Picnic!

We had a picnic last Friday for everybody who lives at the school. So here, at long last, are some pictures.

We have Wednesdays off, so I spent this morning sorting through paperwork and trying to brush up on some vocab. Once I get this posted I plan to do a little bit more homework before lunch, and then attack the rest of it after I eat. We finally got our unit 3 test back yesterday, and once again I did quite well. 96% actually.

Dans apre-midi (in the afternoon) we had our first test with our other teacher. Her biggest challenge is teaching us oral comprehension and expression. She likes to play portions of French movies and then drill us on everything we understood, a painful and frequently very silent exhibition. This test involved both listening and speaking, as well as a written portion. It was intimidating but I think it went okay. I forgot one of the words in the spoken portion and accidentally slipped into the informal once or twice but immediately corrected myself. I did get my teacher to laugh, so I guess that counts for something. I speak French enough with other students that it isn't too uncomfortable even if I am completely wrong and using hand signals to fill in the gaps. It made that part of the test much easier.

I had a wee bit too much fun with the written portion. We were told to use as much vocab as possible so I went to town and I was still scribbling away when class was supposed to be done.

Robert, the master of the fire
We had a pretty good tournout.
Nobody knew I was taking a picture. Can you tell?

If you want to know who all these people are, feel free to ask.

You thought they would never come...

The pictures from my trip to downtown Paris last week! I've been sifting and editing since supper. Here we go!

My first stop was l'hotel de Ville (The paris city hall)

This is the main hall, so to speak, of the Paris city hall. The whole building is quite impressive.

They had stained glass windows showing all the different professions and the years the organizations were founded. This one is the swordmakers. I'm not sure why it came out sideways.

This is the sailors, I believe. I have pictures of the windows for a lot of different older professions.

One of many pretty chandeliers in the city hall

There were a lot of ships in the city hall. The river was quite important to the development of the city.

The outside of the city hall is also very pretty.

My next stop was the Palais Royale. As mentioned previously, it used to house royalty and now it houses several branches of the French government. It was quite fancy. We actually walked through an ornately decorated computer room with paperwork piled all over the place.



I was really hoping they would have even older ones sitting out, but they didn't.


Looking out of a window in the Palais Royale.


A panoramic shot of the Louvre. This isn't exactly scientific, as you can especially tell from the right side of the picture, but you get the idea. Sort of. It doesn't look nearly as big in the picture as it is. Look at the arch two pictures down. That is a three or four story structure in the middle of the clump of trees in this picture, and it is so far away that you can't even see it. Also, it looks in the picture like those two towers ahead are on the back "wall" of the fortress. They aren't. They are at the end of the block. A road runs through and the complex continues on the other side.

An angel on the roof of the Louvre.

I have no clue what this arch is for. It's just sitting behind the Louvre. My touristy map didn't even mention it. In the average city this thing would be the main attraction.

Random golden statue in the middle of an intersection.

Yay for toy sail boats! They have a bunch of sticks laying around, so when the boats reach one side of the fountain the kids push them back out into the fountain with the sticks and the sails carry them across.

The tower of Saint Jacques

The base of this statue says that it was erected by the schoolchildren of America in grateful memory of the LaFayette Statesmen Soldier Patriot.

This is the French military school in downtown Paris. I'm not sure if it is still a military school, or just a huge museum.

This fountain sits in the plaza where they had the guillotine during the French reformation.

You can see the arc de triomphe off in the distance. I didn't have time to see both that and the eifel tower. Later I found out that I could have gone to the top of the arc for free that weekend, and normally it costs something like 6 Euros. So I should have gone. Oh well. I guess I'll never climb the arc.

Again, this is hardly a scientific pano job, but you get the idea.

dorm skating

First, these birds are EVERYWHERE. They plague Paris like blackbirds plague cornfields. They are really cool because when they take off, they look like flying skunks.


Just a little post-class craziness.

Fruity

My mom loves to tell embarrassing stories about my past because they are cute. I think that is a lame reason to tell embarrassing stories, at least when they are about me. One of her favorites is about the time I asked why we call vehicles that don't work "oranges." The reason that is embarrassing for me is I distinctly remember asking that question. It's probably one of my earliest memories. Our family had gone to watch my cousin race his go-kart, and his kart kept breaking down during the races. Two or three times my mom or my aunt called it a "lemon." I developed a good idea what that meant, and I was quite proud of myself for having picked up this new bit of English vocabulary, so a couple of days later I plotted a way to show off my new-found vocab to my mom. I nonchalantly went up to her and asked the deep probing question, "how did this fruity twist in our language come to be?"-- except that I used kid language and I got my fruits wrong. She not only interpreted it as me having no clue what they had been talking about, she also thought I couldn't tell my fruits apart. Well, I guess the later was true. But it was quite embarrassing for me, and it made me squirm inside whenever she retold the story.
However, that story no longer makes me cringe. Why? Because now I am that 5-year-old again, saying stupid things when I'm trying to sound intelligent! And I've become okay with it, at least most of the time. Grunting and hand motions are now my most fluent and frequently best understood language. I have had great success with "Je parle un peu du français," but if I try to say almost anything else in public (outside the school where people are used to newbies who use the present tense to talk about tomorrow, yesterday, and last year) people look at me like I am speaking Mandarin or something. And yes, the fruits give me grief. I'm rather nervous about the first time I have to pray out loud, because the word for sin is only slightly different from the name of a hairy fruit, and it is going to take all of my concentration to not piously ask, "forgive us for all of our peaches."

