(un)common ground: 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: