Day who knows which

Well hello to those of you who still check this!
This afternoon I finished my last final, and so I am done done done done done with the study part of this study abroad adventure! Sorry for the lack of posts in the past month, things got really crazy with traveling every weekend and getting into finals. Lets see, I have been to three other countries since I last posted: Italy (Florance and Rome), Spain (Granada), and Sweden (Stockholm). Italy was really cool, I visited a friend who is studying for the year in Florence so she showed us around there, it was amazing I actually liked it better than Rome. Rome was fun, it was a blur though because we only spent 2.5 days there and there is so much stuff to see. Spain was interesting, due to some stupid airline regulations I missed my flight from Madrid to Granada, ended up taking a metro to a bus station to get a bus to Granada and got pick pocketed on the metro. So I spent the night in Madrid, thankfully there was a hotel near the bus station that allowed me to pay with my mom's credit card number. I made it onto the bus on saturday and spent about half a day in Granada, which was amazing I really wish I had gotten more time there. Sweden was lots of fun too, it wasn't nearly as cold as I had expected given we were there in December. It was all decorated for Christmas and was very cute and festive. Other than travels I have been doing lots of work, writting lots of papers, and studying lots. But that has all paid off, and now I get to enjoy my last few days in Paris with my mom and Kirk (and my friend who is visiting from Florence) and then a few days traveling around Brittany, and than a few more days in Paris before I am home right before Christmas (assuming my flight on Brittish Airways works out despite the strike)
-Chelsea

Day 66: Provins

Hello again,
This weekend was unfortunatly my last free weekend in Paris (all the rest I will either be traveling or have visiters), so I spent a lot of it in my room doing the tons and tons of homework that was either due this week or will be due at the end of the semester. I did have some fun adventures on Friday however, when I went to Provins (a medieval city about an hour and a half out of Paris) with IES. Its not a huge tourist attraction, and the trip wasn't as "must see" as the other IES trip I went on (Normandy), but it was still lots of fun and it was really nice to be out of the city in a small town in the country :) The day started with a tour of the medieval walls around the city, which were of course how it defended itself. It was really cool, and we got to go inside the walls and look at the ramparts and such which was neat. Apparently the concept that in the middel ages they would drop boiling oil on invaiding armies is not accurate, because oil was too expensive and too precious. Instead they would boil pears down into a sauce and dump that on invaiding armies, tasty and deadly! Anyways, from the walls we went to a guard tower on a hill near the middle of the city, so on the way there we got to see most of the city which was really beautiful and looked almost exactly like the town where Belle lives in Beauty and the Beast. The tower was awesome, it was my favorite part of the whole day. We got to go inside and look around and than go up to the top where we had an amazing view of the countryside. France really does have the most beautiful countryside of anyplace that I have every been. After the tower we had a yummy french lunch at a restaurant and than went down bellow the city to take a tour of the deserted chalk mines/caves that run bellow the entire city. They were really cool, and apparently when you buy a house in Provins you purchase the rights to the caves bellow your house so people will use them as a sitting room, or formal dining room or something. After the caves, we went to see the city's church which was interesting in that it is not like any church you would see in Paris. It was never finished because the city ran out of money, so it is an impressive building but at the same time it had a very rough and obviously unfinished quality to it. After the church we got on the bus back to Paris. About 20 mins outside of the actual city (in the subburbs) the bus got pulled over! Apparently the cops saw the bus driver looking at his phone (even though he wasn't placing a call) and pulled him over. This whole ordeal took about 15 mins to sort out, during which time I was more amused at the french peoples inefficiency than anything. The bus driver took a 5 min smoke break on the side of the freeway where our bus was parked while the police tried to figure stuff out, which I just found absolutly hillarious...oh how french. That was the only exciting stuff that happened to me this weekend, but on Monday I had another play to go to for my theater class and unfortunatly I read the schedule wrong saying what time it was and thought it was an hour later than it really was! Thankfully I have fallen into the habit of arriving about 30 mins in advance when I have to be someplace using the metro, and the time we are supposed to meet for the plays is 30 mins before the play starts, so I managed to get there only about 2 mins late and only missed the first few lines of the play. It was really good though, I would say my second favorite play that I have seen here (after of course L'Avare at La comedie francaise). Tomorrow is the begining of fall break, so tonight I am getting on a train and tomorrow I will wake up in Italy :) I am going to Florence for Wednesday and Thursday and than on Friday morning we are going down to Rome until Sunday afternoon when we get on a train back to Paris. I am excited because a)its Italy, where I have never been and b) I will be visiting a friend from Tulane who is studying in Florence and she will come down to Rome with us :) One more class and than I am on my way to Italy!!!!

