Je Suis Heureux!

So this might seem like a weird thing to ask, but . . . you there, reading this! Would you mind going over to the Facebook post where I linked this blog and liking it? It's just for my own personal record--I want to see who all is reading this silly thing of mine! :)

All right, anyway. Forward! On to the blog!!

Okay, to explain this first thing: sometimes on the metro, there are street performers who get on the train and perform, whether that be dancing like Michael Jackson, singing, or (yes, the cliche is 100% true) playing the accordion. Usually I find this at least marginally entertaining. But on Monday morning, I was very exhausted and a little sad (for reasons that will eventually become clear) and I just wanted to sleep a little bit. Which meant of course that somebody got on the RER and started to play some of the liveliest accordion music I've ever heard in my life. Like seriously--this guy brought an accompaniment track. Imagine trying to catch a few Z's when there's somebody five feet away from you playing music like this:

(Sorry it's just the floor--the people on the metro have this weird thing where, if they see you filming, you're basically expected to pay.)

As a wakeup call, it was kind of annoying, but hey--it means I'm in Paris!! :D

Class was pretty uneventful--well, actually that's not strictly true. I had this chocolate eclair to help me stay awake:

Unfortunately, it did not help because I was sitting in the sunlight and got a little too comfortable for my own good. Fifteen minutes after I put my head down, just to rest it for a second, mind you, I woke up in panicked confusion as everyone in the class laughed at something Brother Euvrard had said. I didn't hear what it was, so I can only hope it wasn't a joke about me snoring. 

Anyway. Mondays mean Art History, so we spent another afternoon looking around at the Louvre, which honestly never gets old for me. Not only are the paintings incredible, but the walls and ceilings of a lot of the rooms we've visited are seriously some of the most ornate things I have seen in my life.  No pictures, though; not because I'm lazy, but because most of the ceilings tend to be covered with loooots of nude people. And, like, I guess I could do Incorrect Caption Hour with those, but I think it would get a little awkward. 

Actually, we're going to skip Incorrect Caption Hour for this week, because I just want to focus on the cool things I saw this week. There was a lot of really cool stuff, like this queen blinging it out with extremely realistic-looking pearls: 

An excellent painting by Vermeer:

Cool fairytale-esque landscapes:

And my personal favorite, this painting:

This painting is very pretty in itself, but what made it so special for me was the fact that I had a piano book with this picture  on it. At the time I got that book, I never imagined I would get to see the painting in real life some day. Just another cool reminder of how blessed I am. 

Tuesday was a day of firsts! I went with Scarlet, Rachel, Skye, and Jacob to eat at a little cafe and then go see an organ recital at Notre Dame. Which would have been super exciting anyway, but the excitement was heightened for me because I had never actually been inside Notre Dame before. So I was pumped!

Before that, though, we had to go get dinner. We found this little cafe that had a little bit higher-end fancy French food, and I saw this on the menu: 

And while I may not be the bravest soul when it comes to many things, I have never been averse to trying new and strange foods. So I decided to go for it.

Thanks, Scarlet, for taking this picture!

I'll be honest, I was not enamored of snails. I don't know if they weren't cooked right, but it felt more like eating a muscle than anything else--not a mussel, like the clam thingy, but an actual muscle. Really tough and chewy, with this strange earthy flavor. Not my favorite. But I have now officially eaten snails! So that was fun.

We had ice cream, too, which was much more of a success. Salted caramel and chocolate:

Let's be honest, you can never go wrong with French ice cream. 

You basically can't go wrong with a walk across a bridge on the Seine, either, especially as the sun is setting.

Hooo, Mama!

And it just kept getting prettier as the sun went down:

Excuse me, Paris sky. You are arrested for being too gosh-darn beautiful!

Here's a video I took of that, too, just because:

Rachel was playing La Vie en Rose on her phone, too, which was extremely appropriate for what we were seeing. Gosh, I just love it here, you guys, I really do.

Notre Dame is an especially pretty lady at night, methinks:

Oh yeah, and the concert was pretty amazing as well. 

There were a lot of different styles of music showcased, which was pretty cool. The first piece sounded really . . . I don't know how else to describe it . . . modern? Like, confusing and a bit incoherent. Reaaally cacophonous. I've spared your ears by giving you something from the Romantic period, but the first piece kinda sounded like that part in Phantom when he's just wailing on the organ like crazy and Christine is napping. Also, fun fact: the guy at the organ was 80 years old! I thought that was pretty amazing.

