Adieu Paris

Il a neigé à Paris! And it wasn’t piddily little snow either, it’s legit. We probably got about a half inch of thick, wet snow. Of course, it was beautiful when it was coming down and when it was fresh but it got pretty gross very quickly. The sidewalks were covered in slush and my shoes and socks were soaked by the time I got home but it was snow so it was completely worth it. Despite the weather, Parisians are still riding their vélos (bikes) and their motos (motorcycles). Ils sont foux!

Today is le 18 décembre, I’m going home in two days. I know I should be feeling sadder about leaving than I currently am but I’m really excited to be going home. Maybe it hasn’t hit me yet, that I’m actually leaving Paris. Still, I can’t say that I’m not ready to go home. I even had a going home dream last night. I dreamed that I was studying abroad but I was only across the street at my neighbor’s house. I could see my house, but I couldn’t go home. If that’s not a plea to send me home I don’t know what is.

Although all I’ve been thinking about home this last week, I’m trying to soak up as much of Paris as I can. I went for one last wandering stroll around the city today, even though it is only about 32 degrees and snowy outside. Today I found “81 Roo de Loo”, Julia and Paul Child’s apartment at 81 Rue de L’Université. I will definitely miss the luxury of being able to just wander through the streets of Paris, not sure where I’m going but not being too worried about it either. This was by far my favorite pastime in Paris, coupled with a nice afternoon in a café with my book. Sure, not everything was perfect about this experience. Academically, my classes were fairly disappointing and I never got to know my host family very well. Still, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. For me, this whole adventure really started seven months ago. In my mind, DC and Paris were always linked. After so many months of anticipation and imaging of what these experiences would be like, it is strange to know that they have come to an end. Right now it’s hard for me to judge the impact that all this has had on me. I know that these experiences have had a huge impact on my life but I’m still not quite sure how they will affect me when I get home. I know that this past year will probably be one of the most memorable of my life but I realize now that I’m just getting started. These past months have been great but they are really just a springboard for the rest of my life.

To all of you out there in blogger world, thank you for keeping tabs on me and allowing me to self-indulge for an hour or two every week. I hope you enjoyed reading the blog as much as I had writing it. Merci, mes amis.

I will very soon no longer be living in an old house in Paris so it is only fitting that I leave you all with one last phrase from Mr. Ludwig Bemelmans:

And she tuned out the light-
And closed the door-
And that’s all there is-
there isn’t any more.

Les Grèves

Well, I did it. I broke one of the cardinal rules of my program: I walked towards a grève (strike). Yup, I saw a blocked street, police presence, and smoke but I kept on walkin’ right towards la manifestation. More on this very vie parisienne experience in a minute….

Last night I hung out my rugby team as a final farewell get together. They played a tournoi without me yesterday afternoon (I had class, boo) and they lost both games. We were planning on going out to dinner but we ended up hanging out at their school’s bar/café place. For all the Hamiltonians, it’s kind of a mix between Opus and the VT, if you can imagine that. It was really fun to hangout with all the girls one last time and get to know them a bit better off the rugby field. I wish we could have done it more often during the season! One of my teammates is actually coming to Cambridge next summer for a stage (internship). Small world, eh?

The rugby farewell was the second in what will be a week of farewells in Paris. Besides homework (I’m almost done!) I am trying to soak up all the Paris I can in the next week. One of those things includes getting to see some of the famous French grèves. Like I mentioned at the beginning of my post, our program was on the more cautious side in telling us how to deal with grèves. Even though I knew I wasn’t in any danger whatsoever (and not the only person standing around watching the grève parade, as I like to call it) I still was coming up with crazy responses in my head in case someone came up to me, yelling at me for taking pictures and making a mockery of their serious fight protecting their retraite (retirement) or whatever they want. “Vive les ouvriers!” (Long live the workers!) was the best I could come up with. Luckily, I didn’t have to use it.

