Pictures, finally...

Here's the Moulin Rouge. I'd go see a show there, but the cheapest tickets cost more than 100 dollars each.

Here's the Louvre at night, aint it perty?

Here's the chateau at Fontainebleau. Eight centuries of French kings went to this place. It was also one of Napoléon's favorite haunts.

Here's me standing at the top of the main staircase at Fontainebleau.

A random chandelier at the chateau.

There's a room in Fontainebleau where the walls are decorated with one of the King's (I forget which one) china. Here's a plate with a depiction of Niagra Falls on it. He had it made for him after he visited the United States, before it was the United States of course.

Here's me taking a picture of me taking a picture at Fontainbleau.

Here's the kings' bed.

Here's a room and the bed where a pope stayed for a while when Napoléon held him hostage at the chateau until he would accept one of Napoléon's laws.

And here's the queens' bed. Marie Antoinette ("Anne d'Autriche" in French) had the room redecorated, but she never got to see it before she was executed during the Revolution.

A random hallway at Fontainebleau.

Another random hallway at Fontainebleau. Napoléon III had the shelves on the walls filled with over 1600 books from Napoléon I's personal library.

Napoléon I's throne room. This is the only throne room still in existence in France.

Sorry this picture is sideways. It's a picture of Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise Cemetary in Paris.

Here's another picture at Père Lachaise. I took this one so that you could get a feel for the cemetary. It's like a small town, but instead of buildings, there are just giant graves everywhere; no simple tombstones here.

The next few pictures are of the Christmas window displays in Paris's largest, and ritziest, shopping mall. When you ask a Parisian what to do in Paris around Christmas, their first answer is always "go see the windows at the Galleries Lafayette." They look more impressive in person because all of the displays move and each has its own song. It's awesome.

Here's one of the main entrances to the Galleries Lafayette.

And finally, here's a picture of my school. I don't actually have classes in this building, but this is the Sorbonne.

A few pictures

Bonjour à tous. So I still haven't had a chance to upload any of my pictures. Sorry. But, here are a few that other people have taken of me. I hope this helps you get by until you can see my pics.

So here's the Louvre on a Friday night. This is one of their indoor sculpture gardens.

And here's me standing in front of the gardens at the Palace of Versailles. Apparently they're even more impressive when there are flowers and the fountains are turned on, but I still enjoyed it.

 And here's me (in the back left corner) hanging out with some of my friends from my program on Thanksgiving Day.

And finally, here I am with some of my friends from my program going to get cafeteria food for dinner. We jokingly call it the homeless shelter. The food's not great, but the price can't be beat (it's only 2.90 € for the student meal, that's the equivilent of 4.27 US dollars).

Hey There

Hello... Sorry it's been so long since I've checked in. I feel like I say that a lot, I just get busy and this kind of falls to the bottom of my list of priorities. Anyway, things are still going well here. I had a big grammar test yesterday and I'm not sure I know how I did. That brings me to an interesting point though: the French grading system. Everything is graded on a scale of 0-20 with 0 being the worst and 20 being the best. I have never seen anybody get a 20. The average score is 10-12, decent is 12-14, good is 14-16, really good is 16-18, and anything above that is almost impossible. So what they do is you start with 20 points, and then for each mistake that you make, you lose one point. Unfortunately, that does not leave much room for error. If your teacher is nice (which thankfully, mine are) they will only take off a half point if the mistake is not serious. The difficult part comes when you get your grade. Although a 12 is average, it still has a tendency to remind you just how poorly you speak French. Fortunately, I got a 16...