Anyway, it was a great night with a lot of really fun people! Outside Notre Dame, there was also a street show that was totally awesome, with this guy who breathed fire. Unfortunately, the crowd was so tight around him that I could not for the life of me get a good shot. Next time, next time.

We'll return to Wednesday and Thursday in a minute, because it's part of a longer explanation of things, and I didn't actually take any photos those days. Friday was great, though! I spent the afternoon doing a walk with Rachel, and that was suuuper fun. It was walk number 7, a walk in the Marais District, but our adventure started before we even actually got to the starting point for our walk. (Long story with lots of text ahead)

So along the Seine, there are loads and loads of shops set up in these big green boxes that unfold into booths. Vendors can sell all kinds of things there: aprons, postcards, facsimiles of famous works of art . . . and books written in French.

As Rachel and I walked along the Seine towards the starting point of our Paris Walk for the day, we happened to slow down in front of one of the little booths, where there were big piles of books everywhere. Unfortunately, this is a sign of Weakness that most vendors take as a signal to pounce.

We'd glanced at the books for a hot three seconds or so before this thin guy in his 50s or so, with a grey rain jacket and at least 15 very visible dark hairs coming out his nostrils came up to us and started to speak in French, asking us something and gesturing to the books. Which, just a fast disclaimer about: I'm not sure if this happens to anybody else in our group, but the instant somebody on the street tries to speak to me in French, I feel like my brain's first reaction is to wad up all my language skills into a little ball, stuff them into a cannon, and shoot them into the Seine. Basically I had absolutely no idea what he was saying, and looked at Rachel with vague panic. Unfortunately, she couldn't understand him very well either, so we kind of haltingly explained that we were American and didn't speak excellent French. (Although to be fair, Rachel is awesome and waaaay better than me at speaking French :))

This didn't put the guy off, though. He was nice enough to slow down his speaking, and asked us about what we were here to do, what we were studying, etc. Then he dug into his pile of books and pulled out a little book by some guy named Paul Eluard. "Il est un livre de poesie," he said, and opening it to the first poem, he handed it to me.

I was kind of just like, wat? Is he trying to sell me the book? I felt really dumb and confused for a second, before I finally realized he was asking me to read it aloud. So I started to read. (The full text can be found here, btw--last one on the page.)

I got about three words in before he interrupted me and told me to go back to the beginning, explaining some mistake in pronunciation I'd made. The next time it was probably five words or so, then he corrected me again. And so it went. Yes, that's right--Rachel and I stood with this random dude on the edge of the Seine for about five minutes while he helped me struggle through pronouncing a French poem. And after that was done, he asked me if I understood it, and then we went back through and I picked out words I knew, and he explained the ones I didn't (all en francais), until we'd unboxed the whole poem. Then, after that, he had Rachel read the whole thing, repeating after my pronunciation of the words!

I don't know exactly what this guy was expecting of us, honestly. Because he didn't even try to sell us that book--or any book. He asked us if we knew any other French poets, and then went digging through his collection again to look for more books. When he couldn't find the ones he was looking for he borrowed Rachel's little notebook and wrote down the names of several poets inside it, then said that these poets were the ones who, roughly translated, had "the best sense of the music of the language." He told us places where we could find books like these for only a few euros, then wished us well and let us go on our way.

It was the kind of experience that seems kinda . . . surreal in the moments that follow it. Rachel and I just kept walking for a little ways, before I had to stop and try to take a selfie without him noticing that could catch him in the background. I kinda succeeded:

Yup, that's him! Congratulations, Poetry Man! You are now immortalized in my blog.

Truth be told, it was really a neat experience, and probably one of my favorite things that happened this week. Because despite the fact that I take French classes every day for three hours, this was the first time since I've been here that I felt like somebody in France was willing to help me learn, at my own pace, and not because they were being paid to or because they felt like they had to, but because they wanted to. It kinda reminded me of how it felt to get French lessons from my dad.

So yeah, unabashed sappy moment, I love and miss my daddy!

All right, that story was reallly long. Back to our previously scheduled blogging.

After we ran into Poetry Man, we stopped for another little break at a bridge along the Seine, and Rachel took a cute picture of me:

And then we were finally ready to start our walk. First up was a glance at this cool old building, the Hotel de Sens:

Which was designed for the archbishop to live in and completed in 1519. Rachel and I both agreed that a little tower like the one jutting from the right-hand side of the building would be #goals to live in.