Why the pictures aren't up.

Patience, my faithful reader. I am giving a short little devotional in class tomorrow and it took me three hours at least to write it out. Fortunately one of my French friends (my only French friend?) agreed to fix all of my mistakes for me, so now it should be all correct. Of course, when I read it off the script tomorrow I will miss-pronounce half of it anyway, but at least I'm starting with proper French. I am planning to videotape the spectacle tomorow so you can witness it as well.

I am actually stealing a story told by B. Lukes several Sundays ago back home. I loved that story, despite the fact that I'm not married, so when I suddenly volunteered last week to share a devotional, this was the first thing that popped into my head. I tossed a couple other ideas around, but all of the normal things I would teach on are much to abstract for my current level of French. I didn't really want to just tell a Bible story in French. This story makes a fantastic point but yet is fairly simple to tell- or so I thought.

I was surprised how hard it was to tell a story in French. Fortunately we learned how to write future tenses in class today, and I learned past tense by reading another class's white board during coffee break. I ended up needing past, present, and future tense for the story. Even so, my sentence structure was all off. There was one big chunk of text (the part at the end where I am addressing the audience, of course) that my friend got to and just kind of stalled out. He told me that he would have to completely rewrite a bunch of the sentences for it to sound French, or he could just fix it enough that it would sound like a translation from English done by a computer. Since it was quite late, I just told him to scrap the whole middle section and leave the key lines at the beginning and end.

Honestly, nobody in my class would have caught a word I said of the other stuff anyway. All throughout the story I was digging through the dictionary for words, which doesn't bode well for my poor audience of newbies. Tomorrow will be a lot of pantomime and pictures... which should be a wonderful test of my artistic abilities.

Which means that I should get a little sleep. But first, my friend Robert put this up on Facebook. This was us, in downtown Paris, looking like tourists. And, just like tourists, we were lost and didn't even know it. Traveling at mid day with no compass can be really difficult. I thought at first I was on the south side of the river, but none of the roads were on the map... until I turned it upside down. MAGIC!!!

Heritage Days!

I headed into Paris at about 11:30 this morning and finally dragged my weary self back into the school at 9:00 tonight. And other than the 15 minute train ride each way, I was pretty much on my feet the whole time. Yikes! There are many, many pictures to go through, so here are just a couple from the Eifel tower for starters. I started the day with two of my classmates. We went together to L'hotel de Ville (the city hall) which normally isn't open to the public. That was probably the coolest thing I saw today. They had a lot of information about each of the rooms. Everything was quite ornate... not quite like the Sauk Centre city hall! There was also a very neat demonstration of handicapped sports going on in the plaza outside. Then my classmates and I parted company. They got lunch and I maneuvered my way to the Palais-Royal, another building that is not normally open to the public. The city hall was massive, but this complex is HUGE!!! I'm not sure how many city blocks it occupies, but it must be a couple at least. A number of royal families lived in it over the years, and now it is the home of several government departments. It was really strange looking at ancient, ornate decorations lining the wall of a room and then a Beatles cd box set sitting on the desk in the middle of the room.

I had originally hoped to also get to the Hôtel de Béhague, which was owned by a woman with too much time and money who traveled all around the world collecting the best of everything she found and piling it up in her mansion. However, it took me too long to get through the line at the Palais-Royal. So I meandered back, getting some pictures of the Louvre as I went by. I hadn't realized that it has a massive park behind it, complete with some kind of victory arch. It isn't the Arc de Triomphe (though I did see that in the distance) but a smaller one with some dude on top of it who I presume to be Napolean. The sun was shining through the clouds in a very pretty way, so I took pictures of a couple of angel statues on top of Louvre that looked very neat. Only later did I realize that both were female and one didn't have any clothes on her top half... so she got deleted. Maybe I'm over-sensitive, but I was exposed to way too many naked bodies today. Some places were worse than others. The park beside the Louvre was so strewn with nude statues that I went through about as fast as I could, though I did stop to take pictures of the sailboats in the fountain. What a fantastic idea! we need to do that in the US.

