Viva la España!!!

Hello all! I realize it's been a while since I last posted, but November has been insane! If October was about exploring Paris, November has been about living in France and traveling to its neighbors. So, the quick version of events is that I went to Madrid for a weekend with a friend from my class, got sick, got better, finished my second class of the quarter, went to London with a friend for a few days, went to Edinburgh to meet a friend for a short visit, and am now back in Paris. Woo-hoo! Keep reading if you want to read the more detailed versions (I think I'll split this up between a few posts to keep this from getting too long).

So, for today's post: Spain!!!

A few weeks ago, my friend Ariana and I planned to go to Madrid for a weekend, where we would meet up with her friend, Ankita, who is studying in Toledo. We left Paris Friday afternoon, landed in Madrid, got directions from the friendly info desk guy at the airport, and made our way to our hostel, which was clean, friendly, and in a great location - and served free tea and coffee all day! For dinner, we went to a Mexican restaurant that had fabulously colorful wrestling-themed decorations:

The food was pretty good too; I had some sort of cheese filled empanada with a sauce on top.

That night we went out for drinks and found an Irish bar to hang out in that was seventeen times bigger than it appeared from the outside - it had two floors and tons of space with comfy chairs and couches and booths and tables. We loved it!

We wanted to have a lot of energy for Saturday, so we turned in relatively early and woke up at about 10 on Saturday ready for exploring. We had an early lunch at El Tigre, which Ankita found online in her search for an authentic Spanish tapas bar (tapas are small snacklike foods that are served for free when you order a drink at a lot of Spanish bars). El Tigre was a small packed restaurant (and I mean packed, you could barely walk) where you don't even sit, you stand at small counters around the edge of the room. At first, Ariana and I were worried about whether we could eat there - I'm mostly vegetarian, though I've started eating chicken, and she has a lot of food allergies, especially to fish - since there was definitely fish being served and there wasn't much control over which kind of dish you were served). But we talked to the waiter and he brought us potatoes and bread with cheese and some kind of tomato sauce, and it turned out to be cheap and delicious. Although I was disappointed that Spanish food isn't spicy, we still loved it there!

Sangria and tapas!

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering the streets of Madrid without any real plan, which I love doing (we were heading in a general direction looking for sweets made by nuns in a convent, but we never found them). We picked up some souveniers, looked at the gorgeous architecture, saw some very odd street performers, picked up Indian samosas at an international food festival, and found an indoor fancy-shmancy food market surrounded by glass that had some of the most expensive produce I've ever seen.

This building was decorated so colorfully with figure paintings - so cool!

We made our way down to one of the most famous art museums in Madrid: the Reina Sofia. They had a fantastic exhibit on an artist who sews/embroiders world maps with each country colored by its flag, a new one each time world borders change. The detail is incredible; I can't even imagine how many hours it would take to embroider that.

This museum also housed many of Salvador Dali's and Picasso's work (including Guernica!!!) but I was so entranced that I forgot to take pictures. They were amazing, I promise! I did feel like I didn't know enough about Dali to appreciate what I was seeing, but I was still in awe. There was also a lot of modern art, really beautifully complex works that clearly took vast amounts of time and effort on the part of the artists. The technical skills exhibited by these testaments to the astounding genius and capabilities of the human race just took my breath away:

 

I will never understand the appeal of modern art.

After the museum, we went back to the hostel, ate dinner, and changed to go out for the night. We found a fun club that was oddly playing mostly American rock songs, but we had a great time anyway. 

Sunday morning we woke up, checked out of the hostel, and went exploring in Madrid's biggest flea market. It was fabulous, I got a great pair of pants and lots of souveniers, and we found a small corner shop that was selling intricate Moroccan, Spanish, and Middle Eastern objects. I wanted to take the entire store home with me. We saw an immensely talented street performer who played water glasses, and I found tiny sculpted vignettes of jewel-toned Spanish doors that I either want to recreate or find somewhere to hang in my room - they were so realistic!