Anyway, on a lighter note, I saw my first French protest today. For those of you that don't know, France is renowned for its workers going on strike. Some French people even joke that it's France's national sport. Since I've been here, there have been at least three strikes that I know about. Today, there was a strike by most of the high school professors and some of the students. The cool part of it is that they closed down one of the busiest streets in Southern Paris. It was funny, the police knew that they were going to protest so they closed down the street to give the protesters a staging area. Then all of these vans showed up as part of the protest and they tied big balloons to the top of the vans with the name of each school that was there. I felt like I was seeing a practice run of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or something. So then, after about 45 minutes of standing around, things got started and the protesters marched down the street to one of the busiest intersections I know of, right in front of a major train station. Everything just shut down and nobody acted like it was abnormal. It was weird but pretty funny. All I know is that I'm glad I was walking and didn't have to try to drive around all of that mess. Here's a link to a news story about the strike: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article_interactif/2009/11/24/les-enseignants-en-greve-pour-vos-enfants_1271261_3224.html. It's in French, sorry. I'll try to get some pictures up soon.

So last weekend I went to the Cathedral at Chartres. Chartres is a small town about an hour and a half drive west of Paris. There wasn't anything special about the cathedral except for the fact that it's one of the oldest cathedrals in the world. I guess if you include the Druids, people have been worshiping in that spot since 300 b.c. You can see walls that were built in 700 a.d. I will get some pictures of that up soon as well. (It's starting to look like my next post will just be pictures).

I also went to the opera last Thursday. We saw a German opera called Salomé. The story is pretty disturbing. Salomé is the daughter of King Herod from the bible. Well King Herod has John the Baptist arrested for something and when Salomé sees John the Baptist, she falls in love with him. Of course, when Salomé comes onto John the Baptist, he turns her down because he is entirely devoted to God. Well John the Baptist starts telling King Herod that his kingdom will not last and that the only eternal kingdom is God's. So Herod gets sad and asks Salomé to dance for him. Salomé doesn't want to because she is heartbroken over John the Baptist. King Herod offers her anything that she desires if she will dance for him. (That's where it starts to get weird. See, there's a creepy, incestuous sexual tension between Salomé and her father, King Herod). So, Salomé does a dance.

Now, I was disappointed in her dance. It's the infamous "dance of the seven veils" where Salomé is wearing seven veils and she takes them off one by one until she is totally naked. It's supposed to be very sexy and is often considered the first strip-tease. Somehow, the director of this opera managed to make this dance very unsexy and really just weird.

But anyway, back to the story... So when Salomé finishes her dance, Herod asks her what it is that she wants in return. Since John the Baptist denied Salomé, she demands his head on a platter. King Herod tries to talk her out of it, but it doesn't work. So John's head gets cut off (offstage) and then they bring it on stage and present it to Salomé. She gets really weird at this point and starts professing her undying love (and lust) for John the Baptist, to his severed head. There's a lot of writhing around on the floor and then she has a schizophrenic attack and tells John's head that she hates it, then that she loves it, then that she hates it, and so on. Long story short, she makes out with his severed head and then lays on it, weeping. The end. Like I said, it's a weird story. And the opera was in German (they had French subtitles above the stage). Needless to say, I didn't really care for it. But it was kind of cool going to the opera in Paris.

So, I think that's enough for now. I will try to be in touch and try to get some damn pictures up. If I don't talk to you before Thursday, happy Thanksgiving.