I finally got to the Eifel Tower and decided not to pay the $5 to walk the stairs to the first and second floors. The line was long and I wasn't sure I would be able to get up there before sunset anymore. Besides, I wanted to get pictures of the tower in the sunset, which I couldn't do if I were on it.

So I wandered out onto the park between the tower and the École Militaire. It is a very long park, I suppose comparable to the Mall in Washington D.C. So I kept walking and walking, and every once in a while I would turn around and take more pictures of the tower as the sun set. I also had a delightful, though short, chat with a pleasant older woman who told me (in French) that she had hosted several American students before. I had a hard time figuring out what else she said.

There was some kind of peace concert going on at the military school (go figure) and also at the event were a whole bunch of people doing various kinds of juggling. So I watched them for a little bit, took a couple last pictures of the tower, and then headed back to my train stop as quickly as I could. By now it was getting dark and I was taking back streets that didn't always run straight, so I wasn't 100% sure that I was going were I needed to go. I eventually hit the river, right about where I had planned to do so, and saw Notre Dame up ahead. Then I saw a sign for the RER (not where I expected it, but I'm not picky) and headed in. I punched my one and only ticket home and then realized that I may or may not have gone to the right place. The sign listed the name of my town, but which way was the train going? If it was going towards CDG airport, and it kind of looked that way, then I was on the platform for the wrong train. This suspicion was suddenly dwarfed when the train pulled into the station and it looked wrong. It wasn't just going in the wrong direction, I think it was going to other cities. Like possibly in Belgium. Fortunately I saw a sign for the good old RER that goes where I need to go and ran down the stairs. All of this confusion was accented by the fact that somewhere long ago I had read that the trains stop running at 9:00. It had taken me significantly longer to get back from the tower than I had anticipated and it was now approaching 8:45. I got down to the platform just as a train pulled in. I checked the signs. It was going to my stop! So I hopped on. In a a couple minutes it became apparent that it was the last train of the night. After we went through most of the stations, including mine, their signs turned off.

Praise God that I got to the station at exactly the right time! If I had been delayed even a little more on my trip home, or if I hadn't seen the RER sign, or if the WRONG train hadn't come exactly when it did and tipped me off to the fact that I was in the wrong place, I have no clue how I would have gotten home. I know nothing about the bus systems around here and I wasn't carrying either a credit card or enough cash to hire a cab.

But now I am home, and tired, and I'm going to bed. Good night!

John

What Should I See?

Studies are going quite well. We had our Unit 2 test yesterday and I did quite well. So far I have been able to stay on top of everything and for the most part I feel like I am actually ahead of my class. I don't think I'm quite far enough ahead, though, to jump into the class above me. The teacher there knows a lot less English, so if her students aren't understanding her it is hard for her to explain. Even if I did decide that I wanted to jump up, she would have to accept me and from what I have heard about her I don't think she would. Also, I would be going from a class of 6 to a class of 16.

I think at this point I am going to work through our textbook at the pace my class is going, but supplement that with other self-directed study. We have a freebie table in downstairs and somebody left "Le Petit Maison Dans La Prairie." I am quite excited about reading the adventures of Laura Ingalls-Wilder in French. When I read those stories in English, I could read about as well as I can read French now. Well, maybe a little better. But I will be re-living my childhood and learning at the same time. Fantastic!

I also have begun flashcard production in earnest. On Wednesday I spent at least half an hour drilling the same flash cards over and over and over and over to the stopwatch. Now I know how my LearningRX guys felt. I was drilling the numbers over and over and over. In the first four times through the deck my times got much better. Then, for four or five times in a row it took me about 1:54 to get through the deck. I really wanted to do the deck faster than I run a 400. So I kept at it, and my head got more and more sore, and finally I told myself, "Okay, one more time." And I blazed through the deck in 1:24. Today, when I went to the post office and the lady told me how much I owed her, I actually knew what she said. It took a second or two, but I got it. It was fantastic.

But anyway, none of this pertains to the subject line of this blog. Here is the deal. I am in Paris. You have maybe wanted your whole life to go to Paris, and you will never get the chance. I have never had any particular desire to go to Paris, but I love history and pretty buildings and especially pretty things with history. However, since I have never spent much time studying French history or much of anything else French, here I am and I have no clue what I should go see. SO... if you will tell me what I should go see and why I should go see it, I will go and take pictures and send them to you, along with a report of what I found. Deal? Sweet!