We parted with Ankita, who went back to Toledo, and Ariana and I visited the biggest park in Madrid, the Retiro. It is a relaxing haven within such an energetic city, and we sat down to have tea outside of a fountain, and found a cute wooden bridge over a stream before coming upon the Crystal Palace, a glittering building in front of a glassy lake with trees whose leaves were in the middle of turning colors. It was fantastic. As we made our way out of the park, we came upon a church that had a copper dome with cris-crossing metal bits, which the years had weathered beautifully.

After this, we ate dinner at Maoz, the chain falafel place, and then relaxed at the same Irish pub until we had to leave for the airport. There was a duo of a fiddler and a guitarist in the pub, and they kept us entertained while we waited.

Our flight was at 6:30 am, and since we had to be there about two hours beforehand, and Madrid's public transportation shuts down late at night, we decided to just sleep in the airport, which, in retrospect, was probably one of the worst attacks on our immune systems and sleep habits we could have thought of, since we had to sleep in shifts to guard our stuff. We went straight from the airport to class, thus concluding our whirlwind visit!

I fell in love with Madrid, as did Ariana. It was such a colorful and vibrant city, and compared to Paris, absurdly friendly. I think at this point both Ariana and I (and the rest of our class) were going through a bit of a homesick phase, and were glad for a change of scenery, but I don't think that was the only reason for our favorable impression. Even though I was only working with the garbled bits of Spanish I vaguely remembered from eighth grade, I still felt that I managed to communicate better with the Spanish than I ever have with the French, and the general atmosphere was more relaxed and, frankly, happier.

After that trip though, I came down with quite a headcold, probably because of the lack of sleep, but I chugged grapefruit juice and managed to get better before London, thank god (more on that next time!)

Today has been beautiful. It was a sunny warm day in Paris (middle of November? says who?), and I had a lazy morning, then walked across half of Paris just for the hell of it, and sat in a cafe and read for a couple of hours, then came home and started a new knitting project. I'm about to make dinner (fancified macaroni and cheese - I've taken to sauteeing tomatoes with garlic and cumin and cayenne and mixing that with the noodles and cheese mix), and then I'm meeting my friend Emily for the evening - a perfect day in old Pareee.

Love, Naomi

Je vous presente mon ville, Paris!

Bonjour all!

It's been a while since I've posted because two weeks ago was the final exam for our first class, Apes and Human Evolution, and then I had a huge presentation to give today for our second class, Primate Evolution and, well, I've been lazy.

The past two weeks have been much less hectic than the first three. I didn't get to do as much sightseeing, but I got to explore the city as a resident, which is a whole different experience, one that's very interesting to learn about!

I went to Les Puces de Saint-Ouen at Porte de Clignancourt, which is the biggest flea market in the world (No, really! It covers almost three square miles) with a few friends on a beautiful Sunday morning.  I bought a purse and got to test out my French haggling skills. I think I need a bit more work; I'm sure I could have bought it for less, but it was fun to practice my numbers, since we had only just started learning how to count in French class. We spent the rest of the time browsing through stalls, especially some of the wacky furniture stalls, where we sat in all of the giant comfy chairs we could find. It was fun, but also quite overwhelming, and I think I enjoyed looking at the scenery around the market (people sitting outside eating baguettes and cheese and wine watching the crowds go by, the brightly painted buildings, the ivy) more than I liked the goods themselves, but then again, I've never been a good shopper.