Unfortunately, Sarkozy was right when he said « Quand il y a une grève en France personne ne s'en aperçoit » “When there is a strike in France nobody notices anything.” There are so many little grèves here and there in Paris that they’re not really a big deal. Everybody knows when they are going to happen and the city knows how to deal with it accordingly. I would have been really mad though if this strike had been taking place when my family came to visit though. As it turns out, they left right in time. The Musée D’Orsay, le Louvre, and le Chateau de Versailles have all either closed entirely or closed partially due to the strike. The Centre Pompidou has all these little signs in the window that saw “En grève!” It reminds me of when Leah (ma soeur cadette) was little and used to tape a sign to a yardstick and march around the house on strike for some reason or another. The best part of the grève parade I watched this week: the food truck! Along with all the marchers and the van with the guy with the blow horn, there was a truck driving along with the crowd selling food and drinks (including alcohol, what a fantastic idea……). Hey, even les grévistes need refreshments, right?

The only way the grève is affecting me is that it makes the metro more crowded. Right now, the RER A line is on strike. That’s right, only one line. At least they’re nice about the strikes, and still operating during rush hour in the morning and evening. I took RER A to class the other day and I didn’t have to wait any longer than I normally wait for the train in the morning even though signs everywhere said that “Trafic très perturbé” (No, it’s a faux ami, traffic is just disrupted, not perturbed…...)

Nine days until I fly home!

Bon après-midi!

La Fin Approche!

The end is coming!

In proper French, the title of this post should be presque la fin du semestre or something like that. If I said “La fin approche” to a random person on the street they would think I was talking about the end of the world, like “2012 the world is going to self combust, join our cult.” I’m certainly not saying that, c’est ridicule.

Now that it’s December, my days in Paris are numbered. I have just over two weeks left in France. Unfortunately, I think will be spending most of them doing homework but that’s ok. The reason I haven’t done much work on these final projects during the semester is because I’ve been out and about seeing Paris and visiting museums and going on lovely flâneurs around the city(strolls,fancy new vocab I learned in class this week ;).Of course I haven’t done everything there is to do in Paris (that couldn’t even be accomplished if I stayed for a whole year) but I am really satisfied with the amount of stuff I’ve seen and done over the course of the semester. I am ready to go home.

Next Monday I have my last stage (internship) and my last entrainment de rugby. I don’t think I’ve talked about my stage yet. I’m not doing an internship but instead volunteering (most kids on my program are). On Monday evenings I tutor English at la Goutte d’Or, an afterschool learning center for kids in the 18ieme arrondissement. The center is supposed to help build study skills for kids in the quartier. The 18th is a heavily immigrant neighborhood, lots of Algerians and Africans. When I get off the metro, I don’t hear French on the street. It can be a little sketchy but I’ve never had a problem. I tutor one girl, Sarah (supposed to have two but Myriam hasn’t come in a while). We mostly work on verb conjugations or exercises that Sarah wants to work on in preparation for her English class at school. She hasn’t taken a lot of English and doesn’t understand a lot of what I say to her, even really simple questions. La dernier séance next week should be fun. We are going to listen to songs from High School Musical on my I-pod and fill in the blanks in the lyrics. She really liked Hannah Montana and HSM easy reader books that my mom brought from home so listening to the songs should be a fun last session. I am going to leave the books at the center because they don’t have any English books. I didn’t think that Sarah liked our sessions all that much but after I told her I was leaving soon she did seem a little sad and asked me for my email address so we can email each other.

As for rugby, after next Monday I’ll be hanging up my maillot. I don’t really have any desire to pick it up when I get back to Hamilton. I don’t really like the tackling all that much. My big annoyance is the fact that by the time I get my arms around a girl for the tackle, she other usually just passes the ball anyways and I end up out of the play. It seems pointless. We might be getting socks and shorts though next week so I can have a little souvenir of my time with les Gorettes (besides my many bruises). I am really happy I got to play this semester though. It was interesting to see how sports are organized over here and it was quite a different experience from any other team I have been on.

I’m going to track and knock of a couple last Parisian sites this weekend: La Grande Arche de la Défense and le Basilique Saint-Denis, where all the French kings and queens are buried. I’m not sure if they still thereare or not. I read that during the Revolution the place was ransacked and all the dead monarchs were thrown in a mass grave. Gross. These lovely little tidbits about the French Revolution never seem to end, do they?