Day 60: Midterms and Visiters

Hello again,
Sorry it has been so long, I had a crazy past few weeks. First off, I had to move. My host family went on vacation to Rome and did a house swap with a family in Rome so I was kicked out of my house and moved in with my host grandma, who is 84 years old and Portuguese. She is probably my favorite person that I have met here, she is absolutely hilarious and very sweet. My move started off awkwardly because she did not talk to me when I first got there and didn't seem too happy. Once my host dad (her son) and my host brother left she got very nice and came over to welcome me which was nice (but also my first indication that their relationship is not great), however in the middle of making sure that I was comfortable she started crying. At first I was super worried about what I could have possibly done to make her cry, but than she came over and pinched my cheeks, kissed my cheek, and rubbed by back so I guess she was just happy to see me. Her apartment is closer to central Paris (right by the Eiffel Tower!) so it was really nice and convenient for me to have a 20 min commute to class instead of a 50 min commute. Also I have a GIANT, fluffy bed here which is always nice :) She is very nice and sweet, she gave me a bookmark of Portugal after we talked about how beautiful it is and how I have never been there (now I really want to go), and keeps leaving little presents on my bed when I am out (for example a box of Kleenex that she thought was pretty and a map of the world). She also lectured me one morning during breakfast about how I need to marry a french boy and have lots of french babies so that I can continue to practice my french skills. I think my favorite experience with her was when she asked me if I wanted her to buy me anything at the market that day and I asked for grapes. She asked me if I wanted white or black grapes and I said white. She than told me that she used those terms because my skin is white (hurrm ok?), after which she verified that I did not want grapes from Africa. I had not heard if grapes from Africa were worse than grapes from elsewhere so I said it didn't matter to me. She than informed me that people are black in Africa, and I had said that I wanted white grapes. Hahah, it was quite silly. Anyways, the week after I moved was midterms so I was absolutly swamped with work :( and very very stressed out. One of my midterms though is the hands down best midterm that I have ever had. It is for my commic strip class, we have to write a commic strip based off of one of 3 grim brothers stories. It is really fun, and it is actually pretty intense, we have been working on it for 3 days and it is due next monday. Thankfuly the artwork does not have to look good (mine is stick figures) but what is important is our stylistic choices in layout, and how that works with the story so it is a lot of fun and has given me more appreciation for commics as a letigamate form of art/literature. Anyways, my roommate from Tulane, Allison, who is studying abroad in Granada, Spain this semseter came to visit me this weekend which was a rediculous amount of fun :D We had missed eachother a lot and it was great to have a roomie reunion again even if it was just for the weekend. It was also just nice to have an excelent excuse to do all the touristy things that I had yet to do (like go to the top of the Eiffel Tower). I am going to get to go down to Granada to visit her in about 2.5 weeks and I can't wait! Sunday was the first sunday of the month (duh) and therefore all the museums were free, so we got to go to the Louvre (for the second time that weekend, its also free for students friday nights) and musee d'Orsay so that was a lot of fun. The best part of the weekend was Sunday night, when we were just walking around the Latin Quarter after dinner. We walked past Notre Dame and decided to take pictures of us pretending to be gargoyles, than we convinced my friend Joey who always has a mini-backpack in which he carries his stuff to put it on under his jacket and pretend to be the Hunchback of Notre Dame which was absolutly hilarious. Oh other random tidbit, last Tuesday I got to go to La Comedie Francaise with my theater class to see l'Avare by Moliere, which was a really cool experience. The theater is really old, and the troup that puts on plays there is basically where you aspire to work if you are a french speaking actor. The play was really really good, the actor who played Harpagon is a really famous french actor, and he was perfect, he was so funny and it was really an amazing acting job on his part. Everyone else was good too of course, but he really stole the show (which is appropriate because he is of course l'avare). Well that was the past couple weeks for me. I can't believe that in just a few weeks I will only have a month left here :( this semester has gone by so fast, in some ways I wish I was going to stay here for a whole year because I absolutly love it here, and I know I will be very upset when I have to leave. At the same time, I have realized that I am American and I miss being in the society that I feel I really belong in. I miss Tulane and I miss my family and friends and I miss California, so I guess its a good thing that I am not going to be here for a whole year, but I will miss Paris like crazy when I leave. It truly is the best city in the world.

