. But I think there’s a much more divisive socioeconomic and cultural line between the races in the states than here. My first night in town when we went to that bar the Frog, I was having a conversation in french with a couple guys, and the white guy was saying about the black – “see my friend here he’s just French. Not half-african, half-french or anything, just French. It’s so weird in the states how you have to divide people.” Granted I’m in Paris, not the banlieus. The history of racial division in the states is also a lot longer and more bitter than here. There’s pride in the cultural divisions in the states too, since we had a lot of sadness come out of the melting pot idea. I don’t know what to think of it yet, I need some more time here, but it’s definitely interesting.