T.H.I.S

For those of you unfamiliar with the acronym, the title of this blog post is "Thank HaShem [G-d] It's Shabbat!" and it seems particularly fitting, given my overall attitude last weekend. Here's the story:

I love Paris, in fact, it's in my top three favorite places in the whole world. It happens fairly regularly, though, that when I ask my friends what they envision my life to be like here they say something along the lines of "Well, you get up and look unimaginably chic. Then you stroll down the Champs Elysées munching a warm croissant on the way to class. You maybe study, but probably don't. Then, your host family feeds you an elaborate four-course dinner, you probably drink too much wine and then you go to a bar or go to bed. Right?" While parts of that description happen sometimes, none of those things have happened to me on the same day all at once. Ever.

I'm not here to complain about Paris itself - there are far too many things to praise than not, but my friends at home seem to overlook the fact that Paris is a big city and everything here requires effort and attentiveness. For example, my 40+ minute commute in the morning is not simply hopping in the car and plugging in the iPod; rather, it's being squished into a moving aluminum can next to probably 100 other people, having your personal space violated almost every day, keeping your personal belongings away from the pick pockets and knowing where you need to stand in the car to make your other two transfers in order to make it to class on time. Suffice it to say, I was getting tired.

So, I decided to take myself on a Shabbaton (definition: a weekend retreat focused on celebrating Shabbat) somewhere outside of Paris to reflect on my time abroad, which is coming to an end all too soon, to take a breath, to relax, to be on my own schedule, and to rest up for the upcoming finals and paper that begin next week. My destination? Brussels, Belgium! Mostly chosen for its convenient location and cheap train ticket prices, but exciting nonetheless!

I won't go into too much detail, but rest assured, I had a completely lovely weekend. Highlights included the Magritte Museum, the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, checking out the Pierre Marcolini Chocolate workshop, long walks, reading for pleasure, and sleeping in. I was strangely surprised by a few things: the language (almost everything was written in four languages: Flemish, French, German, English), the lack of Belgian stuff (i.e., most foods, artists, etc. seemed to be stolen or borrowed from the French or Germans), and the friendliness of the people! Here are some photos to tide you over.

~D

I've actually never seen so many chocolate stores in one place.

Literally every other window in the whole city looked like this.

Belgian waffle in Belgium? Had to do it.

View from Kunstberg (Hill of the Arts)

Marat Assasiné, Jacques-Louis DAVID!! Musee des Beaux-Arts

What up, European Union!

la muse de paris

Historically and presently, Paris has served as a source of inspiration for musicians, chefs, authors, inventors, designers, and artists who traveled to, or worked in, this city for a variety of reasons - to feel liberated, to be freed from constraints placed upon them by their communities elsewhere, to mingle with their heros and mentors, to become famous ...

I am not here for any of the above reasons, per se. I guess, though, it's always rather liberating to be in a new place and fend for yourself through a series of adventures and mishaps that end up taking your life in a direction that you couldn't have previously imagined. However, there is something to be said about a city that is known to be the epicenter of creativity and art on the planet. What does that mean in my day to day life? Other than being extremely fortunate to see a lot of performance art in theaters, I see all kinds of musicians and artists doing there thing pretty much everywhere, including a seven-piece ensemble that plays every Thursday and Sunday in the Châtelet métro, which I see on my way to dance class.

Side note/rant: I personally, have two issues with the metro in terms of artistic promise. The first is that people seem to really not appreciate my tendency to tap-dance while waiting for the train to arrive. It's a habit that I picked up in New York a while back and haven't been able to shake. In fact (little known fact), I do this quite often - in grocery stores, waiting for friends to come out of a store... you get the idea. I'm not good at it, but it's something that helps me pass the time, but the Parisians are not taking it. No one has said anything to me outright, but the death glares are making me think that I should take up knitting or something. Secondly, everytime I enter the metro, I see choreography. It's a huge issue, people. Then I daydream about the kind of awesome site-specific dance piece I could create about the permeation of people on Line 9. I have a bunch of ideas and I hope that some of you will volunteer to help me out with a little project I want to do on BART when I get back to the Bay :)

Yes, I know, the cliché is that art is everywhere, but here formal art (aka not street art or beautiful formations of children in line waiting for their croissants) is literally everywhere. On almost any corner you can see signs pointing to a variety of tiny museums that no one knows existed because it's around the corner and to the left of the Louvre. For example, my goal this week is to head to the Musée du Luxembourg, which is very near my school, but I haven't gone because it's not a "major" site and I haven't gotten around to it yet.

More fun art: While walking down the street yesterday, I found that it had rained letters!

Other than artistic explorations, this week involved heading to the Catacombes, which is basically a place several tens of meters underground connected by an complex tunnel system that holds an ossuarie. Essentially, in the mid 1800s, the city decided to expand and build housing, so they built over the cemetaries; however, in order to preserve the notion of the sacred state of the dead, they moved all the bones from all these cemetaries into the Catacombes. It was more that a little disturbing, but at the same time very fascinating. It looked like this:

Those would be bones and skulls.