Day 45: Sorry I haven't posted in so long!

Sorry I haven't posted in so long guys! I was busy traveling, and than with school. Last weekend was my first weekend in a while that I stayed in Paris which was really nice. I got to relax and get lots of homework done. I also got to buy food to prepare for myself at home since I knew it wouldn't go bad while I was out of town so it was nice to be able to cook for myself. On Sunday I found a great church, its called the American Church in Paris, and it has a contemporary service at 1:30 that is all in English. It was really great to finally go to church, and the service was fantastic. Lots of awesome worship songs, and a really great message about Job. It turns out that the church was only about a 10 min walk from the Eiffel Tower so I finally got around to seeing that :) after the Eiffel Tower I decided to go to the Place des Vosges which is a nice park (I wouldn't say that it has anything on le Jardin de Luxembourg). While I was over there I went to Victor Hugo's house which is right next to the park. On my way home I went to a few churches, St Pauls and Eglise Saint-Gervais Saint-Protais which were quite impressive and pretty. Other than that nothing too exciting has been happening, I have really settled into a rutine here of going to classes doing homework and the like that it just seems totally normal to be in Paris now. Oh I remember something fun I did, last Wednesday I went to a world cup qualifier game (France vs Austria) with some friends which was super fun. France won 3-1 so it was an exciting game. It was really fun to be doing something French that wasn't explicitly touristy, and since we had such cheap seats (we were litterally on the top row of this giant statium) we were with the "real" french. I wouldn't say either team was particularly impressive skills wise, but what was incredibly impressive was the french people's ability to pull of a fabulous wave. I swear, the first wave that they did went around the statium (which is the size of the superdome) 8 times before it died, it was so much fun! Last Thursday I saw another play for my theater class, which I didn't like as much as the first one. I actually liked this one better when we read it because it was funnier (although the way the first play was directed it was actually funnier), but the first play gave the french opinion of the EU which was really interesting for me, whereas this one talked about how we relate and view others, and the conclusions it drew were very much in the american mindset so it was not quite as interesting. I had an interesting experience Sunday night, I was in the kitchen making dinner for myself and was talking to my 11 year old host brother about nothing in particular. All of a sudden he started talkng about "the real religion" in reference to Catholicism. This didn't bother me at all, and we talked for a bit about our conceptions of heaven, hell, etc but then he started asking me if I was interested in converting to Catholicism and when i said no he started pestering me about why not and was saying a lot of (incorrect) bad things about protestentism in relation to Catholocism (like how 90% of protestents have converted to catholocism, and how protestents don't try to follow Jesus) which was really frustrating for me. It was probably the bigest homesickness moment I have had since I have been here because I feel like in the USA when I talk to Catholics they don't try to convert me and are generally more accepting of other branches of Christianity. I know that he was doing it out of a place of deap passion for his faith and love for others, but it was still frustrating and not the best situation for me, especially because I feel like I have been surrounded by nothing but atheism or catholocism here and I miss protestentism, especailly the methodists! Thats probably my biggest complaint about France so far. Oh well, c'est la France.

