Van Gogh, Monet and Quais

Yesterday we joined the BYU art history study abroad on an excursion to Anvers-sur-Oise (the town where Van Gogh spent the last 81 days of his life, painted 80 canvases and died) and Giverny (home of Monet's famous gardens). They were so beautiful!!!! Plus impressionist art is probably my favorite, the only thing that would have made it better is if we could have gone to Renoir's home was well.

In Anvers-sur-Oise, they have signs depicting Van Gogh's canvases in front of the scene that he painted. It's super cool because you can see exactly what he was seeing when he painted it. Here's a couple examples:

It was so cool seeing them in person. My favorites though were the wheat fields. They were so pretty! And the lighting was beautiful!

So after wandering around the quaint town for a little bit (and I saw a Brittney just like Buster, it was so cute!) we went to this interactive museum that was actually really cool. It explained what life was like during the time of the impressionists and it was very non-museumy. After that we headed back to our purple-and-pink bus to go to Giverny!

Giverny was absolutely gorgeous! I was actually surprised that the gardens weren't really big--they were definitely big, but I guess I've been spoiled at all the chateaus I was picturing acres or something. But the  house was exactly how I would have imagined Monet's house to be, all in pastels of blue, green and yellow, very open and airy just like his paintings. I couldn't take any pictures inside, but here is the view from his balcony:

the view from the balcony

on the porch

And the gardens of course were also amazing. We were there at the perfect time of year for the water lilies and all of the flowers were blooming. It smelled soooo good, especially the honeysuckle.

So when we got back to Paris I ran over to the Latin Quarter to see this bookstore that all my friends have been telling me about. It's called Shakespeare and Company and it's really cool. All the books are in English and everyone in there was American, which was interesting. But it really did remind me of Flourish and Blotts like someone said-there aren't bookstores like that anymore. I could have spent hours in there just browsing. Of course if I was looking for something specific that would be pretty hard to do...

the front

The building used to be a monastery in 1600 so I think that
explains the piece of a stained glass window

they have a chair from a cathedral upstairs to sit on

the stairs

this is super small, but it explains what their mission is and
I thought it was pretty cool

So after an amazing last dinner with our host mom and her daughter, we finished packing and decided to give her our gift. My roommate Erin had the brilliant idea of buying her an antique book from the quai stalls along the Seine because she collects them. And what was even more brilliant is that we got her an English reader from 1925 as a thank-you for helping us with our French. She absolutely loved it and said that she's never had students as nice as us haha. It was so cute seeing how excited she got :)

Me and Erin with Claude

our front door!

Well it's time to say goodbye to Paris :( I'll miss you!

P.S. Congratulations to my little sister Annica! She graduates from high school today. Good luck! Wish I could be there!

Isn't she beautiful?

Did I mention how much I hate packing?

So instead of starting, I turned on some T Swift and Tangled and did my homework instead. Sad huh? But not really because they are just blog posts about my adventures in Paris. If you want to read them you can here and here. The first is about my favorite part of Paris, the Latin Quarter. And the second is my "after" post about Mont Saint Michel. Check 'em out! Also: here's my last photo essay. It was inspired by Raymond Depardon, a really famous French photographer.

Well I probably should probably get to that packing...I'm back in Paris after getting up at 6:15 am, and sitting in the airport for twice as long as I was planning due to a delayed flight. But I made it! I loved Nice, but I have to say it was really cool to feel like I was coming "home" when I got off the Breguet-Sabin metro stop on line 5 and walked to 38 Rue Richard Lenoir. I'm excited to see Lyon and Geneva, but I really do love Paris, and it will be sad to leave it on Thursday morning. It really is unlike any other city in the world.

Nice and Monaco!

Alright it's now Sunday and I haven't blogged about the last 4 days...getting behind! Bullet points and pictures it is!

Thursday:

• excursion to Ecouen-the chateau of Anne de Montmorency. It was pretty cool, but I'm afraid I'm a little chateau'd out...
• my roommate Erin had the brilliant idea of doing a photo scavenger hunt around Paris since we know the city well now. It was super fun! And my friend Lorraine came down from London so she joined us. 
• Some of the requirements:
• a giant jar of nutella
• someone obviously foreign
• gypsies
• eiffel tower
• in a fancy perfume shop
• arc de triomphe
• a nun
• a couple making out
• the giant head at Les Halles.... you get the idea

giant jar of nutella

Smelling fancy perfume

Lorraine!

