A toutes les gloires de la France

Wow, okay, I think this might be a long post. Read it or don't.

SO last Friday, the Astro program went on a trip to Nançay, about two hours south of Paris, to visit the Observatoire de Nançay Radio Telescope. They have a couple gigantic arrays of radio telescopes that are pretty sweet.
We climbed up the primary mirror of the big radiotelescope:


I wish I had a better picture to show you the scope of this thing. It's about 200m long, and 40m high or something. High enough that it was pretty scary climbing the steep ladder and standing on a flimsy-looking wire frame while we went up. I know one of the girls took pictures of us while we were at the top but she hasn't uploaded those yet...

We had lunch at a little pub in the village with our professor and a solar physicist who had given us a tour. (Apéritif: Blackcurrant Kir, Appetizer: Salad with prawns and avocados, Main dish: Beef, with a side of sweet potatoes, polenta, and sautéed mushrooms, Dessert: cake with crème anglaise, espresso.)


That Saturday I had a thoroughly American movie-going experience with Joe and Ethan. We went to the theater at the Forum des Halles, we paid too much for movie tickets and popcorn, and we watched Kick-Ass. It was better than I had expected it to be; an absolutely ridiculous action movie. There were lots of stupid parts, too.

On Monday we had a wine and cheese tasting at the Center with our professor and the Humanities class. A wine merchant came to teach us about the different types of wine and cheese we were eating. My favorite wine was a Sauvignon Blanc, and my favorite cheese was Tomme de brebis, a cheese made from ewe's milk.

Tuesday night I had a pleasant surprise: I randomly got to have dinner with Erik Lokensgaard, my friend from UChicago who graduated last year and is traveling around Europe right now. We cooked a big dinner at his hosts' apartment (Pascal and Sophie), and a couple other UChicago people showed up, Antoine and Gideon. Dinner was cous cous, lentils with sautéed veggies (cabbage, zucchini, onions), a fresh salad, and bread and wine. SO much fun. Definitely worth the long ride all the way to the 17th arrondissement, which is the opposite end of Paris.

Wednesday night my French class went to see a play, La Fausse Suivante, at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. It's this small, old theater that's very cool but has tiny seats.
And then I stayed up all night finishing my Astro final paper and presentation! Woo!

Yesterday we all went to the Palais de Versailles. After a slow start, we went on a tour of the palace. It's overwhelming how vast and beautiful it is. It was ornate beyond anything I've ever seen before.



The famous Hall of Mirrors:

We had lunch there on the grounds. (Appetizer: tomatoes, pesto, and some fresh greens on a little pastry, Main dish: Salmon on a bed of carrots, snow peas, green beans, zucchini, Dessert: Chocolate gâteau "mi-cuit" [half-cooked...meaning very gooey on the inside] with crème anglaise, espresso).

After lunch, we were free to wander the gardens. There are about 850 acres of gardens that make up Versailles' "back yard." Huge, right? It used to be about 15,000. Good ol' Louis XIV.

Ethan and I:






Later that night Ethan, Joe and I finished our bottle of whiskey and headed to this little hole in the wall sangria bar. It was tiny, and the sangria was delicious and obviously home made by the little old bartender.
Such a good night.

Next week: Germany!

Le Printemps!

Paris is kind of too beautiful for words right now. It's (finally) full-on springtime: sunny, temperatures in the 70s, flowers blooming everywhere, any spot of grass is taken up by people picnicking or napping or playing soccer or frisbee, people have finally stopped wearing coats...
And I'm stuck inside doing some Astro homework. (Or, more accurately, procrastinating by writing this post.)

So last week I had a bit of a cold. Being sick sucks in any country, apparently. Go figure. I missed one day of class, but it wasn't a big deal because my professor was still in Chicago (because of the volcanic cloud blah blah blah) so the lecture was being given over Skype. Translation: I didn't really miss out on any learning.

Last week I went to a free jazz concert at l'Hôtel de Ville, Paris' Town Hall. You know, this place:

Très agréable.