Day 30: Normandy

Well this is technically 2 days after I got back from Normandy but I didn't have time to write until now. The trip was amazing, it was a lot more profound and sad than I had been expecting. The bus ride was about 3 hours, which was not at all bad considering 1) the French country side is probably the prettiest countryside I have ever seen and 2) I had one of the 4 best seats in the bus, which was kinda like a 2 story bus in that where the seats were where above the driver so I sat in the very front right in front of the windshield and it felt like we were on a roller coaster. Before we made it to the beach where we were staying we went to Caen where there is a museum dedicated to promoting peace by documenting war, particularly WWII. It was really moving and very interesting, it gave a extremely detailed history of the war and since it was from the French point of view there were defiantly things that I didn't know before or hadn't considered before that were super intersting. There was a temporary exhibit about the jewish children that were killed during WWII and that was really hard to see after having gone to Dachau the weekend before, it brought up a lot of supressed memories. There was also a cold war exhibit which we all found pretty hillarious (in a very dark humor way), it showed a lot of American and Soviate propaganda videos which were quite amusing, and there was one video featuring a song called "duck and cover" which was about how if a nuclear bomb is dropped you should duck and cover under your desk, a picknick blanket, etc and you will be fine. After Caen we went to Gold Beach (on of the beaches the Brittish invaded) where we were staying and explored around a bit. The beach was very facinating, the history really weighs down on you when you go there, and you can just feel how many people died there. There are remnants of the Allies defense/suplise structures left in the water and they really look like giant scars. The next day we went to the Museume of the Disembarkment, which was a really cool museum. It is right next to Gold Beach and gives and incredably detailed history of all the planning that went into D-Day as well as the fighting that happened after D-Day to seize Normandy. I never fully appreciated just how complex it was, and if definatly blew me away. After the Museum we went to Omaha Beach where there is a graveyard of American soldiers who fell in France, the land of which was given to the USA by the French. That was the hardest part of the whole weekend for me, there was a memorial to the fallen soldiers and in the room around the memorial there were about 20 placards with pictures and stories of heros from D-Day, most of which died. It was incredably emotional and I was crying a lot when reading them, which apparently most people do because one of the French guards stationed there came up to me and asked if I was alright. Right after you leave the memorial you see Omaha Beach which is even more sad than Gold Beach. While there are no reminants left in the water at Omaha (that I saw), it was the beach that suffered the highest casualties (3,200 american soldiers dead) and it was impossible (for me) to look at that beach and not see all the death and distruction that happened there. When walking around the graveyard there were a few graves marked "here lies a fallen comrade at arms, known only to God" and it really hit me hard that I was looking at the grave of an american boy who died at Normandy, and whos parents, friends, and maybe wife have no idea where he was burried, and I of all people got to see his grave. It was very emotional, and the weekend as a whole plus my visit to Germany last weekend have made me view WWII so very differently. It feels so much closer to me now, and so much more real which is really hard but at the same time is very important for me. Like visiting Dachau, I think it will take me a while to fully process what I saw at Normandy.

