À la fin

I thought I'd make it through today without tearing up, but I tried to return a book and could only get store credit and I had to tell the workers, "Je quitte la France demain." From Rue Daguerre to Bois de Boulogne the phrase throbbed in my head while tears pulsed from my eyes occasionally. I'm going to backtrack and make updates to this blog over the summer because I'm so afraid to forget all I have done and what it has meant to me. Today I rented a rowboat at the Lac Inférieur in Bois de Boulogne, a massive park in the west of Paris, and not only was it really fun but it encapsulates well what my experience here was like. I love nothing more than to just float and observe, and I feel strong and satisfied while clumsily directing my course on whims and in the face of obstacles. Here I can have an adventure any day I choose and just float along. I'm so afraid that going back home is going to be like going back into a cage. Here I can find challenges without having to look and it's so invigorating. At home the challenge will be to find the beauty, mystery, and energy of a place I've known my whole life. Among other psychological challenges I guess. I need to go put this sculpture I made that is too heavy for my suitcase in an interesting spot in Parc Buttes-Chaumont before my last dinner with my family. I can't believe something I've known I would do for six years has come to an end. I will never be a 20 year old woman in Paris again. I may never live here again. I have seen what the world has to offer me and I am completely worthless if I don't go for it with everything I've got.

Has it been six weeks? I'm bad at math.

I need to make a concentrated effort to update this thing more often. Too much has happened since my first post. I'm still loving my family and Paris. The cold and gray skies are getting to me and I just can't wait for spring. I know it's not too far off! Winter's wearing on has made me less adventurous in Paris. I'm trying to find a new café each day because I had a really great experience where I talked to an elderly man in French for over an hour in café Le Select about literature, movies, and languages. The downside of French cafés are that their $2 cup of coffee equivalent is the size of an espresso shot (albeit much stronger). In a French café you are basically renting your seat out by the hour. No freeloading and camping out for 6 hours to do homework! Wifi is not a given and free wifi is almost unheard of. My hope is that this can be attributed to my listening/discovering skills. It's really nice to have a break from the constantly busy student lifestyle I've had for the past 2.5 years, but it's difficult to adapt myself to this new style of learning, of discovering my own opportunities to learn and feeling most of the pressure from within. I've never felt so pressured before to figure out what it is that I want to do with my life. I'm really frustrated by how difficult this whole fluency thing is, how difficult it is to make French friends because of how social circles roll over here with the added complication of the language barrier. I know there's got to be this sponge period where I just take everything in before I can be as proactive as I'd like to be. I'm a little pissed at Ernest Hemingway. He mentions all these asides of making clever small talk with French civilians in his novels but all of his best friends were Americans. He romanticized his little expat life without warning me how hard it would be! I'm definitely caught up in a love affair with Paris but I'm not sure we understand each other fully yet.



The past two weekends I voyaged to Florence, Italy to visit Morgan and to Aix-en-Provence, France to visit Meredith. Both weekends were absolutely lovely. We were kind of lazy because it is still quite cold, and having a good friend to just laze about with is something you do kind of miss here. It's good to have downtime during what seems a constant, wonderful adventure. But still I saw a good deal of the towns, including the chocolate festival and the intricacies of the two sides of the river Arno in Florence. I was surprised by how many American students crowded central Florence and piqued by the more local-populated, winding streets of the southern side. Morgan and I found some wonderful flea markets, ate gelato like it was going out of style, and watched too much Party Down. Her roommates were lovely. Meredith and I sampled various falafels and crêpes in Aix and split our nights between a fun live band/strobe lighty DJ dance club with a ceiling of ancient stone, a chill party with some French kids, and too much Bored to Death. Also when Meredith visited me in Paris at the beginning of February we crashed our upstairs neighbors' housewarming party because we could hear them dancing, we really needed to welcome them, and also to show them how a dance party was done right. It was so much fun! I really love travelling despite the stress of missed trains and one ride in an "unofficial taxi" with two strangers. I thought this might be a bad translation for "rape van" but it turns out serial murderers don't work in pairs after all. Last night I went to see Pains of Being Pure at Heart in Lille and only got to see two songs because of the stupidly early last train. Tu Fawning played a great show to open and I do miss going to shows, seeing American bands and listening to their banter and repping their city (Portland) and stuff so it was still very nice. Lille was charming and I was glad to see where my dear friend Frède grew up even if I just saw a small part.



