days 3 and 4 (ish)

The last few days have been so crazy and great. My French is improving a lot. The other day we went to the Picasso museum, which was interesting. I didn’t really know much about him, but through looking at all of his pieces of art and talking with my friend who’s an art history major, I learned a lot. It’s cool to see how he painted and sculpted and everything over his whole lifetime. Also, I learned that he was trying to see how much you could take a shape and make it look like what we think it is in its context, like a triangle for a nose, for example. So he kept pushing the limits—taking shapes farther and farther out of context to see if it would still look like the original intended image, in a way.

After that, Emily and Kaleigh and I went to find Victor Hugo’s house, which was an adventure. We’re getting better at asking people for directions, but they speak so quickly, so it’s hard to understand them at times. We found it, and it’s in part of this beautiful building that goes around a whole block, with a huge park in the middle. There were lots of cute little French kids playing around in it. I LOVE listening to kids speak French!!

Later that night, we took the metro to a “random” street in Paris, rue Muffetarre, to try to find a cafe where Ernest Hemingway used to go. (Emily just read “A Moveable Feast” which is a memoir of Hemingway when he lived in Paris, so he references a lot of places. It’s fun to try to find them.) The cafe doesn’t exist anymore, but it was fun to walk around and see Paris “night life” without the tourists. Everyone eats dinner really late, so at 9 or 10, when we were walking around, the streets were alive with people getting food and eating at cafes. We got coffee and hot chocolate at one, just sitting and watching everyone walk by. Then I bought “Les Trois Mousquetaires” (The Three Musketeers) at a local bookstore. I figure, if I’m going to read it, I might as well read it in the original language. (Though I tried to read a few pages, and I only retained half of what happened...)

Let’s see... another adventure... Yesterday we got on the metro and took it really far, to the 19th arrondissement (district), and walked around the Cite de la Musique and the Canal d’Orcqe where Amelie, in the movie, skipped rocks. It’s a really cool place.


One morning, a few of us, before class, walked to this little market street nearby and then sat at a park and did some homework. It was such a good moment, to be in a park in the middle of Paris, sitting on a bench in the sun.

I love it here.