Day 25: ICP & a play

Yesterday was my first day of my class at l'Instituie Catholique de Paris (ICP) and I was super nervous for it all day. I was talking to people who already had their first class at ICP and they kept saying things like they understood about 75% of what the teacher said, and how they thought that was good and I was getting really worried that my class would be too difficult for me and that it would be aweful. Also I was worried that the prof and the other students would make fun of my accent or just be really standoffish and rude. Well as it turns out I did have reason to worry but not about the class itself. Finding the actually class room was probably one of the most stressful and hardest things I have done since I got here. I had this lovely map printed out of where to go and had written directions down and got of the metro with 45 mins to find my classroom so I figured I was good. Wrong. First off, there are three ICP campuses, but they are all right next to eachother. I went to the one that my map said to go to and looked around and there were only 3 buildings: F, G, and H. My paper said my classroom was in building C so I said to myself, aha it must be in the other campus. So I walked around the main campus and coundn't find building C. I finally asked the information desk and they said it was in the third campus (which is on the same property as the main campus but you have to enter it through a different street). So I walked over to the third campus and found building C. Great! So than I looked and saw my paper said my classroom was on the 2nd floor room 23. I went up to the 2nd floor and there were classrooms 21, 22, 24, and 25. Hummmm. After wandering around this tiny floor trying to figure out where they hid classroom 23 I went back downstairs and asked a lady who was hanging up a flier on a buliton board. She gave me the "quoi? tu parle a moi" look and was very very rude, the first time this has happened to me when asking parisians questions in french. She basically told me she had no idea where my class was, and that she was locking up building C now so I had to get out. At this point I only had about 10 mins left before my class started and was starting to freak out about would I get there in time, what if I can't find it and miss the first day, will I have to drop it and take another IES class even though I would have already missed 3 days of that. I walked back to the information desk, and asked them where the class was for "The keys of Christianity". He gave me a blank stare and said there is no class by that name. At this point I was absolutly desparate and asked him if there was a class with a similar name at the same time. Turns out the name of my class was switched to "The basics of Chiristianity" between when i registered and yesterday and no one told me. Also my room was changed, and it was in building F where I had stared from. I ran over there and all the way up 4 flights of stairs and ended up getting to my class 5 mins early which was a miracle. And of course, right when the clock struck 7 (the time my class starts) a whole group of Parisians wandered in, knowing exacly what was going on and where they were supposed to be. I took this as a sign that I will never fully understand how Paris works, and I will always be the American. I think I am ok with this. Anyways, my class ended up being fabulous, since it is a review course for my major, I didn't learn anything but it was interesting to hear it from a different point of view. I had no trouble understanding the prof, which made me very happy I definatly got 100% of what he said. He, and the students in my class are much nicer that the norm of what I have heard from my friends, and I think it had something to to with the fact that it is a religion class and all the people in it are religious. I definatly think it will end up being my favorite and most interesting class so now I can't wait for next week!
This evening I went to the first play for a class I am taking called "Theater in Paris". We read 4 plays and go see them all (one we see twice, two different versions) and one that we don't read, and tonight was the play we finished discussing in class today called l'Europenne by David Lascot. Its a very new play, it opened in 2008 and it basically talks about the french peoples' point of view on the EU and what is going on in Europe right now so it was super interesting. It was also absolutly hillarious, much more in the production that in the actual script. It was a lot of fun, and afterwards David Lescot came out and talked to the few people who waited around for him, and he signed my copy of the play :) it was super interesting to talk to him, because he is also the director and he made some changes to the play since he origonally published it so it was really cool to get to pick his brain a bit about why he made those changes.