This weekend my French class went to l'Opéra! Now, you would assume that since it was a French class trip and since we're in Paris we would watch an opera in French, to keep improving our language skills etc. etc.
Nope.
We saw Billy Budd, by Benjamin Britten. Not only is it an English opera sung entirely in English, it was comically anti-French because it is set on a British warship during the French Revolutionary Wars.
Overall, not my favorite opera. It's an all-male cast, with a very uninteresting plot centering around the young sailor Billy, who is the epitome of good and whose only flaw is that he has a stutter. Lots of blatant religious symbolism and undercurrents of homosexuality.

After the opera, a group of us went out in the neighborhood, La Place de la Bastille:


We had some crêpes for dinner (I hadn't eaten all day) and went to an absinthe bar.
For the record: Absinthe is plenty sweet on its own and does not need to be in a cocktail.

Alright, I should go finish my homework. For our astro lab, all we have to do is recreate Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the Universe. No big deal.

Au lieu de faire mes devoirs...

So, I don't feel like doing my French homework at the moment.

Mostly because my French class takes so much time! There's the class itself, plus Phonetics lab, plus weekly conversation sessions with a French university student, plus movies for class, not to mention the reading and the homework itself. Most of it would be much more enjoyable if there were more wine (come on, speaking a foreign language is just easier after a few glasses) and no grades. Hélas...

Speaking of French class outings, last Thursday my whole class (of 12 or so) had a dinner with our teacher and our "conversation assistants" (the French students who we meet with once a week). After a long day of all of my classes, I wasn't really feeling up to another few hours of awkward French conversation with my teacher. But it was mandatory, and it was a free meal.

It was surprisingly not awful. There's just something satisfying about watching your teacher order bottle after bottle of wine, making sure no one's glass is ever empty.

Afterwards, I went with a couple of the Astro kids (Ethan and Deniz) and three of the French students! Sara, Guillaume, and Gregory. They are SO COOL when they're not forcing us to practice our French. We went to an Irish Pub nearby and it was quickly revealed that les françaises know American 80's music better than I do. Go figure.

The rest of the weekend had its ups and downs. A lot of people chose this weekend to travel, so in general it was harder to find things to for those who stayed.

Saturday I went exploring some more. I found a street with more comic book/graphic novel stores right next to each other than should be good for business. I bought a couple of books in a little shop. I'm glad that the Small Used Bookstore is such a universal thing, because the shop was exactly the same as so many I've been to in the states - floor to ceiling books, title after title, dust, the owner's cat rushing past your ankles. Of course I bought a couple.


That night I went out with the frenchies (Sara and Gregory) and I actually ran into two of the Astro girls so they tagged along. We went to a club, daaanced for a while, left at about 4:30 am, decided we may as well wait for the Metro to start running again and got some breakfast. I made it home at about 6 or 6:30 am. on Sunday. Good times were had.

And now I really don't think I can put off my homework much longer.
But I leave you with a picture of our Astronomy class with our first professor, Rich Kron, looking goofy in his brand new beret:

Space 'n' Stuff

These are some of the images I took with the telescope at the Stone Edge Observatory in Sonoma, California.





Messier 3 - a Globular Star Cluster, 33.9 kilo light-years away.
It has a radius of about 90 light-years.






Messier 51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy, about 23 megalight-years (23 million light-years) away.
The radius of this sucker is about 38,000 light-years across. Its mass is estimated to be about 160 billion solar masses (that is, 160 billion times the mass of our Sun).








Messier 81 - Bode's Galaxy, about 11.8 megalight-years away. If you look up at the night sky, it appears as a "star" in the constellation Ursa Major.






Messier 101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy, about 27 megalight-years away. This one has a radius of about 85,000 light-years, making it nearly twice the size of the Milky Way.

Une autre semaine est passée...

Bonjour!!
Another week and some days have gone by, so I have lots of updates!
Last Friday all of the Paris programs went on an excursion to the Loire valley (sort of central France, about a two hour drive south of Paris) to visit two châteaux: Blois and Chambord.

