Pictures -
*me in front of my dorm, it's a funny 70sey building
*Centre Pompidou (Baubourg),
*An old map of my quartier, if you look up a current map you can center my house between Place d'Italie and Parc Montsouris, over a frickin river!
*Laura's bday we had a HUGE group go for karaoke, it was a blast
*Sam eating a crêpe in front of our train stop
*Renoir's Moulin de la Galette - Musée d'Orsay
I haven't written in a while, so I figured I'd give a little update of what I've been up to. I've done lots of touring and adventuring around town, and I feel like I'm really starting to get my bearings. I don't even have to look at a map anymore to go some places. But even in new places I have an idea of how the system works now, so I guess you could say I'm no longer so grid-dependent. My french is getting better I think, I feel more confident, and I feel like I'm understanding more, although I still make "beaucoup de fautes."
I don't wanna go into like every day, but I've visited the Louvre twice, the Musée d'Orsay, Notre Dame, and a whole bunch of quartiers (neighborhoods). For the last week or so I've been hanging out every day with my new friend Sam (in the skipping video of my last post) and a bunch of other people we've met now in the dorm: a few Americans, an Estonian, a few Italians, an Israeli, a Tunisian, and occasionally some Germans. It's so much better now that I know people here, I finally found the trash bins and the washing machines, and I know which internet works best on which floors, and we can cook big dinners together :) I also found out that you can ask the front desk for sheets and a blanket lol. That woulda been nice to know earlier on, but at least now I've got double the blankets. Quite handy since the windows aren't the best and it flurried a bit today!
Friday I wandered around the Centre Pompidou and the Marais, then went out to a bar by Oberkampf with some friends. Saturday we celebrated Laura's birthday with a huge group of people from all different countries and speaking a whole variety of languages. Everyone gathered at her dorm Masséna and a huge group of like 26 took the metro to this karaoke bar making a ruckus all the way hehe. It was a blast! Sunday I chilled in the dorm and recovered a bit, then yesterday I almost went to the Catacombs with Yoko but it's closed Mondays, so we went to eat and chilled a bit instead. Then last night Sam's new french friend Larbi came for dinner and like 6 of us cooked dinner and chilled on some wine and pool in the common room.
Finally, today I mostly just chilled around the dorm, drew some dying flowers in my room, read about Paris, and studied French grammar. Nina, Neta, Sam, and I met up in the common room and did our nails, then I went to Monoprix to buy a new mug (cuz mine broke falling off the pool table last night), and I made some ramen. Now I'm chillin in the common room with my friend Bre (who's writing a paper), researching Parisian history. Lol as I was writing that someone shut off the lights and the whole room started singing Joyeux Anniversaire for a couple of girls holding a birthday cake, how cute!
A Bit About The 13ième Arrondissement
Ok so I've been reading a lot lately about Parisian history, and if you've been here before or if you're interested in France you might know a bunch, but you've probably never heard the history about my area. It's such a big city with so much history it's hard to talk about everything, so we'll start with this. I live in the 13th arrondissement, on the Rue de Tolbiac: named after a Galois town and also a big battle in 496AD between king Clovis I and the Alamanni (germanic tribe), when they all came under Frankish dominion, and Clovis got converted to christianity.
My local train station is called Glacière, also the name of a street right nearby. Sam and I went to a cute local bar down the block last week and the owner was telling me that it was named after ice-sellers that lived on the street and sold ice from the river (glace=ice in french, glacière=icebox). So I'm thinking about how far the Seine is and thinking how that doesn't make sense, and the guy tells me there was a closer river.
So I forgot about it for a bit, till today when I was reading about the arrondissement in general. The Gobelins tapestry factory nearby is famous because it's been processing, dying, and weaving tapestries the same painstaking way for like 400 years. I haven't visited yet, but I know where it is because it's where we change nightbuses. So I'm reading up on the history, and they say at some point that all the dyes from the factory flowed into the Bièvre river and they decided to cover up the river for sanitary reasons in the early 20th century because it was getting so polluted. So I remembered what my neighborhood bar-owner had said and look up Bièvre river. It turns out it my dorm is on top of the former 2nd Parisian river, which flows from a southern suburb into the seine still, but its Paris portion is invisible. It's underground and eventually flows into the sewer system. How cool is that?
I also started reading this great book where this guy goes through 21 centuries of Parisian history by metro stops, and making each chapter/century correlate to a station. It's perfect for me, and the author is adorably enamored by history. It's also in french, so it's good practice. I'm also still trying to finish Les Misérables (in english), still a daunting task, but its cool because I'm actually here and I can see the spots he's talking about. His characters also walk thru my neighborhood at one point, soo cool! I've still gotta make it to the Hugo museum by the Place des Vosges one of these days.
Aight, catch ya later
