General irresponsibility

Lately, I've mostly been keeping on keeping on, studiously not studying, spending as much time as possible picnicking and dancing and eating ice cream and sitting by the Seine (sometimes all at once!) as I possibly can. There's a French national holiday once a week, essentially, during the month of May, and this year all of them fall on Tuesdays, so my friends and I have been reveling in a series of 4-day weekends. This is not making it easier for me to get excited about leaving. So I just don't think about it.
The weekend after spring break ended, I headed back to Amsterdam with friends Selene and Rachel to see the city in its springtime glory. We were there for Queen's Day, so we got to ride this neat-o Ferris Wheel in the central square, and the waiter in the pizza place where we ate dinner one night was handing out lollipops, just for being female. We spent most of the rest of the weekend doing things we normally do: sitting in parks, eating, etc. The one exception is this: as much as it hurts me, and as hard as I try, I'm never going to be French. Specifically, I'm never going to be a French woman. However, there is a part of me that sincerely believes that I could be Dutch -- I'd have to sacrifice Camembert for Gouda, but other than that I'd just need to buy a bike, try to sound serious speaking a language that sounds like something a Muppets character would make up, and move into a riverboat on one of those charming canals. This impression was only reinforced by someone mistaking us for locals while we were eating raspberries canal-side. I am smitten.
The other big deal over on this side of the pond has been the presidential election, which ended with Nicolas Sarkozy, the more right-wing candidate, winning the majority of the vote. It's been really interesting to be here for this, and to hear such varied opinions on it all -- my host family are big Sarkozy fans, which has been a huge learning experience for me -- having lived in Vermont, and being a student at a small, east-coast liberal arts college, it can sometimes be easy for me to think of conservatives as a nebulous, rather destable group of money-hungry billionaires and racist backwoodsy types, determined to push the States into a state of ruin. However, here I am, living among them, and they're not all bad -- they cook me dinner and let me sleep in their house, and teach me things about France and French, and I've grown pretty fond of them over the last 8 months. So I've had to reconcile political beliefs that I have a hard time understanding and which I have always alienated and reviled with my feelings for this wonderful, warm family that's welcomed me into their home. It's been frustrating and hard, but probably good for my larger world view in the long run. This is all balanced out by the people I work with, who are all loyal "Royalistes," fans of Ségolène Royale, the female socialist candidate. I haven't gotten a chance to talk to them about the outcome of the elections yet, but last week they were telling me that they're worried that a Sarkozy victory would spark another '68 -- people taking to the streets, violence, endless protests, etc. etc. So far, that hasn't quite proved true -- there's been some rioting, but it's been pretty localized (I haven't noticed anything apart from a few extra sirens here and there), but things do seem like they have the potential to get nasty. We'll see how it all turns out. In the meantime, I'll continue to revel in this ridiculous life of mine until my flight home June 1...

La renaissance

IN LIVING COLOR! My parents (visible below) breezed into town last week (during my SECOND week of spring break, good choice, France) and brought along a lovely new shiny silver digital camera, which will be brightening this blog address until I run it into the ground/leave Paris. You know, whichever comes first. Because they didn't come until the second week of break, I have no pictures in share-able format of the first week, which I spent in Berlin and Krakòw with good buddies and future apartment-mates Liz 2 and Bianca (although Bianca has a few up on her photoblog, which is linked to at right). It was quite a trip - I loved Berlin much more than appearances would have led me to believe (their unofficial city motto is "poor but sexy, which I think sums things up pretty well), and Krakòw was just as charming as appearances would have led me to believe (and so CHEAP).
Since I've been back, I've spent as much time as possible trying to soak up the 80-degree weather and bright sunshine that's been illuminating this city of mine for the last week and a half. It's getting harder and harder to get home for dinner at 8 when the sun doesn't set until 9 and there are so many places for me to sit outside and look at pretty things. I'm working real hard on all kinds of awkward tan lines (the sleeves-pushed up, the one-arm-in-the-shade, the jeans-rolled-to-mid- calf-while-wearing-sneakers-and-socks). I've heard so much hype about Paris in the springtime (haven't we all?), but god damn, is it ever justified. Every doubt I've ever had about this place has been washed away by constant sunshine and blue skies and flowers blooming EVERYWHERE.
I don't have much to add beyond that -- school started again today, although my class at Paris III is over, so it's just my two Sweet Briar classes and my stage from here on out. I'm doing my level best to not think about the fact that I have to leave this place in six weeks or so. It will be tough. I predict a certain degree of bitterness upon my return.
In other news, related to my return, it's a sure thing now that I'll be in Philadelphia from mid-June to the end of August working for the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe, with brief séjours in Vermont on either end of it. It's likely that I'll be subletting an apartment in the city with friends, which I'm excited about, although I'm not particularly looking forward to all that humidity. It looks to be a pretty rad summer.

