Rachel in Paris

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Champagne Supernova

I, admittedly, haven't seen much of France outside of Paris. It's a little strange that I've seen much, much more of Italy, for example, than France. Last year, I spent a weekend in Marseille and Arles and went on a day trip to Giverny with Central, as well as an awesome hiking trip to Fontainebleau on my own with friends, but other than that, I know nothing about France outside of Paris firsthand. Quel dommage! I see this as a real problem, because it's like only visiting New York in the States (I hate when people say 'the States', but I just did it.). When Parisians realize I'm American (Which takes all of two seconds), they immediately start confessing their love for New York (And sometimes California) even if they've never been there. When I say that I'm actually from Minnesota, I think I burst their bubble. It really peeves me that New York is somehow a microcosm of the U.S. for foreigners in the same way that Paris is for France. In reality, most Americans are NOT from New York and don't live that lifestyle and I think the same goes for the French in regard to Paris. It seems like I'm constantly defending and promoting Minnesota, but I think it usually falls on deaf ears (I think Parisians are just not interested in our lakes or freezing your ass off in the nearly year-round snow).

I sometimes find myself wishing I had just gone the TAPIF route and been placed in a small town in the middle of nowhere just so I can have that alternate experience of France. But I love Paris too much, so I couldn't let that happen. Yet. Maybe another time, since the program allows you to do it until you're 29. But by 29, I should maybe try to have my life a little more put together (Or not. We'll see where I'm at when the time comes. A wise philosopher once said, "YOLO." and I've taken that to heart).

Anyway, my point is that this past weekend, the graduate students went on a day trip to Reims, at the heart of the Champagne region and I loved seeing more of France. There was so little time to see or do anything, so after our two-hour bus ride in, we immediately went to Notre-Dame de Reims, a beautiful thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral whose structure resembles Notre-Dame de Paris, but whose façade is much more ornate. We also saw the Basilique Saint-Remi de Reims, which I actually enjoyed more due to the lack of tourists and a choir practicing in the back. I am such a sucker for European churches. I'm starting to get a little jaded when it comes to their aesthetic beauty, but it just floors me how old they are and to think of how many generations have spent their time- very personal time- in them. I also love them because they're free.

The rest of the day, we spent at the French Champagne house, Pommery. Again, clearly knowing nothing about France at large, I was expecting a Champagne house to be in the countryside and to be able to see the actual fields where the grapes are produced, but Pommery is well within the bounds of the town. I'm learning.

We had a tour of the cellar, where an astounding 28 million bottles are currently stored. Shit! Think about that. Like really think about it. If I did my ~~Googling~~ math right, that's more than five bottles of Champagne for every Minnesotan. I've done winery tours before (In Italy and Greece), but nowhere near as massive as Pommery.

So here are the photos I took while in Reims that don't really do it justice.

Love,
Rachel

Notre-Dame de Reims

Notre-Dame de Reims- the windows were done by Marc Chagall in the 1970s

Notre-Dame de Reims

Reims

Basilique Saint-Remi de Reims

Reims

Pommery

Pommery- this wall engraving was done under candlelight and took a year to complete.

The oldest Pommery Champagnes

Pommery

Friday, October 11, 2013

Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground

This is the first week where it's truly felt like fall. The leaves are starting to pile up despite city workers constantly sweeping the sidewalks. The leaves seem to just turn brown on the trees and then fall off, or have stayed green. I'm missing the spectacular fall colors, apple orchards, corn mazes and hay rides in Minnesota. But this is France and they don't do any of that.

I hate to say it, being a hardy Minnesotan who deals with snow almost year-round, but I'm cold. It's cold outside and almost to the point of needing gloves. I don't know why every year we act like we're just completely sideswiped by fall, but summer does always seem to be extinguished just a little too fast. I'm also realizing that my prediction of being able to sit on my terrace year-round is not going to come true. I'm shivering as I write this in my drafty little apartment, so I think I'll just have to admire the Eiffel Tower from my desk for the next several months instead. Enjoy the following photos from this week and expect some photos from Reims and Champagne after my day trip tomorrow.

Bon week-end à tous !

Rachel

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Greece

For my history course, we were prompted to write a brief travel piece inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Italian Journey. We were to write about a time when we felt struck by our surroundings and it wasn't enough to simply read about a place- we had to experience it for ourselves. I thought I'd share about my visit to Santorini, Greece in 2012.

The seats in the Athens International Airport were not designed for eleven-hour layovers. We sat in the blue leather seats playing card games, building card castles and reading through the cheap guidebook we’d picked up in a tourist shop downstairs. We sunk farther into our seats as we watched the light fade from the brown, barren, foreign mountains through the airport’s giant windows and wondered silently what Athens was like. When all sunlight completely disappeared, lights from unknown buildings began to dot the blackness in the distance. We made every attempt to convince ourselves that our backpacks were pillows and that the constant instrumental music playing over the loudspeakers was a lullaby. It’s hard to sleep under the fluorescent lights of a Sbarro restaurant when your back is twisted into a ninety-degree angle. We did laps around the strongly-perfumed terminal in search of mental stimulation and found refuge in French magazines to read which made us feel sentimental for Paris. Every half an hour passed felt like a small victory and eventually the sunlight returned and it was time for our flight to Santorini.

Out of our tiny, plastic, airplane window, light reflected off the water of the Aegean Sea; in combination with passing through clouds, it was like a great, blank expanse of whiteness. We watched as strange pieces of brown, uninhabited islands appeared within this whiteness: the Cyclades. Almost as soon as we reached our maximum ascent, we began to descend into the isolation of Santorini. We stepped down the stairs of the airplane and walked across the tarmac into the tiny white building of the Thíra Airport.