Bonne soirée à tous!

Ma Famille

My family left early, early yesterday morning after spending the week in Paris with me. Hamilton has a ten day Thanksgiving break so my fam arrived Sunday morning and left yesterday morning. I was kind of sad without them yesterday. This past week was jam packed, visiting the sites of Paris and spending time with my family. It’s a good thing I get to go home in a few weeks. Yesterday I just sat in my room and tried to do homework all day (limited success). Today at least I went out around 11 and sat doing homework in a café for a couple hours. I pretty much didn’t see my host family for a week so it is kind of awkward to be going back to eating with them and acting like I didn’t just disappear for a week.

So last Sunday morning, I got up and went to Aeroport Charles de Gaulle to greet the fam. We got into Paris, found the hotel no problem, and we were off. We had to deal with some lousy weather during the week but overall it wasn’t a big deal. It was funny to go back to being a tourist in Paris all over again. I definitely haven’t been blasé about everything in Paris but it was refreshing to experience everything my family who haven’t seen it all before. Plus, we got to do a couple things I haven’t done yet either (go up Notre Dame to see the gargoyles, Chateau de Versailles) so I got to join in on some of the newbie revelry too. Plus, I got to spend Thanksgiving with my fam. We found a resturant that was advertising le dinde as its lunch special so we had a French style turkey Thanksgiving before going to my little rugby tournament. Turkey for lunch and rugby in the afternoon, almost just like home!

Mom, Dad, and Leah all did very well getting used to the French and not really speaking the language. My mom understood a lot of the signs and what people were saying from her college French classes. Leah took French in high school and has been to Paris on two different school trips, but only spent a day or two in Paris on each trip. She now takes intro Spanish at Hamilton but her French isn’t completely gone. She has to make a presentation in her Spanish class on Monday so I hope being surrounded by French for a week didn’t mess her up too much. Daddy was pretty funny throughout the week. It took him about two days to be comfortable saying merci instead of thank you but he got by just fine. There is so much English in France that even if nobody in my family spoke French we wouldn't have had any problems.

Ok, well I should get back to doing some homework. December is practically here so that means so are the due dates for my final papers. I wish it wasn’t so cold though in my room. It hard to focus and do work when I’m all bundled up in like four layers of clothing.

Good luck to my team who’s playing Trinity today! Bon courage les filles!

Bretagne...well, sort of

Ouch, Patriots. I’m almost glad I wasn’t home to watch that catastrophe. Not news that I like waking up to :(

This past weekend I had a nice, relaxing weekend in Bretagne. Well, almost Bretagne. I am only now realizing that I wasn’t in Bretagne but in the next department over, Le Pays de la Loire!

My friend’s host family invited us to stay at their beach house in Le Pouliguen, a small beach town on the west coast of France for the weekend. Yes, my final research paper due dates are quickly approaching but I definitely couldn’t pass up a trip to the French coast! I specifically remember one of my Hamilton professors telling me to blow off work in order to travel around and see more of France, so I’m really just following orders.

Like all my trips thus far in France, this one of course started out with another chance rencontre at La Gare Montparnasse. I get to la gare wicked early, pick up my tickets from the ticket window (the automatic ticket machines do not accept American credit cards) and am waiting for my friend while she does the same when I see an American couple at the window picking up their own tickets. I thought, “That’s weird, that guy kind of looks like Bob Ryan.” Well, of course, the guy turns around and it was actually Bob Ryan! What are the chances that I run into a Globe sports writer at 8:30 in the morning at a train station in Paris? I have had so many chance rencontres lately. I ran into the Patriots in London, my old high school French teacher on the metro, and now Bob Ryan and his wife at the train station. C’est marrant.