I leave you with a couple of extra pictures which I don't have enough text to wrap around. This picture was taken after 9 PM. No long exposures. It just stays light out that long.

Roger took to Paris immediately.

L'agonie

The time has come for me to announce the demise of my faithful digital camera. These images are the last you'll see coming from the little ol' Kodak EasyShare. You'll be missed, little buddy.
Things are heating up in Paris, in more ways than one. I'm currently spending my last day as a 20-year-old holed up in my bedroom at 24, rue de Rocroy, trying to put together a dossier on John Ford's Vers sa destinée (Young Mr. Lincoln), so that I don't have to spend my first day as a 21-year-old doing so.
Paris has really been jerking me around, lately, weatherwise. We've had a couple of really gorgeous 60-something degree sunny days, where it feels like the whole city tumbles out into the Luxembourg Gardens to soak up the sun and feed the ducks, or stroll along the quais, perusing the wares of the bouquinists, or play a friendly game of boules in the neighborhood park. But then there's days like today, where it's cold and rainy and dark and there are too many other Americans on the metro for me to reveal that my metro book is in English -- heaven forbid I be associated with all these 16-year-old yahoos screaming at each other and slightly older women talking about way-too-personal-for-public-transport things ("So then she found this RASH..."), just because they assume no one else can understand. Joke's on them, I suppose.
Then there's been other craziness, both in and out of Paris. I've been out of town the last couple of weekends - the first in Provence with Sweet Briar, where I dangled my toes and skipped stones in a bright blue river under a 2000-year-old Roman aqueduct, spent the night in a monastary nestled in the brushy hills overlooking the Rhone valley, and followed the world's most thorough tour guide through Important Sites like the Palais des Papes in Avignon and the Roman ruins in Arles. I would have liked a little less talking about Romans and a little more visiting local agricultural producers (the vines were calling to me!), but it was a lovely weekend just the same.
Then Emily Freeman (of the Brattleboro Freemans) appeared on her spring break, and stuck around for a few days before the two of us whisked away for a weekend in Switzerland chez Frutzli, where we visited baby cows and a watch museum, ate a lot of good food, went grocery shopping at least three times, wandered the streets of Geneva and rolled along the country roads around Aclens, read light vacation literature, and spent some good quality time at the Crazy Pub, along with everyone Johann has ever known, where I discovered a certain hidden talent for darts. Kind of.
And now I'm back in Paris for another week, featuring a guest appearance from Emma Chubb (of the Pittsburgh Chubbs), before heading off to Berlin and Krakow for a week, then coming back to show some relations around the City of Lights. I just can't wait for spring to actually get here for good. Here is a picture of my friends standing illicitly atop a Roman amphitheater (now used for bullfights) in Arles:

Goings on about town.