My history of French cinema and history of photography classes are fabulous. Barely any homework, quite easy really, and really interesting things that I want to learn about for the classes. Obligatory film viewings and museum visits are made even sweeter by my student of art history card that gets me free access to all art museums in Paris---probably in all of Europe but I just haven't tried it out yet. My favorite exhibit I've seen so far is the André Kertesz exposition at Jeu de Paume photography museum just by the Tuileries. He had a really interesting evolution of life and career. His photographs had real personality and vision throughout the 20th century. Quotations of his musings on photography drawled across the walls almost like trains of thought. You could almost see him posed pensively behind his camera as he thought of how he would like to consider himself always an amateur, for an amateur looks with new eyes and learns anew from everything he captures on film, or every perspective that inspires him to make that capture. I also visited the exposition at Maison de Victor Hugo which featured portraits of famous writers. The exposition focused on the relationship between photography and writing as art forms and I enjoyed thinking about metaphor stuff.


This is all for now. I have winter vacation right now from my art and theater classes that take place at outside universities so I plan to get up tomorrow, do a bit of homework, and send out some summer internship/job applications. So weird to think of any life that continues after this trip! For now I simply must focus on how to make tomorrow's mundane tasks into an adventure.

Premier Post!

I can't believe I've only been in Paris for a week and a half! I figure I'd better start this blog so that I don't start to forget all the interesting things I've done and seen here. I can't have my camera with me all the time and therefore I haven't been able to immortalize even half of all the moments in photographs, but ouais, c'est la vie et donc c'est pas grave. Let me just say---I love it! My host family, Miles and Diane, and my roommate Jess are so nice and I really like living with all of them. Ask me about them, about our cute apartment, about anything!, anytime over facebook or skype. I'd love to hear from everyone and keep in touch.

I'm taking my classes here with a co-op organization called IES from which all my credit hours will transfer back (non GPA) to IU. I've been in an intensive grammar course for the last week called a propédeutique and on Thursday my 3 real courses with IES begin. More to come about those if anything particularly fascinating or relevant should be learned. On Wednesdays starting next week I will be taking one literature/mid-20th century French drama course at l'Institut Catholique de Paris and one sculpture workshop course at l'Academie de la Croix Nivert. This will be so awesome and a great way to meet French students! I hope so anyway because I am expecting these to be mostly unsuccessful experiences since French universities scoff at syllabuses and there is absolutely no way I will have any idea what is going on.

Besides museum strolling, mainstream shopping, and going to boulangeries, student cafeterias, quaint cafés or bars with new friends from IES I have gone on a few more adventurous excursions to different neighborhoods of Paris. This past weekend my roommate and I visited the Marché aux Puces de St. Ouen, the largest Paris flea market. The weather was rather dreary but we armed ourselves with crêpes stuffed with nutella and grated coconut and sought refuge in tiny antique clothing shops where eccentric old women gleefully tried ancient theater/battle jackets on me while the older mumbled about how we couldn't buy her "fleurs anciennes." She had nearly hidden in a basket on a shelf some tired old silk flowers that were falling apart but apparently nearly priceless. I was piqued yet disappointed to discover here, as in most vintage places I've encountered, that the French love to guard their treasures. If you want to take something old or beautiful out of its musty corner you will pay a hefty euro for displacing a relic of the city's history, a testament to its glory ever-fading with onslaughts of greedy tourists and heady debates over social policy reform. Many of the French proudly believe that they are privileged to be French, and being French comes before any other aspect of their person.

I had hoped to start an etsy business for the overflow of my vintage finds while here but it is more difficult than I thought. Even if this does not work out, as the search continues I am finding beautiful neighborhoods and meeting all sorts of different people which is really most of the fun, and all of the adventure.

Stay tuned for stories, pictures, fun finds, and other stuff!