Day 22; Munich

This morning I got back from my trip to Munich, but I was so exhausted that I slept almost all day so I am only writing this now. We left bright and early Friday morning for Munich, we took the TGV which was lots of fun, its so much nicer than flying and we got to see the French country side which is absolutely gorgeous. When we got into Germany it was love at first sight for me, it is so cute and lively, for some reason I was expecting cold, gray and industrial. Anyways, we got into Munich around 1:30 in the afternoon, and although we were super hungry we went to our hotel first, which turned out to be a good idea because we got kinda lost (the metro in Munich is not quite as fabulous as the metro in Paris, the train we needed only came once every half an hour!). When we finally found the hotel we got ourselves checked in and everything, it was suprisingly nice for being the cheapest hotel we could find. After we droped off our stuff in the room, we grabbed some lunch at a market close by. We decided to get some cheese and bread and just make a lunch out of that, unfortunatly neither of us spoke much german, so we managed to buy one thing of cheese and one thing of butter (that looked like cheese). Definatly a nasty shock when I cut off a piece of the butter and tried that. It was pretty gross, so we basically just ended up eating the one cheese and a pretzel (which was apparently invented in Germany and they are obsessed with them). After lunch we went to the city square which was absolutly gorgeous, its such a quaint little area. Unfortunatly there were some right wing politicians with slogans a long the lines of down with Islam, and stop Islam. There were a bunch of protesters around talking to people, and I overheard some people explaining it in french and english. They were equating this party to the Nazis and saying that they need to get them out of germany. There were a whole lot of police/swat looking people around so we decided that it was probably not the best place to be and continued walking. We explored the city for a while which was quite fun, and than we went over to Oktoberfest. It was definatly not what I had expected, it was basically a huge state fair with tuns of rides, games, food, shops and the like. In order to get beer you have to go to "tents" which are basically beergardens where you can sit down and order a liter of beer (that is the only size). They are really hard to get into and to grab a table at but we finally managed and ordered ourselves two beers. They came in these giant stiens, which you weren't technically supposed to bring home with you, but we managed to take them as souveniers :) I was very suprised that I liked the beer, but I guess Germany is not a bad place to go to try it for the first time. I only drank about 1/5th of my stien, and my friend didn't drink much more of his so we gave the rest of our beer to these german kids our age who spoke english that happened to be sitting at the same table as us. They definatly were shocked that we weren't goinig to finish our beers and made fun of us a little bit, but of course they were more than happy to get beer for free. After Oktoberfest we went back to the hotel and slept like babies because we were both so tired. Saturday morning we woke up early and went over to Dachau (the first concentration camp in Germany, it was established in 1933 and ran until 1945). It was a very emotional and difficult experience of course; its right in this cute little normal town, and the landscapeing outside the camp was done so that it looked really nice and peaceful, definatly not at all how it felt inside the camp. I don't want to talk about it a whole lot because I don't want to think about it a whole lot, I feel like its an experience that is going to take a few years for me to fully internalize and react to, its just too hard to do that all at once. While I was tearing up almost the whole time, I managed not to cry until we went into the gas chambers and than the crematorium. Those were by far the worst places I have ever been in my life, even though the gas chamber was never used in Dachau. The crematorium was, and I personaly think it smelled really bad in there, I felt like I was going to throw up and had to go outside for air, although my friend said he didn't smell anything. I am glad that we went there, it was important but I don't plan on ever going back. I thing this trip to Germany and Dachau will make next weekend's trip to Normandy very interesting. We spent about 3 hours in Dachau and at the end wanted to get out and back to Munich as quick as possible. When we got back to the city we were very hungry, so we had lunch at this little outdoor market which was really yummy. I had schnitzel (I am sure I didn't spell that correctly) which was really good and very German. After that we decided to do some shopping for souveniers, walked around the city some more, and than went back to Oktoberfest. It was funny, on the metro to Oktoberfest we saw these people that we had met on Friday because they were speaking french in the metro and we were as well. We ended up hanging out with them at Oktoberfest for around 45 mins which was cool because one of them was German and so he knew what to do and how to do it. Anyways, after a while we left Oktoberfest and went to the train station to grab our night train back to Paris. We were in a compartment with a Parisian, a Colombian who spoke french, a drunk TGV conductor (french obviously), and a german (who didnt get on the train until about an hour after us). So we were speaking a combination of french and english and having many very interesting conversations. The TGV conductor drank about 5 beers in an hour, so he was getting quite drunk and it got really difficult for us to understand his french because he was slurring it a lot, which just made it all the more funny. He kept interrupting our converstations with random stories about himself that had absolutly no relevency to our topic of disscusion. It was definatly an entertaining night, but we didn't get much sleep and what sleep we did get wasn't very good since it was on the train, so when we got in Sunday afternoon we decided not to go to Orleans this weekend (because we don't need to buy tickets in advance with our eurails) but to go next weekend or someother time. It was definatly a fun weekend, but I am very happy to be back in Paris. It was frustraing not being able to speak the language with anyone and not really knowing how it was culturally appropriate to act so its nice being back here where I do speak the language and understand the culture (at least a little bit)!