After starting my morning on that strange note, I hopped on the 9am train for La Baule Escoublac. The trip was about 3 hours, with a couple stops towards the end of the trip. Édouard, my friend’s host father met us at the train station and gave us a little tour of the town before bringing us to the house. As it turns out, the house used to belong to Édouard’s grandparents so he spend many summers in the house and has a lot of close friends who still come back to Le Pouligruen with their families. He has a lot of childhood memories in the house and I can tell that he really loves going there. He ended up being the only member of Meredith’s host family there for the weekend. His wife is in the process of starting her own business so she stayed in Paris to work and their fourteen year old daughter wanted to have friends over so she stayed behind too.

Pouliguen is a summer beach town, so everything was pretty quiet this weekend (which I see now is why the rest of the family chose to stay back in Paris this weekend). There are three small towns along the beach, which happens to be the largest sand beach in Europe. Like all the seasonal beach towns back home, a lot of the little stores and restaurants were closed for the winter and a lot of the houses were boarded up. Nevertheless, there were still a good number of people out and about and plenty of surfers, kite surfers, and people just walking along the beach so it definitely still had the beach-y atmosphere.

Meredith and I spent the weekend walking along the beach, visiting another beach town down the road with Édouard and enjoying authentic crêpes, galettes and cidre. Now, I’ve had some tasty crêpes in Paris but they are nothing compared to the crêpes Meredith and I ate this weekend. In Paris, crêpes can be either sucrée (sweet, sugary and delicious) or salée (salty, savory and delicious) but in Bretagne (and obviously Pays de la Loire), crêpes are typically strictly sucrée and galettes are sallée(There isn’t much difference between the two, just different flour used in the batter).They were hot and crispy and delicious and a perfect treat after our long bike ride along the beach (which included a bit of rain).

I may not have actually been in Bretagne, but it sure felt like an authentic Breton weekend.

J’ai gagné le match!

I won the game!

I am sorry to report the Hamilton field hockey team did not have as much luck as I did today. The Continentals fell in overtime to Skidmore 3-2 in OT in the Liberty League Championship. I followed the game on Skidmore’s website using their little game tracker and as far as I can tell the Continentals played a great second half to get out of a 2-0 hole but lost on a heartbreaker in OT. Quel dommage.

I had my second petit tournoi de rugby today and although it was cold and windy, it was great! Practices have been getting a little boring lately so I’m glad we finally had another match. It isn’t very fun to plaquer your own teammates over and over again week after week. I am trying to be friends with these girls after all…..Although we only had six girls today, it wasn’t a problem. We play 7v7 rugby (the kind that was just added to the Olympics) but the other teams were short on players too so we just played 6v6 instead. A lot of our players were either gone for the weekend or still on vacation. I’m not sure if the girls on my team live in Paris full time or if they go home on weekends. One of my host brothers goes to school during the week in Rouen but comes back to Paris on weekends. That sounds really bizarre from an American point of view but it’s fairly common over here. I found out today that our team captain lives in Toulouse, which is kind of far for going home every weekend. She wasn’t here today so I wonder if she was gone because it was the weekend or because it is their vacation week. The tournament today was small, only four girls teams and a four boys teams (including Le Porcelets, our corresponding guys team) but boy was it festive. There were mascots and even les pom-poms (cheerleaders). Le météo called for low 40s and rain so I bundled up and was prepared for the worst but luckily the rain held off and I had my underarmour long sleeve shirt so I was set. I couldn’t take a lot of pictures but I hope the one attached to this post gives you an idea of what the field looked like. Le terrain was in the 13ieme arrondissement, Stade Carpentier, just barely in Paris (la péripherique was right next to the complex, behind me in the picture). The boys in pink are Les Porcs.