Tomorow is a once-a-year event known as heritage days. Many public buildings in Paris are opened to the public that normally are closed, including the presidential palace, a number of impressive mansions, and the senate building. I'm trying to decide what to go see. None of them would mean a whole lot to me at this point. The other option is to walk up the street to Antony, where they had the wine and cheese festival last week, and where this week they are rededicating some kind of public square or something. There a bunch of American reenactors here for the occasion from the Lexington, their sister city, dressed as minutemen. So that might be a good photo shoot, even if it is rather boring otherwise. I had thought at first that there would be an actual reenactment, but I guess not. Triste.

Some shots of my neighborhood

I haven't yet posted any pictures of the neighborhood I am living in. Traveling into Paris is exciting, but it also gives me an appreciation for the relatively peaceful streets of my suburb. Right around the school there are a lot of apartments, so it feels like Minneapolis. But if I go a quarter mile down the road I hit the old part of the city, and it looks very French. Fortunately whenever we take the train, we go through the cute part of town to get there. These pictures were taken at various times in the last two weeks during one trip or another. I am still very shy about taking out my camera and taking pictures of people's houses, which is why I have so few pictures and also why they aren't well composed.
This is such a cute little window, and the pegs holding the shutters open are little heads (click on the photo to see a bigger version of it)
The houses are clustered together, European style, and most of them have wooden shutters.
There are so many pretty old houses, it is hard to know which ones to photograph. I picked this one because the windows on the side are such a strange shape.
This is along the route to the train station. My friend Peter is in front of me with his backpack. His wife is in the yellow shirt way up ahead, walking with another classmate of ours. I have no clue who the guy in black is. He just happened to be walking by.
My friend Bobby and I saw these antique motorcycles sitting in a very small room just off the street. It almost looked more like an entryway than a garage.

Would you like some cheese with that wine?

What is the difference between American cheese and French cheese?
When cheese gets moldy in America, we throw it away. In France, they raise the price.

The only exception to that rule is the Antony cheese and wine festival, where you can sample hundreds of cheeses and wines for free while listening to bagpipe music from a band of highlanders. One of my friends and I walked over to festival (it took almost an hour but was a very scenic walk) and took part in the festivities. I didn't sample any wine but I did try a number of cheeses, some considerably better than others. The very first cheese I tried was good, but I didn't eat the rind. I draw the line when the mold turns black. The worst I had was quite well done, and I was dared so I ate the whole thing, rind and all. The guy giving out samples warned us ahead of time that it would be strong, so I was prepared. It wasn't too bad. I wouldn't eat if for fun, but as long as I could wash it down it wouldn't be any worse than beets.

One booth was melting cheese and dipping bread in it. That was MARVELOUS! Yumm-o. I also sampled two dried meat/sausage slices. Both were saturated with salt and therefore fantastic. There was one chocolate stand in the whole place (which obviously drew quite a crowd) and also a stand for sampling honey. I had some dark honey. I'm not sure what it was but it was good. I also had a nice oil, possibly olive.

I didn't get many good pictures of the fair itself (too many people packed closely together to get a clear shot) but I did get some pictures of the group playing bagpipes and doing a traditional dance. I really should have taken pictures of the cheeses I sampled, but I hate marking myself as a tourist like that.

Paris from the Seine!

The guardian. During one of the floods the water was up to his neck but he didn't drown.
I believe this is France's equivalent of Congress.
A view of Paris from the River, with Notre Dame in the far left.
This massive glass building was built for the World's Fair.
...As was this structure that you have never heard of, I'm sure.
The Eifel Tower is framed here by two pillars of a rather ornate bridge which I believe was a gift from Russia.
Most of the bridges had some sort of ornate design in the middle, on the pillars, or both.
Close up of the Pegasus on one of the pillars
Somewhere on this block is a very famous restaurant that was supposed to be the model used for the Pixar movie Ratatouille. I think it is the one on the corner, although I don't remember the restaurant looking like that.
This is one corner of the Louvre. Once the palace, it is now a MASSIVE museum. It is one of the three most "important" museums in the world, and the home of the Mona Lisa. It is so large that if you spent 30 seconds looking at each piece of art it would take you more than a month to see everything.
Here is a shot from the other end of the Louvre. Large, eh?



The building with the wooden tower is the oldest one in Paris. Which one has the wooden tower? I'm not sure. I think it is the cream colored one. How old is it? Well, I didn't quite catch what our guide said. Speaking of which...

Here she is.
After we got off the boat, four of us walked to Notre Dame.
This is the backside of the cathedral, actually taken from the boat.
Also taken from the boat.
Okay, we found it! As you can tell, it is a massive building. But it isn't just huge, it is huge and ornate. Note the statues all over the front and top of the building. see those double doors in the middle? The next picture shows a closer shot so you can see more detail.


And an even closer shot shoes the detail on the apostles lined up by the door.

The inside is beautiful.


This cool little model depicts the cathedral being built.