We boarded the island’s only form of public transportation, a lonely coach bus that follows the island’s only highway and felt the bus sway as we climbed over the craggy landscape and through villages of small, white, stone houses. A grumpy, elderly man stalked the aisles, taking passengers’ coins and putting them into his money belt in exchange for an unmarked bus ticket. Our delirium from not having slept since the previous day in Rome coupled with ongoing heartburn from a slice of old train station pizza in Naples made us go in and out of consciousness as we passed through the rocky, sundrenched landscape. On the southwest end of the crescent-shaped island, we hauled ourselves and our bags off the bus. In one direction, there were brown mountains that looked close enough to reach out and touch, and in the other direction, the ocean stretched out before with no end in sight.

After spending the past week in the cold and the rain of April in Italy, we found ourselves baking in the dry heat and peeled off our leather jackets as we started dragging our suitcases through the black sand of Perissa. We passed small wooden boardwalks with restaurants and bars where locals called out to us in English, all the while straining our necks in search of any type of sign to indicate if we were, in fact, in Perissa. The sand gave way to pavement and squat white houses and scattered trees. Dogs ran freely through the streets and scooters zipped by along the highway. We found our hostel in a quiet, forgotten area of town and knocked on the office door. The building looked like an old 1950s-style motel in the U.S. with the doors to the rooms accessible from the sidewalk. A woman with bright red hair answered the door and smiled before telling us that there were no available rooms despite our reservation. She made a few phone calls in Greek and all of a sudden we found ourselves in a cramped, blue car driven by an older man who spoke no English speeding down the highway to a lonely stone villa where there was an available room for eight euros a night. We dropped our bags onto the floor in the corner and spent our first few hours in Santorini asleep in real beds that put those blue leather seats to shame.

I had often wondered what it would be like to see the island’s most famous and picturesque village, Oía, with my own eyes instead of through the lens of someone else’s camera. When we drove our rental car up the one-lane, two-direction highway past the cliffs and the surrounding houses, it was as if were entering a painting. To stand atop the sprawling cluster of white buildings with their deep blue doors and to be able to see the entire island—everything that is living and breathing for as far as can be seen—within one slight turn of the head is a rare experience. I had never before been able to turn completely around and see only quiet, dark blue water in every direction. We watched as the sun sunk in the sky, turning it bright orange before fading to black behind the silhouette of the volcano Nea Kameni. I have never seen a landscape so beautiful and unique since.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

When September Ends

Check out my video collage of September, most of which is shaky iPhone footage. YAY.

I don't think it really hits you how fast time goes by until you routinely scan your Navigo métro card in the morning over the reader on the turnstile and it unexpectedly flashes a red 'X' with a loud blaring sound. It means another month has gone by and you need to shell out the €65 to pay for a new monthly pass. It's October, y'all.

I realize I don't ever write about school, which is funny because didn't I come here for that? My daily routine involves me waking up, extremely tired to the point of absolute dread of getting out of my bed, wasting time around my apartment and realizing that I haven't left early enough for my thirty-five minute commute to school. I rush out the door, never completely satisfied with my outfit (Everyone's more stylish than me) or my homework (Everyone's more studious than me) and just hoping that I didn't forget anything up in my room because going back up my stairs is just not in the cards. Once I walk down the boulevard Saint-Michel to the Luxembourg station, I take the crowded, stinking RER B train one stop to Saint-Michel, where I catch the RER C train for three peaceful stops to Pont de l'Alma.

I'm always late for class. Always. My "campus" (Which doesn't exist in the American sense) is a group of buildings relatively spread out throughout the seventh, and I spend the whole time walking to each one formulating excuses as to why I'm late. I always blame the RER for having issues if I'm asked.

Then I have classes and work (In the writing lab as a tutor) until about 5 or 6 PM each day, with the exception of Wednesdays, when I have class until 8. During any and all breaks, I'm usually curating my Google Calendar and email, eating croissants, madeleines and sandwichs jambon-fromage and drinking vending machine coffee.

When I'm done with everything for the day, I always feel like Wow, I live in Paris. I can go do anything I want to! and then pull out my map to go somewhere, but I usually just end up heading home. I tell myself I'll go running in the Jardin du Luxembourg, too, but then I go buy a baguette and a bottle of wine and forget about it.

As for my actual classes, they're all pretty fantastic, but hard. I can't tell you how nice it is to be taking classes you want to take instead of generals in college. For the most part, I take too many notes, which is weird. It's weird to like what you're studying because you spend so much of your education complaining about it all. I'm realizing that translation isn't really just looking up words and writing them down. It's actually a really tedious and grueling process. Today, I met with Anne-Marie, my official directed study advisor, to go over my first translation of Philippe d'Iribarne's sociological article La force des cultures. I thought I did a pretty good job on the first few pages and that translating was coming so naturally and quickly for me. No. Everything was wrong.

On a different note, Paris is really expensive. Like really expensive. I reluctantly spent a bit of time at Franprix and Monoprix today and was astounded when I started really looking at prices of random things, like €13 for nail polish and €18 for a basic towel. A pint of Guinness at a bar runs at upwards of €9. It's painful. And remember, you need to multiply by at least 1.3 to get dollars. Everyone seems to manage just fine because they're all out at cafés and brasseries all day long, while I drink my instant coffee and one-euro wine with a side of baguette. I don't even know how people can afford their cigarettes, but they sure do somehow because Paris is essentially just one really big, beautiful ashtray. I, on the other hand, feel like I'm about one Navigo away from pulling up a chunk of sidewalk next to a homeless man with an Amsterdam beer in one hand and a J'ai faim SVP cardboard sign in the other (Which isn't really all that different than what the bouquinistes do, if you think about it.). I guess Paris is not really designed for the American dollar or young adult.

On to October!

Rachel