So, now for the play by play recap of le final. After winning our first match easily, it was time for le final. The first team we played were beginners and hadn’t played a match yet so we scored every time we touched the ball so it wasn’t much of a game. The second team on the other hand was fierce. They had black jerseys and their supporters were yelling for them to beat les salopes (our team, in not so polite language) and yelling for them to be méchante (mean). Because of field time restriction, we only played a 5 minute match but with only six girls and the cold weather, c’était pas grave (not a big deal). The five minutes sure made the match exciting though! Les Gorettes (my team) played stellar defense and made some key stops when the other team (not sure who they were, didn’t play long enough to figure it out) was on our half of the field. In the last minute of play, my teammate Maud was still on her feet with le ballon around midfield but several opposing players were quickly descending, two girls were already trying to bring her down (she’s a toughy). I knew what I had to do. Maud saw me and read the play brilliantly. I went barreling up the middle through a hole and Maud was able to get me the ball when I was already mid stride and gaining momentum. They couldn’t stop me. I protected le ballon and did the whole Heisman pose and I was home free. It felt good. After the game, the team sang a little song with my name in it (no idea what they were saying, but Bay-ki was in it somehow) and les mecs (the guys) serenaded us with a victory song after our triumph. Pretty good for only playing 5 minutes, eh? We probably would have lost if the match was any longer. That was really the basis of our bonheur, the fact that we were able to squeak out a win. Despite the fact that I only played two really short matches, I am still wiped and am expecting to be a little sore when I wake up tomorrow.Today will probably turn out to be le point culminant (the highlight) of my very short rugby career so I'll take it.

Bonne nuit

George? C'est vous?

George? Is that you?

Just got back from a disappointing trip to the bibliothèque. I brought my computer with me to class this morning with the plan to go to the bibliothèque after class and set up shop. First, I get there and I see that the small room with all the desks is completely packed with students, not a single chair was left. Then, I find the books that I looked up but as it turns out they don’t really apply to my research paper. Very frustrating. The bibliothèques can be like that sometimes. They are open weird hours and none of them are open on Mondays, which is not convenient with my schedule because I don’t have class on Mondays so it would be a perfect day to work in a library. Now that is November, I have to actually start thinking about my schoolwork…..

Yesterday (Monday) I didn’t have any classes so I went to Cite de l’architecture et du patriomoine, a museum about architecture and the heritage of Paris at Palais Chaillot. I don’t know why they couldn’t just call it the architecture museum because that is what it was but I have found that the French always love an excuse to celebrate patrimoine français. The special exhibit I saw was called Le Grand Pari(s) and it was an exhibition of ten plans for revitalizing the greater Paris area, making it more accessible and more environmentally sustainable. It was a pretty cool exhibit even though all the displays were a little difficult for me to read. All the info was using fancy architect language so it was a little tough for me to read the French but I got the gist of it all. It was organized by the French government as a sort of contest, (un pari is a wager or a bet, conviently leads to a play on words with the word Paris…) but I don’t think they are actually picking a winner and implementing the plan or anything. It was really cool because I could imagine Paris changing over the course of the next fifty to one-hundred years and looking like some of the proposed designs. The most important concept in the contest was opening up Paris to the surrounding area (le grand Paris) and les banlieues (the suburbs, low income areas). This included improving roads and metro lines and in one case eliminating la périférique, the road that rings around Paris and separates the city from the outer banlieues. The only downside of the visit was an annoying, smelly security guard guy who kept hitting on me and telling me how this security job is only a temporary thing that he does three days a week and he’s looking for an architecture job….sure you are dude, sure you are……Trust me, he was not the architect type. When I was in his little section he kept moving into the next exhibit ahead of me so he could talk to me. It would have been a lot creepier if he didn’t appear to be a little on the simple side. I moved as quickly as possible through his section until I obviously reached the end and he had to retreat back to his little post.

After the musée, I took one of my usual wandering walks around the area with my little red Paris par arrondissement book and I stumbled upon Place d’Iéna and the statue of George Washington. The statue struck me as kind of odd. Anybody else get this feeling when looking at the picture? To me, the face looked very harsh and a little menacing, not the GW I am used to seeing. At home, we usually don’t see images or statues of George Washington in such a fighting pose. Of course we have images of him on horseback, leading the troops, but this statue struck me differently. I didn’t read the inscription on the base of the statue because I didn’t want to dodge traffic trying to get to the middle of the square, but I am guessing that the statue was erected more as a tribute to his victory over the British than to his leadership qualities both during and after the war. To me, it comes across as a very European interpretation of our man George. I’m not really a fan. I’m sure not everybody gets this vibe, but you will all have to tell me your opinion after your own visits to Paris :)