The tunnel leading to the "L'Empire de la Mort" (Empire of Death)

This week, the agenda will include Père Lachaise cemetary where Proust, Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are buried; a wine bar excursion; writing a French paper and starting an Art History paper; fancy dinner; stroll through the Bois de Boulogne (giant park); yoga!

À bientôt!

la vie continue...

Mes chers amis,

Can you believe I've been in Paris for seven weeks already? I can't either. My whole relationship with time has shifted dramatically over the past few weeks because, while there is a deliberately relaxed speed with which Parisians pass their days - i.e., deliberately enjoying a two-hour lunch or deliberately spending a few hours or the whole day in the Musée d'Orsay - at the same time, Paris does not slow down. Especially for things of such a trivial nature as midterms. For instance, our second Bing (Mr. and Mrs. Bing, thank you!) cultural event was nowhere other than the infamous Paris Opera. We enjoyed a wonderful performance of the French classic, "Manon Lescaut" which ran from 7:30 - 11pm the night before the midterm in Art History, a class in which 20/34 of the students here are enrolled. Let's just say, it was not my greatest exam for many reasons (such as little sleep due to the Opera and, oh yeah, the fact that it was a timed exam on slide identification of 17th and 18th century paintings. IN FRENCH).

I hope that it will be sufficient to say that I have not been bored for one day since I've arrived, which, if you know me well, is no small feat. During the week, I'm pretty busy with classes -- I'm taking French, Art History, France in World War II (a history class), Hebrew, Dance, and I'm teaching an English workshop at a French elemetary school. So, with all of that plus my elongated dinners with my host family and Skype dates with my dogs, it's pretty packed M-Th. Fridays, I've been going on field trips with Stanford during the day to such places as a chocolatier and the French Institute of Fashion (Institut Francais de la Mode), and walking around and exploring different neighborhoods. In the evenings and on weekends, I've been museum-hopping, finding awesome excursions such as visiting the Grand Mosque of Paris, finding great cafes and crepes, and seeing a lot of performances. In the past two weeks, I've seen "Manon" at the Opera, "The Rodin Project," a modern dance piece inspired by Rodin's watercolors, "Danse Libres," a very post-modern performance that involved a lot of nude people and live sheep on stage, and "La Dame aux Camelias," a theater piece directed by a very controversial German dramatist. It's pretty surreal and a little overwhelming at times, but it would be a lie to say that I'm not absolutely loving it.

Before I get to the pictures, here are some interesting cultural tidbits I've discovered:

• There is no word for "cheap" in French. The way you say "cheap" is by saying that something is not very expensive. Hmmmm, indicative of my current shopping frustrations? Yes.
• A statistic I came across in a class the other day was that the average French person consumes the equivalent of 173 bottles of wine's worth of alcohol per year. And yet, the only people who I see drunk at bars are the Americans...no wonder we have such a great reputation abroad.
• Baguettes, or "La Tradition" as they are called, have a price that is regulated by the government, which I think is totally awesome! For 90 centimes (cents) you can buy a baguette at ANY boulangerie! What a steal :)

Below are some photos of the past few weeks:

My walk at dusk last Sunday. Hôtel de Ville (4e)

Voltaire's tomb, Panthéon (5e)

View of Paris from the 5th floor of the Musée nationale d'art moderne. Centre Georges Pompidou (4e)

Words to the wise, Shakespeare and Company Bookstore (5e)

Yes, that is a nude, green man and a nude, red woman and live sheep. Danse Libres, Centre Pompidou (4e)

Handwashing station at a bakery in the Jewish Quarter. Boulangerie Finkelstejn, Marais (3e)

gastronomie

Yes, I know, I said that I would blog about my weekend in Charente, but today I went to a Salon de Mer et Vigne, which is essentially a gigantic, beautiful, national farmer's market focusing on products from the sea and from the vine. Hence, I was inspired.

For your pleasure, here are some pictures of my gastronomic escapades over the past five weeks. I would imagine you will notice, as I have in a very real way, that Paris is no place for a diet.

Falafel better than 88-95% of the ones I've had in Israel ~ Chez Hanna (3e)

Assortment of Macarons ~ Ladurée (8e)

Tacos and Cerveza! ~ Candelaria (3e)

Millefeuille of red beets, crab and tuna ~ random restaurant, Angôuleme, France

Poached halibut with citrus cream and roasted vegetables ~ random restaurant, Angôuleme, France

horrible photo, but this is the paella man ~ marché Hôtel de Ville (4e)

school-sponsored chocolate tasting ~ chocolatier servant (16e)

gallette complete d'oignon with cider from brittany ~ Breizh Cafe (4e)

petite galletes (butter cookies) and merangues ~ salon de mer et vigne (bois de vincennes)

moroccan sweet mint tea ~ salon du thé at the grand mosque of paris (5e)