First we had a guided tour through the Château Blois, which has four wings encircling a courtyard. The oldest section was built in the 13th century, one wing was built in the 15th century by Louis XII, one in the 16th century by François I, and the last wing built in the 17th century by Gaston d'Orléans, who was Louis XIII's brother.
This is the courtyard:



Notice the staircase, which was highly ornamented and jutted out from the building so that when the king was residing at the Château, everyone could see him as he moved from floor to floor.

Excursions like this have been a pretty big reminder that I didn't learn anything in AP European History in high school. Or at least that I had retained very little information.
Apparently, the French court was nomadic through the Middle Ages and the French Renaissance. This is mainly because the monarchy wasn't powerful enough to be able to rule from one city, so the king had to move around and take his court of thousands with him. This is the reason there are so many Châteaux scattered throughout France, so the King had lots of seats from which to rule.

Here is the Salamander, which was the emblem of François I:



Salamanders were believed to be able to live in flames and to swallow them. Also look how cool the ceiling is. The whole château was incredibly colorful and ornamented like that on the inside.

Here's the Porcupine emblem of Louis XII:



This is the oldest and coldest part of the Château, the Medieval room:

Apparently there have been a few movies filmed here over the years. Nothing that I had heard of. But, one remnant of a film shoot is the newest thing in the entire château, this throne:

Tourists were encouraged to do whatever they want to the throne, said my snarky tour guide, since it was obviously of no historical value.

After lunch, we hopped back in the bus to go to Château Chambord. This is the type of castle that ends up being the subject of those 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles:


Incredibly cool from the outside, pretty sparse on the inside. The center of the castle is a double-helix spiral staircase, and off of each landing is a stone room that leads to more rooms and more rooms, many of which are empty and undecorated. Very easy to get lost.
Here's a nice view of the "backyard" :

(That's John, a kid in the Math program this quarter. He's also in my French class.)

And so ends a nice day in the Loire Valley.

The next day I went to the Musée d'Orsay with a few friends:

Apparently, it used to be a train station before it was converted to a museum in the 1980's.
My favorite exhibit was about French Art Nouveau furniture and décor.
Seriously.
Look at this dining room:
Or this couch:
This couch was actually designed by Hector Guimard, who also designed all of the Paris Métro signs that are so iconic:


A few other things of note:
One evening, I was trying to hail a cab home with a couple friends. There were plenty of cabs, but they all had fares already. While waiting at the corner, a girl walks up to us and starts a conversation. Her name is Élaine, and from what I could gather of her poor English and rapid French, she is a novelist, and she has a meeting with her publishers coming up but nothing to show them. So, she's out on the streets of Paris, drunk, looking for stories. She told us she'd help us hail a cab if we just talked to her for a few minutes. By "help hail a cab," she apparently meant running into the middle of the street and waving her arms at oncoming traffic. I feared for her life, but fortunately nothing happened.
She asked me if I was Parisienne, telling me that I spoke with no American accent.
I mean, this is just not true, but it was nice to hear nonetheless. Drunken compliments from strangers are still compliments.

I still love my Astro class. We have remote access to a private observatory in Sonoma, California and I've been taking images in class for my final project. I'll post a few once I accumulate some good ones and add color. It is SO much fun. And I don't mean I've just been taking pictures of Mars or things "close to home," but entire galaxies and things that are well beyond the Milky Way. It's awesome.

My mom requested info about the food, so this section is for you Mom :)
Yes, food is expensive. But just like anywhere, it just takes some searching to find affordable (and delicious) places to eat.

The day we were in the Loire Valley, we had lunch at an expensive restaurant (paid for by the University) near Château Blois. As it was Friday in a Catholic country, and still during Lent, all of the courses were fish. But hey, I love fish, so I was happy. The first course was a small fillet of raw salmon on an unsweetened waffle, served with some sort of dill sauce. The main course was a baked white fish in a cream sauce with rice and spinach and nuts that I think were filberts. Very yum. Dessert was first a plate of fresh citrus fruit (grapefruit, tangerines, blood oranges) and a small scoop of a fruity sorbet. Then they gave each table another plate full of sweetness: macaroons and little cakes and meringues and candies and it was actually just too much.