And Paris slowly moves toward spring -- regular afternoon showers, blue-skied sunny mornings, sweater-and-scarf coffees in sidewalk cafés, and even a few trees starting to push out little green leaves and big white blossoms. All of this has made for several lovely balades about town, including a rather memorable afternoon consisting of an open-air panini lunch, seeing An Affair to Remember on a big screen (thank the good lord for Paris's repertory cinemas) and spending the rest of the afternoon reading on a sun-drenched café terrace. Life here is really not so bad.
Even with the urban idyll that Paris has been lately, sometimes a girl needs to breathe a little rural air. And so, I, in the company of fellow Vermonter and near-relative Julia, set off to Reims for the day. It was, as you can see to the left, a lovely day to be out in the significantally less crowded northeast of France. Our train rolled through rolling green hills, by tiny little tile-roofed villages, and through miles and miles of ramrod-straight rows of grapes. And grapes and grapes and grapes and grapes, until we arrived in Reims, the heart of the Champagne region and home of some of the biggest Champagne houses in the world -- Veuve Cliquot, Taittinger, etc. It is also close to the town with what is now in the running for my favorite French town name -- Ay. (or, as I like to imagine most people say it "Ay!")
Julia and I, not wanting to waste such an important agro-cultural opportunity, paid a visit chez Mumm, and toured through part of their 25 km of cellars with a very enthusiastic tour guide, a large family from Austin, Texas, and another American couple who didn't quite seem to approve of our eagerness to ask questions about the Champagne production process. I learned all sorts of things (like the names of various sizes of Champagne bottles, which go all the way up to 20 times the size of a normal bottle, and the fact that most champagne is made up of three different kinds of grapes, and that Mumm is hoarding bottles of Champagne from 1896 in their cellars, but that you and I should not keep a bottle of Champagne for more than 5 years, at which point it starts "declining")
After appreciating the difference between a non-vintaged Mumms (dominant note: apple) and a 1999 Mumms (dominant note: apricot), we strolled back into town to view some other important cultural sites: namely, the cathedral, which features a chapel with stained glass by Marc Chagall -- by far the coolest stained glass I've seen since being in France. After a while, all the cathedrals start sort of blending together (tall gray towers! really high ceilings! lots and lots of uncomforable chairs!), but the Chagall windows combined with the fact that many of the major French kings were crowned takes Reims up a notch. Well played. I really, really liked those windows.
After a spin through "chez Jesu," as Vero would say, it was off for a wander about town, afternoon coffee and churros, a brief visit with everyone's favorite Swedish export (H&M), and then tracking down fixings for a dinner picnic for the train ride home just as the sun went down, the streets emptied, and a light drizzle began. A lovely day.

La Famiglia

So, I've finally done it... I took pictures of most of my host family, except Isabelle, who doesn't live at home, and I can now introduce them to you. So here they are: the family of Comte et Comtesse Phillipe et Véronique de la Cropte de Chantérac, in all their glory.

Here is the Count himself, lighting the birthday candles for Henri's 15th anniversaire. We had tarte tatin instead of cake, and I was just fine with that. Phillipe is perhaps the calmest of the whole bunch, and definitely lends a sort of... centered feel to the house that it didn't have when he was in the hospital (recovering from surgery).






This is the Countess, also known as Véronique, or Véro for those in the inner circle. In this photograph, she's probably forcefully announcing her opinion on something -- perhaps on the subject of teenage drinking, or the fact that Jean (who is 23) doesn't eat dinner at home enough. Véro is a little nuts, but I like her all the same.












This is Jean, the fils ainé, a 23-year-old engineering student who lives upstairs in the old maid's quarters. He's really much more handsome than this photograph would have you believe. Jean's a charmer, with a bit of a raffish streak. He and I have an excellent dinner rapport, where he makes fun of the other members of the family and I laugh, and then everyone else asks what we're laughing about. Also, we have matching sneakers.










There should be a picture of Isabelle here, but you're going to have to make due with Louis. Louis is 20, and spends most of his time studying to get into the grands écoles, the really prestigious business schools in France. He also enjoys soccer and Nicholas Sarkozy.













This is Marguerite, the 16-year-old. Margotte is a woman of the theater, and also plays guitar and sings a lot. She's hilarious. Jean is her favorite brother, although she and Henri are also really close, since they're so close in age. She enjoys making fun of Louis for his prominent chin, which she says makes his head look like a potato chip. This is an important family joke.