That week was full of studying and writing (a paper, a practical slide exam, a written exam, and an in-class essay, all on the same day), but on Wednesday I did get to make an outing with two friends to a museum and a chocolate shop! The museum was Musée du quai Branly, which is right next to the Eiffel Tower. They are having an exhibit on the Maori, which I wanted to see for the tattoo art in addition to wanting to learn more about the native New Zealanders, but although our student IDs gave us free admission to the permanent museum exhibits, we would have had to pay for the Maori exhibit, and we didn't have the money on us at the time (Benny, Shaun, Rosie, Dewey - I'd love to hear about anything you've learned about the Maori, and if we go back I'll definitely let you know what I find out!), so we explored the rest of the museum. The main part seemed to be an anthropological display of native cultures around the world - Native American, African, ancient Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and I think Aztec and Maya. It was set up in a rather odd way: there were tons of different items, and each was displayed in a huge glass case that usually was standing on its own so that you could see 360 degrees, which was great, but they were organized rather haphazardly so that I felt no matter how systematically you tried to see the exhibit, you were bound to miss something. But we still enjoyed our time there, pointing out our favorite items (mine were the textiles and swords and weapons and books, my friend Maria's were the masks and boats and (also) swords and weapons).

After that, we went to a pastry shop I had read about online, called Dalloyau. It was a very fancy pastry, chocolate, and savory food shop, one of the ones where you walk in and inhale the scent of butter and dark chocolate. They are apparently famed for their macarons (two almond meringue cookies that have either jam or ganache sandwiched between, depending on the flavor), so I bought four small ones: chocolate, coffee, raspberry, and... earl grey! The chocolate and coffee were amazing, but the earl grey was the most interesting by far: just enough bergamot to let you know it's there, but sweet enough to feel like a dessert. And I was surprised that the raspberry was my favorite of all - the jam tasted like summer! My friends were equally enamoured.

This past Friday was field trip time! We went to a museum about an hour south of Paris to look at a special exhibit about a woman named Elizabeth Daynés, who creates reconstructions of extinct fossils in the early human lineages for museums. She has no formal training in anthropology or biology or archaeology or anatomy; she's a sculptor by trade who started out making set props for plays and is completely self-taught. It was incredible to see the depth of work that goes into these figures; she works with experts to determine what the flesh of the face might have looked like using only a skull, and can spend up to six months attaching every individual hair by hand. Her intersection of craftsmanship and science is incredible, and she's so talented that the figures really do seem alive! The museum itself was a really cool building; it wasn't very pretty on its own, but it had huge windows everywhere to let in lots of light and was set in a forest, where they placed plants that would have been consistent with the environment of the fossils on display, and the result was absolutely beautiful. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but the outside of the museum looked like this:

Afterward, we went back to Paris and to the Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie Comparée. We took notes for a paper that I'll be writing soon, but we also had more time this visit to look around and goof off, hence this picture of my friend Maria and me standing in front of the primate skeletons:

and:

The museum itself is pretty awesome; here's a shot from one of the balconies on the upper floors:

After, most of our class went back to the cafe in the Mosque, and I remembered to take pictures this time!

This weekend, I was working on my big presentation for today (which went well, phew), but I did get to go wander around the Latin Quarter with some friends. We went back to the knitting store I've found here, and I got a picture of their alpaca yarns (top) and woolen yarns (bottom) - so gorgeous!

Other than that, I've been enjoying the beautiful weather, which I hope stays around for a while, biking to and from class, reading, and knitting. I've started a new long-term project called the Beekeeper's Quilt, which is made up of tons of tiny knitted hexagon pockets, dubbed hexipuffs, which are filled with stuffing and then attached to form a blanket. I've decided on a color scheme (black, grey, orange, yellow, turquoise blue, royal blue) and a pattern.

The brown will be grey... and for anyone wondering, it will require about 1300 hexipuffs. Yep, insane.

Anyways, that's about all I've got for now. If you're on the East Coast, I hope you have power and are surviving through the freak snow!

Love, Naomi

What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks only one language? American!

Salut!

Sorry it's taken me so long to update! There's been so much to do and see that I've been trying to take advantage before it gets too cold to want to go anywhere.

As I had only seen Notre Dame at night, I went with a couple of friends to see it during the day.

The inside was very dark, and since flash wasn't allowed, I didn't get many good pictures of the architecture inside or the things on display. I like these, though.

