later!

4 other girls in the program and I are leaving tomorrow night for Barcelona. We have high hopes for good weather, and I'm really excited to see some great Gaudi architecture, like the Sagrada Familia Cathedral:


Be back on Tuesday! And soon after, we're off to Nice, by train.

update!

I'm sorry I haven't been able to update this very often. Not having a charger a.k.a. not being able to use my computer makes homework, travel planning, facebook-surfing, and blog-updating quite difficult. And expensive.

Things I have done in the past week that I haven't blogged about:

1) Toured Notre Dame, went up to the top of Notre Dame and admired Paris from above. Took pictures of creepy and strange gargoyles (one was eating enormous grapes!)

2) Held a dinner party at my host family's apartment because my entire host family was gone for the weekend. I won't see my host parents again until 2 weeks from now, but my host-sister just got back last night. I made ratatouille and pasta, and people brought cheeses, baguettes, wine, salad, and a berry tart. It was delicious.

3) Visited several artsy libraries, one at the Centre Pompidou, to do research for a project on Kader Attia, a French modern artist who focuses mostly on society's replacement of religion with consumerism and commercialism. Cool, very strange installations. Look him up.

4) Picasso Museum. Unfortunately half of the museum's collection is in Madrid, but it was great nonetheless.

5) Went to the Montreuil flea market. It was less of a legitimate flea market, more just a giant clothes and electronics street market, but it was fun. I bought a pair of pointy beige/gold heels for 15 euro, some great red nike hightops for 20. What a deal! I love markets.

6) Today, went to Montmartre, wandered through the sex shop/strip show/Moulin Rouge streets, visited Sacre Coeur and the artists' district, and had some delicious goat cheese and mint (I know, strange) pastries. This weather is really getting everyone down. Even in this beautiful area, the cold, cloudy, windy weather makes people grumpy. It's hard to avoid.

Things are fine in general. We only have 4 days of classes and then...Barcelona! And then, a day after we get back, we're off to Nice on a train. And when we get back, Alex (Sciuto) will be in Paris for a couple days, so I get to show him 'round these parts, and then I only really have 3 weeks left in Paris. Time flies, it's true.

Some good news! I finally have a place to live in Geneva! I'll be staying at Centre Protestant 2, in the center of the city. This student housing is in a suite, so I will be in one of 3-5 singles with a shared kitchen, living room, and bathroom. Can't wait! Also, I'll be overlapping for almost a week and a half with Sarah, my friend from high school who has been living in Geneva all year. I'm so excited to see her.

So that's that. Now I have to go pay 5 euros for using the internet. GOSH.

blech

My computer charger broke! The cord connecting my battery to the wall outlet started sparking last night and practically caught on fire. One of the wires snapped, I suppose, so I'm "sans" (without) laptop access for a little while, until I get a new cord.

In other news, clothing stores in Paris make me feel like a mammoth. The largest size for pants in almost any store is a 42 or a 44 (sizes 6/8, 8/10 in the states), which is just OUTRAGEOUS. I guess every French women is a size 0-4. Unreal.

the ballet

Last night our group went to a performance by the School of Dance (L'Ecole de Danse) of Paris, which was held at the Palais Garnier, or the National Opera House. It looks like this:


Incredible, right?

Anyways, we saw three performances. The first was "Soir de fête", which had extracts from "La Source" by Léo Delibes and was choreographed by Léo Staats. It was very classical ballet,with a leading male and female dancer, and pairs and 3 and 4-somes of ballerinas in matching tutus upholding the soloist's frequent feats of twirling, leaping, etc (I don't know the real ballet terms).

The second was "Les Forains", music written by Henri Sauguet and choreography by Roland Petit. This told the story of a traveling troupe of performers, including a clown, a little girl, a women who danced with flowing transparent robes connected to sticks she held in the air, so she resembled a butterfly, Siamese twins, and a magician with a puppet ballerina. I loved how the dancing was incorporated into the story, and how the dancers lit up as they performed for the passersby, while before and after, while coming to set up the tent and then slowly packing up, they looked like a bedraggled group of nomads.

The third piece was "Symphonie en trois mouvements" by Stravinsky, with choreography by Nils Christe. This was REALLY modern and reminded me of my class on Music in Paris at the Turn of the 20th Century (remember, Hannah?!?!) We watched a reenactment of the original Rite of Spring choreography for the Ballets Russes. The choreography used a lot of turned-in feet, angular movements, and stomping. It was meant to reflect the savagery of the music and of the story. I thought I recognized some of that in the choreography of the Stravinsky that we saw last night. It was very modern, using lots of non-classic, flat movements, turned in feet, and some tumbling and stomping, too. I loved it. All the men and women wore mesh black shirts or dresses over shiny purple and blue leotards. It made them all look the same and it was such a cool effect, seeing everyone do the same flat angular movements at the same time. It was my favorite.