• we made dinner for our host mom Claude and it turned out really good! Taco salad with all the works, homemade salsa and homemade chocolate chip cookies. It was a bit of experimenting because I had to use a scale and guesstimate the ingredients. You'd be proud mom they turned out great! Claude was so cute asking all seriously how to do it. And Gloria, her 5 year old granddaughter ate with us too. I told them it was my mom's recipe (actually it's Ellen's but I got it from my mom's blog and that would have been more complicated to explain) and Gloria asked if my mom was a pastry chef. haha it was adorable. 

• after dinner we headed out to the Eiffel Tower to hang out with some people and see the lights. I love Paris!

Friday:

• I joined the BYU art history study abroad for one of their tours of the Louvre. It was pretty cool to hear the art professor's takes on some of the paintings
• we wandered around the street stalls along the Seine and found some cool souvenirs. I love those little booths!
• I met up with some of my fellow students to help the BYU Madrid study abroad professor's family move into the french professor's apartment for the weekend. Our professor and his family are in Madrid, so we aren't supposed to get into any trouble while they are gone haha. 

Friday night/Saturday morning: Off to Nice!

It all started at 11:15 pm on Friday night with all of us girls meeting up to take the last RER to the airport. That night's sleep wasn't the best, half of us slept on the concrete and the other half tried to sleep around the handles on those chair-bench things. Plus there was a beep that went off every 15 seconds and a screaming child.... yeah we didn't really sleep. BUT it was totally worth it, because we spent all of Saturday at the beach and it was gorgeous!! The most perfect day at the beach ever. The water was perfect to cool off in and the rocks are actually really comfortable to lie on (but not really to walk on). 

the water was perfectly calm and super clear

the sky!

the beach

this is what we did almost all day

walking around Nice!

Today was the complete opposite weather--a giant thunderstorm and pouring rain. We all got soaked but it felt good on our sunburns. We managed to find the church, and everyone was super nice to us. It was actually kind of a miracle that we found it, because we just went to the bus stop with the same name as the street and hoped it was close. Luckily Erin recognized that one of the guys on the bus was carrying a Gospel Principles manual so we just followed him haha. And we found it!

the start of the rain

in front of the church

 

After church we decided to go walk around Monaco. Which sounded like a great idea, except for the fact that it was a torrential downpour that went on for hours.  Plus all of the grocery stores closed at noon. So it was definitely an adventure! But we managed to figure out the buses and make it there to spend an hour walking around before catching the last bus back to Nice. 

There were a ton of nice cars

I borrowed Casi's flip flops cause my TOMS got totally soaked last
night in the first thunderstorm

The back of the casino, barefoot. After almost
splitting my head open slipping on the wet tile in
flip-flops I decided no shoes was a better option 

So my feet have a TOMS tan line, are sunburnt on top and soaking wet. 

So that sums up my crazy weekend, one more day left in Nice before we go back to Paris for our last two days!

Catch Up

Wow these last 3 days have been insane. I've been trying to fit in everything else that I haven't yet seen in Paris, and I've been to some really cool places that you never hear about being in Paris for only a couple days.
First off: The Pantheon. It was originally designed to be a church dedicated to St Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, who saved them from the Huns. The architect wanted it to rival the Sistine Chapel. But they finished it right as the Revolution was starting so the State seized it and turned it into the "Temple to the Nation."

It's kind of weird that it was supposed to be a church cause it really does look like a Greek or Roman temple. So the "Temple to the Nation" idea actually fits better than a church. But it's gorgeous inside. And they have the tombs of all the famous Frenchmen. So we got to see the tombs of Rousseau, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Louis Braille and the Curies!






Next up: the Arènes de Lutèce

These are almost the last roman ruins in Paris, and it's a huge amphitheater where they used to have gladiators fight all the way up into the Middle Ages. You can still see the niches in the walls where they used to keep the animals. Nowadays the people just hang out there, old guys play petanque and little kids play soccer. You can see them in the background of this picture with my friend Charmaine. We were best friends in elementary school and we got to hang out for a little while!





Wednesday night I went to the ballet at the Opera house! The dancing was super good of course, but I was in the cheap seats so I could only see half the stage. Plus it was contemporary and I was hoping for ballet. It was kind of funny to have contemporary art against the super classical interior. But regardless it was still super cool to dress up and be able to see a performance there! The Opera house is soooo pretty.

Well running out of time again....hopefully I'll post tomorrow. I'm off to Nice for the weekend!

Only a week left in Paris?!