On Tuesday, on the recommendation of my French conversation helper (our French class has assigned a young Parisian, usually a student, to all of us Americans trying to learn French), I went with two friends to an art supply store to pick up some sketching materials, and got to wander around an area I hadn't seen before - which is the point of the trip, right? We were right next to the Jardin du Luxembourg, a giant beautiful park with lots of trees and chairs and a circular fountain - I will be coming back there soon!

Wednesday night we were taken to see the ballet. I was very excited for this, but when we arrived at the theater I found out it was a modern ballet, not classical. Now, I don't know very much about dance, and I'm sure there are lots of people out there who appreciate modern ballet, but apparently I am not one of them. The show was in four parts. The first and third had no music at all, and the fourth had a rather headache-inducing cacaphony of dischordant tones. When there was no music, all that could be heard were the dancers' toes squeaking against the floor, which was very distracting. The beginning of the second part was the only part I enjoyed: they rigged up two female dancers  to wires, and they floated and danced gracefully across the stage. The effect was like watching them underwater or in space: they weren't affected by gravity. They were also accompanied by classical music, which was a relief. I loved that and was very disappointed when it ended. Oh, well. One day I'll get to see a classical French ballet.

I discovered on Tuesday evening that I had somehow lost my notebook/sketchbook, and so on Thursday I went back to the art supply store to get it, picking up one of the most delicious and rich scoops of chocolate ice cream along the way. Now, I should mention that at this point I've had a total of six hours of French instruction, and I've been managing to get around extremely well, considering that. I know the greetings and please and thank you and numbers and how to ask where something is, so I've squeaked by. Additionally, some of the people in the group speak almost fluent French, so I hadn't had any major language problems yet. However, when I arrived at the art store, I realized I had absolutely no idea how to say, "I think I left my notebook here on Tuesday, have you seen it?" After mangling the word for Tuesday (I mixed it up with the Spanish word) and realizing the lady behind the counter had no idea what I was trying to say,  I started miming what I wanted to say, which I was hoping would be so hopelessly funny that it would charm her. She was rather less than amused. I have a sneaking suspicion that she spoke way more English than she was letting on (I've heard this is quite common), and after letting me pathetically mime everything, she looked at me with this half disgusted, half pitying expression and said - in perfect English, "You really don't understand, do you?" And I said, "No, but I'm learning," and she said "Good," but not in an encouraging way, in a thank-god-you-won't-be-mangling-my-language-and-insulting-my-country kind of way. It was disheartening. It was not helped by the realization (only after I had left, of course), that I had had a bit of chocolate ice cream on my nose. I can only imagine what that did for my credibility.

Our school arranged for us to meet some Parisian students, and during that get-together I (and many other people in my program) experienced similar attitudes. Many of the Parisians were quite rude about our method of study (being taught in English by our own professors which our school flew in) and our lack of French. Now, I understand that Americans are known for speaking only English, but all of us have taken multiple years of, or are even fluent in languages other than English or French - it's part of the core requirements at UChicago, and many other American universities. In our class of 12 alone, we have four Hispanic students who speak fluent Spanish, one who speaks Russian, and me (I just finished a year of Arabic), not to mention the three people in our class who actually DO speak French. We were not pleased with their attitudes. That being said, those two times have been the only occasions in which I have encountered the famed French snobbery - everyone else has been extremely helpful and welcoming. I've found that what I heard before I came here is for the most part true - as long as you make an effort to speak French, however slight, they will help you and eventually take pity and speak English, if you really can't communicate through French and gestures. It's only if you assume that they speak English that they will be offended.

On Friday was a field trip to the Vallee des Singes, an animal sanctuary a few hours north of Paris. We had to be out the door by 6:15 am (ugh!), but we got to nap on the train and the bus. We were going to see the primates in preparation for our next paper (which I should be writing right now, actually - yay procrastination!). Although it was colder than anticipated, it was fascinating seeing the apes we've been studying in real life! We saw gorillas (my favorites), gibbons, lemurs, bonobos, chimpanzees, and many others! I particularly loved the male silver-back gorilla, the head of his group; he was so regal!