This next thing wasn't technically a part of the walk, but it was just something we found funny. Check out this building that's just sliiiightly crooked:

Like a knockoff Leaning Tower of Pisa in France. Of course I had to get in on that action:

As we walked down the road past that crooked house, we noticed that all the different little poles you see all around every sidewalk weren't black, like we've normally seen, but multiple colors, like this:

Which I thought was really fun and quaint! As it turns out, we were walking past a kids' school in the Marais District. Which is just like any school anywhere, as evidenced by the random paper airplanes we found dotting the sidewalk:

There was something of actual historical interest around here, too: this really old fragment of wall that ran all along the edge of the school's playground, and was apparently part of Paris' border around 1200 AD.

We walked through a lot of really cool back alleyways. It felt like we'd stepped out of the suburban parts of Paris and into some kind of hidden, secret land where tourists didn't go. Fun fact: these little cone-ish things, called chasses roues, were put in place to keep carriages from scraping up against the walls:

And at the end of the alleyway we came upon a side entrance to a church, L'eglise Saint-Paul Saint-Louis.

I will honestly never get over how much I love the insides of churches in France. They are all so ornate and lovely and unique in their own ways, but at the same time they also bring out some impish tendencies in me that would probably not be good to carry out. Exhibit A: So I saw that domed ceiling up there:

And my brain was just like:

Ya gotta climb up there.

What? No, brain, that's entirely impractical. How would I even do that?

Ya gotta.

But there are people praying, it would be way too distracting. 

Don't care. Gotta climb. 

I would get kicked out.

Gotta.

And like, of course I didn't, but I think there will always be a part of me that sees really high spots and just goes, I wonder what it would be like to sit up there . . . 

Anyway. Pretty churches aside, we still had a lot left to visit on our walk. So we headed out the pretty red doors:

And headed off towards La Place Royale.

What is La Place Royale, you ask? This:

It's basically a bunch of really ancient apartment buildings where King Henri IV's friends could hang out and throw parties and stuff. Lots of famous French people lived there from the 1600s to the 1800s--most notably, some dude called Victor Hugo.

Yes, guys, I walked past his actual house. Didn't go inside(this time), because we were really strapped for time, but it was kind of amazing and it made me think of my freshman year roomie Alyssa and how much she loves Les Mis . . . 

Agh, I'm making this too much about missing people again. Moving past that awkward and extremely blurry photo, let's go on to the Musee Carnavalet, which was nearly the last thing on our list.

 A lot of the things the Musee Carnavalet houses aren't traditional paintings or sculptures, like what the Louvre has, but antique furniture from different centuries:

models of Paris:

And other cool intricate trinkets:

It was cool, and can I just say that Rachel is an awesome museum companion? Because she is. If you're reading this, girl, you are, for reals.

Technically we could have continued the walk to go inside the Historical Library of Paris, but I was kind of on a time crunch so we just kind of waved to it as we went by. Hello, Historical Library!

Ooookay, never mind. The library isn't as nice as the Opera House, apparently . . .

I had to split off from Rachel at this point, to head back home and do some stuff. Random fun things I saw: this carousel right next to the metro stop: 

And this very interesting graffiti inside the metro where somebody asked the age old question: what if Harry Potter had a Sharpie-d on Hitler 'stache?

Then I walked down this pretty road to my house, for the last time.

Wait, WHAAAT??? I hear you say. The last time? What does that mean?

Well, that brings me to the thing that I wanted to talk about. 

I kinda . . . moved out last weekend.

Well, kinda. I switched houses with another girl in the program, in the next town over. 

Yeah, I know that just stating it on the blog like this is inviting all sorts of questions about why, where, what, when, who--and I'd just like to say that this isn't really the place for that. Suffice it to say that I was in a situation that was tough in a lot of ways, and I'm not in that situation anymore, and I'm grateful for the people who helped me out of it--so let's leave it at that.

So, okay, that might seem like a kind of blunt, blindsiding way to end this blog, but I'll be honest, it's getting late here and I really need to start going to bed earlier. Hopefully I'll have the next blog up for you tomorrow--expect tales of my new house and host family, traveling to a Chateau and watching horse races, and lots more!

For now, let's end on a happy note. Sometimes when I am feeling bummed out, listening to extremely goofy music helps me cheer up a little bit. Because with some songs, it doesn't matter what you feel like--you just have to get up and dance to them! So here's a song that makes me feel that way: Je suis heureux, by Claude Steben.

Seriously. You can't listen to that and not want to do the Carlton:

Thank you all for reading my blog! Don't forget to like this post on Facebook.

Most important thing to remember: you can do hard things and endure hard things! Just get out there and do the Carlton!