And this is Henri, the fils cadet, who just barely turned 15. He's studying Russian (and English and German), and one of his party tricks is telling you what your name would be in Russian (apparently they follow a strict patronymic system, so I'd be Elizabeth Rogeryana or something similar). He also plays soccer, and a lot of FIFA soccer on X-Box when the time arises. One of his aspirations is to buy a big pick-up truck and drive it around both North and South America. He wants to come to the US this summer and stay with a family with kids around his age -- any takers?

So that's the fam. They're pretty wonderful and a little kooky, and I enjoy them immensely.

Return of the image!

And I'm back in the game! I've been back in Paris for just about three weeks now, and enjoying all that life à la français has to offer, as usual. The big news about this semester is that I have an internship with Lobster Films (link at the right) as a sort of... translating peon, if you will. I'm the only native English speaker on staff (although most of the people who work there speak English with a great deal more ease and grace than I, at times, can summon up in my second language), so many of theFrench-to-English translation projects in the office go through me. I spend most of my time translating film descriptions for silent film serials from the 1900s-1920s (right now I'm working on one about a rivalry between two sailors over a beautiful café waitress), but I just finished working on a 40-page script for an original documentary about Robin Hood - both the "reality" of Robin and the evolution of the Robin Hood myth through the years, starting with French pastoral ballads in the Middle Ages and ending with cinematic adaptations in more recent years. It was an interesting project, and really gratifying to work on something that is actually going to get made.

In other news, classes have started again, and they're a thrill, as always... Well, no. Completely without sarcasm, my classes this semester do seem a lot better than those I took last semester. My History of Sound Film professor is maybe 35 and used to make movies himself, and has a lot of really wonderful things to say about, for instance, Walt Disney (who he holds almost singularly responsible for ruining children's education), and an interesting experience-based perspective to bring to the material. The class is small, maybe 15 kids, and the teacher encourages student participation, which is really kind of wonderful. I'm taking a literature class in the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Louis Aragon which, despite being at 8AM on Monday mornings, is well-taught and even includes some structure! Like a syllabus! I'm also taking two classes with the program, "Paris au cinéma" and the same grammar/language class I took last semester (the more advanced version, of course). All in all, this looks to be a more academically rewarding semester than the last one -- although you'll have to check in with me again when examen time rolls around.

Other time has been spent hanging out with the new kids - five of whom are from Haverford - which has been fun, a day trip to Chartres to see the cathedral and stroll around for a bit, babysitting, learning to knit, planning further outrageous vacations (the hypothetical crown jewel being Spring Break: Croatia), exploring some new areas of the city, and playing hostess to Uncle Tim and Aunt Margaret, who are here visiting two nieces - Julia, on Aunt Margaret's side, has also been studying in Paris for the year. With all that packed in, I've had to re-learn, a bit, how to be busy - while I only had two days a week that started before noon last semester, I have to be up by 8:30 almost every day, and usually don't get home until an hour before dinner. I'm not sure that my host family quite knows what to do with this new Liz incarnation, but it feels pretty all right to have things to do again.

Winter was here for about four days - we even got some flurries! - but that ship seems to have sailed, and the temperatures are back up in the 50s during the day, which I'm learning to accept. I do miss tramping around in the snow, however. Anyhow, I should get off to bed soon, since I'm ushering Tim and Margaret around the Musée d'Orsay tomorrow morning, but I'll leave you with this lovely image of the heights of French hygiene in parting: as I was walking my young charges to English School last Wednesday, the butcher's shop down the street was getting a meat delivery, but they didn't really seem to worried about efficiency of delivery, so the truck was just kind of parked in the middle of a fairly busy intersection, meat dangling off hooks at the back of the truck. Just look.

I'm... well, you know

So I've been back in Paris for about two weeks now, but I left my camera cord in Vermont, so I won't really get to update until it gets here and I can post photographs of things. To tide you over, here is a yuletide image from the homeland. There's nothing much to report -- being back is going well, and I'm slowly adjusting to the fact that there are 55 new people in my program, only 5 of whom I know. It's a little bizarre. Anyway, I'll update again once I can illustrate, because text-only entries are pretty boring.