One of the females in his group had a baby recently and he was so cute! When they are so young, the mother won't let him out of her sight for months, and barely lets him crawl even a few feet away. Usually he clings to her forearm as she moves around, or she cups him in her hand and walks with only three limbs.

The pictures are a bit blurry, but you can see how adorable he is. For size reference, he's probably about the size of my forearm right now - it's hard to believe he'll one day grow to be around 400 lbs!

The sanctuary itself is a very interesting place - they take apes and monkeys who have been abused or used for medical treatments (those two are not mutually exclusive!) and give them homes and try to imitate their natural habitat as much as possible. This is not a zoo, and they do not participate in the breeding that many American zoos do, sending individuals across the country to mate to produce genetically viable offspring to keep the gene pool diverse and large. The people at the sanctuary don't believe in that because they think that any infant born should be returned to the wild, and since many infants don't survive well in the wild, they prefer to prevent any pregnancies at all. Thus, the females are all on birth control.

The biggest difference, though, is that when the animals are in their outdoors environments, they are not separated by fences from the spectators. For the larger or more violent ones, like the gorillas and gibbons, they live on an island and we are separated from them by a small river, perhaps five or ten feet across - that's it! For the smaller and gentler ones, like the lemurs, there is no separation! We walked among the lemurs, who for the most part were completely uninterested in us, which was great because we got fantastic pictures, like this one of the ring-tailed lemur!

I wish we had had more time to wander around on our own and observe; we only got ten minutes to ourselves. For lunch, we went to a local small restaurant which was excellent. They had tomatoes that tasted like they were from the middle of summer instead of the middle of October. Unfortunately, the French don't know what to do with vegetarians, it's like we're a foreign breed of human or something. So while I enjoyed the appetizers and drinks and dessert, my main meal was a plate of noodles and rather flavorless tomato sauce. I've had much better luck buying my own food, going to street carts, or small crepe restaurants than at the fancier restaurants for this reason, which is good for my wallet, at least!

Yesterday about half of our class decided to have a sight-seeing day. We started out with Sainte-Chapelle, the most beautiful church I've ever seen. Apart from the glorious gothic architecture, the main attraction is the stained glass windows, which were made in the 1200s (like the church itself) - and 70% of the original glass is still there! It's in the midst of being restored. The walls and ceilings were richly painted. I'll stop rambling and just show you some pictures:

The first chapel, underneath the main one.

This color is much truer to what I saw than the one above, much more golden than blue-grey.

First view of the main chamber as you walk up from the spiral staircase.

What I love about this is you can see how the colored light from the stained glass is dappled across the painted parts of the interior walls. Stunning.

This was on the underside of a smaller side arch. Every inch of this place was deconrated luxuriously. It was, after all, a place where only kings could worship.

Then we grabbed a quick lunch and headed to the Musee Cluny, a medieval museum not far from Sainte-Chapelle. This museum had lots of beautiful artifacts, but after the 257th crucifix I tend to get a little bored with these kinds of exhibits. It was mostly other items that interested me: old bits of woven fabric seals from clothing, the remains of one of the largest Roman bath houses, old illuminated books, and the weaponry.

Remains of the excavated Roman bath house.

Old musical notation written on what looks like parchment.

Swords!

A hand-painted book illustrating fighting techniques from a tutor to a young duke (I think). Unfortunately we could only see this page, and the screen which was supposed to show us the rest of the book was out of order, but you can imagine the time and effort it must have taken to plan this out and illustrate it by hand! Amazing.

The group exited the museum at different times, and eventually we were only waiting for one person, who took a very thorough trip. It was nice to sit in the sun for once, though, since it had turned out to be a beautiful day.

We also found on the side of a wall an old sun dial built in 1674!

The time was off by about an hour and fifteen minutes, so my guess is that slight shifts in sun-earth relations over that time and the whole daylight savings thing accounts for the difference. If anyone has a better/more detailed explanation, let me know!

And that brings us to today: a lovely lazy Sunday in which I will knit, read, and eventually write this paper. Hope you're all doing well!

Love, Naomi