Hello There

Hey friends. Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. Anyway, I survived Amsterdam. Honestly, I was kind of disappointed. I didn't have much fun and the city is a little creepy. But I had plenty of good beer and even tried some pretty good dutch food. I'll post some pictures in a few days, but I don't have time right now. Last weekend we went to Versailles. It's pretty neat, but (and I feel horrible saying this), it's just another insanely large French palace. I know that sounds funny, but it's kind of true. After a while you start to feel like, okay, this was built by Louis XIV in the 1600's and there's a lot of guilding, and mirrors, and nice gardens, show me something I haven't seen. Anyway, rather than taking it for granted, I just take it as a reminder that I'm in Paris and I'm loving it. While it doesn't sound like Versailles was much fun, I did enjoy it and I will share some pictures from there as well. I met a French girl the other evening. I was walking to the Metro after class and I walked by the Pantheon and thought "hey Pantheon, what's up?" (because again, I see it everyday and it's pretty commonplace at this point) and when I looked back down to see where I was walking, there was an extremely cute French girl standing there. I thought to myself "now that's nice". Then she came up to me and asked me for directions to the Metro. At first, I wasn't sure that this was actually happening, I thought maybe Ashton Kutcher was going to jump out of the alley or something, so I said excuse me and asked her to repeat her question. She asked me again "Where is the nearest Metro?" So, I whipped out my map, and showed here where we were, and where the two nearest Metro stops were. Then it hit me, "I'm walking to the Metro right now". So I told her to follow me. We started walking and neither of us was saying anything. So I asked her her name and she told me it was Emily. We continued talking and I learned that she is 21, she's from Normandy, she is studying agronomy (which I later discovered is the science of agriculture), etc. The entire time I couldn't really believe that this was happening, but I figured I'd just go with it. So we get to the Metro stop and I start walking down the stairs to the train that goes my direction and I just assumed she would do the same, because why wouldn't she. She stopped me and said that she had to go the opposite direction and then she looked at me for a few seconds like "what happens now?" So, being the suave guy that I am, I said "okay, well I'll see you later" and she goes "Oh, okay, well thank you, goodbye". In retrospect, that was the worst possible way that I could have handled the situation. But at least I got some practice speaking French as our entire conversation was in French. So anyway, my new goal is to find Emily, and my second goal, if the first doesn't work out, is to find a cute French girl because in the words of one of my professors "at least if a French girls says something stupid, it sounds pretty".

Anyway, I am also trying to find new things to do in Paris or to see things that I haven't yet seen. I have an entire list of places already, but if you have any good suggestions, let me know. Talk to you later.

My Life in Paris

So life is good here. Here's a picture of the apartment that I live in. My room is on the top floor, facing the street.

And here's a picture of the family's dog, Dandi. He's very sweet, but he likes to lick your feet so you always have to wear shoes and he's only one year old, so he is really energetic. He's a fox terrier.

Here's a picture of the roundabout at the center of my town, Vanves, which is literally just south of Paris. And below that is a picture of the park that I have to walk through to get to the Metro every day.

Here's a picture from the Rodin Museum. Rodin is a famous French sculptor. This is the garden in the back of the museum, the building at the end of the picture is the museum.

Here's a picture of Collioure, that town in the South that we visited. Sorry I did not post this one earlier, I couldn't find it. I think it's my favorite picture of the place. It's from a medieaval fortress at the top of a hill in the Pyreneese Mountains looking down onto the town and the Mediterranean Sea at sunset. Could life get any better?

So this weekend, we are taking a trip to Normandy where we will visit Omaha Beach and a bunch of other World War II things. That should be interesting. Then, the weekend after that, I am going to Amsterdam with a group of girls from my program. Me, the other guy in our group Max, and ten girls in Amsterdam for Halloween, what could possibly go wrong? I couldn't refuse though. First of all, it's Amsterdam, and second, the bus ticket was € 53 round trip. I'm sure it will be a blast. Anyway, off to class.

Just Checking In

Hey there, so I don't have any fun pictures or much time; but I just thought I'd say hi. Everything is going well. I went to the Salon du Chocolat today. It's a 4 day expo that's all about chocolate. So I ate chocolate for an hour, and had some free samples of Bailey's, port, Gran Marnier, etc. It was pretty awesome but you'd be amazed how quickly you get sick of chocolate and just sweets in general(I think we only spent like 90 minutes there). I didn't buy anything because it was all really expensive. I am getting totally comfortable with my directions and finding my way around which feels nice. I drank some sour milk this morning at breakfast which I've never done before. It was probably one of the worst things I've ever tasted. So my grammar classes are going well and I start my phonetics classes tomorrow. Then I start my other classes next Monday. I'm going to a symposium on Darwin at the Collège de France this Friday, which should be interesting. And I'm going on a date with a girl from my program tomorrow night. I would tell you to wish me luck, but I think she likes me. Anywho, that's about it. Sorry to hear about the Rockies, but go Broncos. I'm also sorry to hear about the cold and snow, it's sunny and 60 in Paris right now. Well, I'm off to class, talk to you later.