Yes that is correct. We leave for Lyon next Thursday. Insane. Where has the time gone?? As excited as I am to go on more excursions, I will definitely miss Paris. It really is like no other city in the world. And I'm now enough of a Parisian to:

• read part of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and recognize all the places he's talking about cause I was there this morning (no joke I really was)
• ride the metro home by myself like it's no big deal
• wander around without a map until I run into a metro to get home
• have perfect strangers (usually French ones) ask me for directions on the metro or street and be able to explain it to them (also in French)
• have a couple favorite pastry shops and know where not to buy crepes
• be annoyed by the stereotypical American tourists who are doing all the wrong things and being extremely rude
• have bread 3 meals a day
• be in love with nutella
• be used to eating dinner at 8 or later (or should I say 20h?)
• not be surprised by walking into a cloud of cigarette smoke on the way home, or anywhere really (but it still freaks me out when they swing their lit cigarettes while passing you on the sidewalk. they could totally burn you! as if secondhand smoke isn't bad enough!)
• not be fazed by a police check on the metro
• and my personal favorite:

• leading my French friends around Paris without a map because I know the area so well (!)

Crazy. And the other day I climbed the stairs out of the metro realizing I had no memory of walking out of the metro. It was so routine to find the right exit that I didn't even think about it! It made me so excited haha.

But don't worry, I've been soaking up all that's left to do in Paris. Are you ready for the rundown of the last 3 days?








Monday:
We went to the Opera again to see la Grande Salle cause it was closed the last time we were there. And we happened to also get tickets for Wednesday night to see the ballet in the Phantom of the Opera's Opera house. More on that later.

ignore my weird face I think I was mid blink

I was in the Opera, wearing a dress, had to curtsy!

 Then we went shopping on the Champs Elysees after I found my souvenir for my Dad! Can't tell though, it's a surprise :) I was hoping to get my gift for Annica-perfume- but holy cow it's so expensive here! 70+ euro for one bottle, that's more than 100 dollars! So that didn't happen. But it was fun trying all the perfumes, it's all fancy. I was way out of my league haha. And I embarrassed myself in H&M asking the vendeuse if they had any wallets. The word for wallet is portefeuille, and that sound (feuille) is notoriously difficult for Americans to say. She looked at me like I was crazy. Apparently I was saying port-fay, when you really say port-eu-fay. They sound practically the same to me, but they are evidently very different.

Tuesday:
I met one of our old french exchange students Aliénor for lunch at the Jardins du Luxembourg. She was in town for Roland Garros (the French Open) with a friend so it was perfect. It was super fun getting to see her again and I managed to talk in only French while understanding almost everything they said!!! Yay! Plus I led them around the Latin Quarter which was really funny seeing as they are from near Paris and I am an American.  (haha she also said she had to look up where the Latin Quarter was on wiki to figure out where to meet me) And they said that my french is really good! That was really good to hear especially after the wallet incident haha.

Me and Alienor

After lunch and class, we decided to go finish the Latin Quarter walk, the required one for this week. So we wandered around-most of it was pretty familiar cause we are there a lot. We found the narrowest street in Paris, it's called "La rue du chat qui peche" the street of the cat who fishes. The street is right next to the Seine, and during the Middle Ages, there was a cat who would fish and bring it's catch to the little alley and eat it. So to describe that road, people would always just say "oh it's the one with the cat who fishes". I think that is so cool.

I think it's exactly my height across!

We also found this random niche by the Academie Francaise and had some fun taking pictures in it.

Four of us squished in

Wednesday:
Went on my favorite walk of the whole trip this morning. I had done part of it with the 462 class, but me and Rachel decided to finish it. First we went to the Musee Cluny, which is the museum of the middle ages. It was so cool! It is housed in a Renaissance Hôtel (not a hotel, but that's the word for the fancy houses the rich would build in the city. Sort of mini-chateaux). But half of the museum's walls are from a Roman bath situated in the same spot. The walls are really high and still standing. Super cool. Here are some highlights of the museum:

These are the remains of the original statues in Notre Dame. They were decapitated and defaced during the Revolution because even though they were depicting Old Testament Kings, the people thought they were kings of France. Plus they were very anti-religion anyways, so they just destroyed whatever they felt like without organizing it or anything. This is the reason Victor Hugo wrote the Hunchback of Notre Dame--he was pleading for Paris to restore it before it disappeared. In his time it was a ruin and the revolutionaries had used it as a barn to store animals.

There was also a really cool sword exhibit, showing how swords changed, why there were important as weapons and symbols. It was fascinating. This is the sword of Charlemagne.










This guy was killed by a sword, you can still see the marks in his skull.

In addition to the viking swords and various other types, they found these little toy swords, and displayed them with a playmobile guy. The exhibit was actually super creative I loved it. They had famous sword scenes from movies playing on the walls, including Monty Python--"I'll bite your legs off!"

Well there's a lot more to tell, but it's way too late and we have an excursion early tomorrow to Ecouen, another chateau near Paris. And I'm meeting up with my roommate who's coming down from London! I'll have to finish up tomorrow. Night!