Down the street from the Cité (where I live), there's this great little place called Planet Food that sells Greek sandwiches (pitas) stuffed with meat and with a side of fries for €4.00-€6.00 depending on the meat you get. They are DELICIOUS and completely filling.

Crêpes are delicious anywhere, anytime. A non-dessert crêpe is usually called a Galette, and they come stuffed with..almost anything. Potatoes-carmelized onions-Bacon-Swiss. Tomatoes-Basil-Mozzarella. It's hard to go wrong.
And dessert crêpes? I'm in heaven. Fruit. Nutella on everything. Cream. I'm drooling just typing this.

Lots of bread. So much bread. Bread everywhere. Fortunately, my diet has been mostly carbs for years anyway, and now it's just part of the lifestyle.

Fortunately, grocery shopping is pretty cheap. It's very easy to get good, fresh ingredients inexpensively. I keep my room stocked with usually some granola, some sandwich ingredients, and maybe fruit or something. Wine is also very cheap (although not actually cheaper than water, which is a popular misconception. Well, maybe it's cheaper if you compare the cheapest wine to the most expensive water, but in general, no).

I don't really speak French..

Here I am, finishing my first week in France. It goes without saying that I'm having a wonderful time, even though I very much miss everyone back home in the States.

On Sunday, I went exploring with my friend Deniz, who is also in the Astrophysics program and is from Turkey. We got off the Métro at Saint Michel-Notre Dame and just wandered with no regards to direction and with no goal in mind other than to see what we saw.

The first store we walked into was a graphic novel shop (not really a comic book store...really just graphic novels and related memorabilia) called Tin Tin. Named, of course, for this fellow:

It was one of those scenarios when I wanted to buy everything in sight, so naturally, I bought nothing.

We stopped in a pet store on the Seine and fawned over puppies and canaries.
We zig-zagged back and forth along narrow cobblestone streets lined with shops and cafés and bars and full of people from everywhere. And every now and then we'd round a corner and run into something like this, the Saint Michel Fontaine:


We finally decided to rest our feet here, l'Église Saint Eustache:

This church is another early example of Gothic architecture blah blah blah flying buttresses and vaulted ceilings.
It also had a pretty sweet organ:


Got lost, but after some very roundabout paths, made it back home.

Since then, I've been going to classes. Astronomy, French, French Phonetics, and an Astro Lab. I LOVE Astro, and am pretty surprised about the fact. Prof. Kron is very friendly and our class of 11 just gets into fun discussions about the process of discovering extra stellar planets or something. My French professor loves purple and has yet to wear an outfit that doesn't feature the color prominently, including her hair. Oh, and we also need to use a fingerprint scanner to get into the Paris Center every day. Unnecessary and high tech; love it.

Tuesday evening the Astro group went to l'Observatoire de Paris:
It's this beautiful stone building built in 1667, I believe. We hung out in the observatory for a few hours, eating, drinking wine, and looking at Mars and its polar ice caps, Saturn (which looked amazing), and the Orion Nebula (also amazing).
This is the telescope:

The coolest part is that the observatory room is not technically connected to the rest of the building, because it needs to be able to spin 360º in order to point the telescope at different sections of sky. These days, it's run by a remote control, so we would just be standing and talking to one another (or to Jay, who works for the Hubble Telescope Institute and was very fun to talk to), and then the whole room would start to rotate.

It was incredible.

Oh, I've also been seeing some work by a street artist I like, Space Invader:

Can you see the alien?

So I'm pretty much a pro at the Métro by now, of course (hah). I'm figuring out where the cool places to do things/eat things/drink things are. I'm getting the hang of this whole "speaking French" thing.

Demain, les Chateaux de la Loire!