Here are some pictures of the Opera House. It's incredible. The ceiling was painted by Chagall in 1964, though the building itself was built much earlier, officially opening as the National Opera Theatre in 1875. It was this Opera House that inspired Gaston Leroux to write "The Phantom of the Opera"! Anyway, it's beautiful.

Centre Pompidou, briefly

Today I went to the Centre Pompidou. Initially, we had planned to look at some work by Hannah's artist, Christian Boltanski, and then use the Library of Public Information, a library which is free and open to the public, to do some research. Unfortunately, the line for the library was incredibly long so instead, we spent some time in the museum itself.

When it comes to some modern art, I like it simply because I know I would enjoy having it on my wall. Nice colors, cool swirls and designs, or multi-colored geometric shapes, etc. But I can't quite see it as ART. I can't see an artist putting much thought into simply designing something pleasing to the eye - for instance, Gerhard Richter's "1024 Farben", below, which I saw today.



There were some other paintings and sculptures and odd things, however, that were so very deliberate. One piece was called "Arabian Stars", by Jordi Colomer, and it was a video of a bunch of Arab chidren in Yemen walking through the streets holding various painted cardboard signs which said, in Arabic, "Picasso", "Pikachu", "Minnie Mouse", and later, several names of popular Arab poets and musicians. Watching it, I couldn't quite understand; was it political commentary? Western imposition of culture? A contrast between a new generation of Muslims and the "Arabian Stars" (note: not Arabic) and Western stars of the past and present? I wasn't sure. The cool thing about modern art that I kept thinking about today is that it isn't simply a representation of what the artist sees, but is frequently a deliberate attempt to persuade the viewer/spectator to really think hard about what the artist has put together and imagine what it could mean. After reading about the piece, I learned that Colomer was commenting, really, on Yemen specifically, and on its modern society, its use of Chinese plastics, Japanese cars, Russian Kalashnikovs. And she was also commenting on how Picasso is a name virtually unfamiliar to most Yemenis, while, she mentioned in an interview, she was corrected several times on the Arabic spelling of "Pikachu". And then, I wonder, is this really modern art? Or is it just a video that then needs so much additional explanation and background information that its really just social commentary in the end. Where is the art?

Anyways, here's Hannah and me in one of those odd outside-the-building escalators in giant tubes at the Centre Pompidou.

I liked this painting.


And this one.


On my way back home, I stopped in the Chatelet metro station to watch this group of musicians perform. They played mostly Ukrainian folk music, but I caught some Shalom Aleichem, too. It's hard to describe, but their voices and the music just filled up the station. Really beautiful harmonies. It was pretty mesmerizing - I could only get myself to leave after they started packing up.

doors

I just noticed - at almost every entrance here, you have to PUSH the door to get in. It takes quite a lot of getting used to.

le misanthrope

This afternoon we went to see Molière's "Le Misanthrope" at the Comédie Française. The main action of the play focuses on Alceste, who entirely rejects all the social niceties and proper courtly politeness in favor of a far more honest and sincere approach to his interaction with others. This makes him incredibly unpopular with the other members of the court. While holding on to and fiercely demonstrating these values, Alceste is also in love with Célimène, a woman of the court who cares enormously about her social reputation. I found the play, when reading it over the past two weeks, to be rather comedic; even the ending (spoiler!) was funny, in my opinion. After everything that has happened and Célimène is exposed as a gossipy social climber who actually despises most everyone, she still refuses Alceste, telling him that she is unwilling to go off into the wilderness with him to live away from silly court life.

I liked the play when I read it, but I couldn't stand the way that the play was performed today. It was SO OVERDRAMATIC and such a true TRAGEDY. I couldn't believe it. I think they were trying a new, modern approach. They added quite a lot of sex to the play, which is completely nonexistent in the text, and they really overdid, in my opinion, the onstage laughter. It was used so often that it seemed almost maniacal, and in the end, the actors had laughed much more than the audience had. That definitely didn't seem right to me, especially since I found the play pretty clever and funny when reading it, and not at all while viewing it. Also, in writing the play is rather flat in terms of onstage movement. There are very few stage directions, and most of the situations are simply two characters having a conversation. In this production, though, the characters were blustering around as if there were a time limit on standing in one place. They were constantly flipping their coattails and running to and from different corners of the stage. It was pretty distracting.

It was rather hard to follow the French. If we hadn't read it in class last week, I wouldn't have been able to follow the play at all. Mostly I think it's because the actors' tones changed so drastically in the performance; from yelling to sobbing to laughing to whispering. It made the already very rapid French speech even more difficult to comprehend.

Anyways, good play, not my fave production, beautiful building for the Comédie Française. We weren't allowed to take any photos, but it was very beautiful, I promise.