Oh Keith.

Today was pretty normal. I spent the morning bumming around preparing to paint, while waiting for the paint to show up, and then finally being able to paint. Afternoon was spent finishing painting the bathroom and trying to make a computer work. Nothing too crazy for me, but the actual workers had plenty to do. Now that we have all the artwork, they were busy installing and figuring out where to put everything. The exhibit really looks amazing, I can’t wait to see it all done on Monday.

After work, I wandered around a bit wasting time before my meeting. I went to the fnac to try to buy a new metro book, but discovered that as soon as a book wins a prize or is generally considered good, its price jumps from 7 euros to 17 euros, way to much for a little paperback. So, instead I wrote down some good books to search for at the library, the good ol cheap student way. After that I discovered a store by chatelet called Christina which appears very cheap for good clothing, but I didn’t have any money so I didn’t critique too much.

After that I met up with my tutor for my final paper to discuss my topic. By the end of my program I have to write a 30 page research paper, about something in relation to my stage. It was a good meeting, because I realized that all my ideas revolve around the same idea. My tutor seemed to think I’ll be able to easily find a specific topic to write about, but wants me to explore the topic further, all sides of it, and then decide what interests me the most. All I know is I want to tie in the Museum and Keith Haring, because they are both such an important part of my life right now. I’ll let you know what the topic is when I figure out what I’m going to right about specifically, but for now I want to keep it to myself. I’m really happy with my tutor because he seems generally knowledgeable and interested in what I’m doing. He’s also just really nice. 🙂 (My meeting was actually at the café where this photo was taken. Small world affect meets internet, I wasn’t even searching for it and I found the picture.)

Once I finished, I realized there must be a bus stop nearby and decided to find it since I didn’t feel like cramming into the metro on a friday night. Which turned out to be a wonderful choice, because as I walked back towards the louvre, I managed to find the beginning of my bus line, hence an empty bus! It also just felt great figuring out how to get to the louvre without looking at a map and succeeding, and paris looked very pretty tonight, life just felt good. 🙂

Bus Tours in Paris

Written about a week ago.

Walking around Paris is not the best of ideas right now, and we did a lot of that today. Since we’ve finally gotten all the travel mishaps fixed and Christmas has come and gone, today we started visiting Paris a bit. We decided to try one of the tour buses that goes around Paris because then it would take us straight to the stops and we could look around and have a nice audio tour. However, we didn’t count on the cold, meaning we stayed inside the buses instead of enjoying the view up top and we shivered quite a bit while waiting for the bus.

We chose the Open Tour buses because they not only do the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, etc route but a Bastille and Sacre Coeur route as well. It’s a good choice if you have the time to explore Paris and want the audio guide and don’t want to take the metro. Or if it’s nice out and you want to sit up top. But, you have to make sure to get started early because it only runs from 9:30-4:30.

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One good thing about the Open Tour Buses is that it only costs 3 euros to add another day to your pass. Our second day had much better weather and we were able to sit up top and enjoy the view. However, it was a little tricky finding the bus stops.

Bye bye St Michel, I hope I never see you again :-)

That is perhaps the most negative title I have written, and karma will probably come and hit me one day by making me live above Gilbert Jeune or something like that. 🙂

Today was my last day involving my Sorbonne class. Thankfully, my oral exam wasn’t that difficult. Since September, we had read 10 texts in class, of those ten we had to chose eight to possibly talk about during our exam. Then, come exam time, you randomly select one of those texts along with a question to answer. My text was part of Les Memoires d’un jeune fille rangée par Simone de Beauvoir. So, I had read part of the texte aloud, summarize the texte and then answer a simple question about the sentiments evoqued by the author. I presented this to my professor and another, who was really nice, so it ended up feeling more like a conversation than a test. So, to any future students of the Sorbonne french as a second language classes, don’t worry, all the people at the Sorbonne are incredibly nice because they’re use to silly foreigners and all our mistakes. Even during exam time my professor was there for me, I mean yes she did have to grade my performance but she didn’t do it in a judging way if you get what I mean. So, Sorbonne exams finished, and now I can worry about other things!

Throughout this semester, my least favorite part of the day was taking the metro from my stage to my class, therefore having to pass through the chatelet metro station, take the line 4, and walk through St. Michel. Ask anybody in Paris and they will tell you that those are three of the busiest places around. After getting fed up with the grimy metro and fake deaf and mute kids bugging me everyday at St. Michel (no lie, they walk away singing anytime somebody actually signs their fake form), I started taking the bus to class. Note for future GPPers, Line 87 and 86 go straight from Bastille to Rue des Ecoles aka right next to St. Michel. For some bizarre reason it took me three months to figure that out, so today as I was leaving my test I realized that for the first time I went to and left class by bus without even seeing St. Michel. Silly me taking three months to figure it out, but at least I did eventually.

Fun fact from my stage: cotton is a horrible material for canvases, it moves and reacts to humidity and all sorts of bad stuff. Meanwhile, polyester is the perfect canvas and reacts to practically nothing except heat and accidents. Oh, the magic of science.