Chevreuse, at last!

Here are the much- awaited images from the Château de la Madeline on the hill above Chevreuse, France. That is to say, they have waited a long time to see you, even if you haven't been waiting to see them!

I rushed out after class on a Friday afternoon, grabbed a bike, and hopped on the RER. From the end of the train line I biked fast and managed to reach the castle a good hour and a half before it closed. Here I am standing on the outer wall of the castle, looking in. You can see the well in the middle of the picture and the stronghold to the left.

The old cellar of the castle has been turned into a museum. There they had a number of models of the castle. They think that it possibly started out as a single wooden tower used by a Feudal Lord to protect the farmers in the village below, then the first stone structures were built in the late 11th century. In 1108 King Louis the 6th attacked the castle, which at that time consisted of little more than the stronghold, as he tried to take control of all of France from the local lords. The stronghold resisted his attack.


Later in the century walls and towers were built around it. In 1356, during the hundred years war, the lord of Chevreuse was captured by the English and had to pay a steep ransom for his liberty, so he sold the castle to a man who was friends with kings Charles the 5th and Charles the 6th. With their aid and money he made further modifications and improvements to the castle. Nevertheless the city of Chevreuse, and the castle, were captured in 1414 by the Duke of Bourgogne.

There were other tidbits of history also but I can't quite piece them together. There used to be an abbey connected to the castle, which may have even predated the castle. It's foundations are on private property so they have not been able to do any excavating. Because it is in a cellar, the museum has a couple of different levels. Here is the stairway going down to the lowest level, along with a knight that I added digitally. :-)

I also tried on this very fashionable helmet and expressed my feudal self. After I had seen my fill of the castle I explored the country roads and bike paths in the countryside and then wound my way back into Chevreuse. I wanted to see the waterway with all of the little bridges that I had visited the last time I was there. It was every bit as pretty as I remembered.


I was going to take a very mediocre picture of a street lamp and a bench when I saw the sun shining through the trees onto this archway along the canal.

I continued along the canal, taking occasional pictures. When I got near the end I turned around, and this is what I saw. Wow! Have I ever mentioned that I love this town?

Oh When the Nerds Go Marching In

I and three families from my school got up by the dawn's early light and blundered to the metro station so we could beat the crowds surging toward our goal- the Paris museum of science and industry.

It was free this weekend, and we took good advantage of it! We had a number of children along (10, if I remember correctly) so the first thing we visited was the kid section. It was cool! They had a section about the television industry where kids could run cameras, give the forcast, or star in a music video.

The next area was about bugs and insects. They had a butterfly garden and an ant colony. Then we learned about the human body. When you placed your hands on two electrodes, a bass drum kept the rhythm of your heartbeat. There was even a little track for measuring how fast you could run.

Next came a section about water. There were lots of water games like balancing balls on jets of water or using water to push balls through a course. You could try 4 different pumps to see which one worked best for moving the water into a big bucket. There was a water clock that I and the dads studied for a long time without ever really figuring it out. It was like a toilet but ten times more complicated. The pendulum pumped a small amount of liquid into a reservoir each second. When that reached a certain height the water siphoned into another reservoir, which after one minute emptied into the reservoir that counted minutes. At the end of the hour all of the minutes drained back down into the flask below the pendulum and the next hour ball became filled. You can see that it was 10:54 when I took the picture.

There was a whole section on energy and another on robotics in manufacturing. It was kind of like a simplified mini-version of the whole rest of the museum. After that we visited the planetarium. The highlight  for me was flying through a 3D-rendered version of the Hubble deep field. Later in the day we saw a 3D film about the Sun that was also very interesting. For me it was not much new information, but it was fun to see it in 3D. Flying through a solar flare? Why not!

We also visited the Argonaut, a retired French submarine. Talk about claustrophobic! I can't imagine having to live there for any length of time. The one toilet for the crew was smaller than an airplane toilet and to get to it half the crew had to squeeze through a passage that could reach 175 degrees when they were at the surface. The bunks were crammed together and the guys used them in shifts. You had to hope you didn't get stuck with one of the bunks were you were hugging a torpedo.

We also visited an exhibit about the intersection of science and fiction. It was like a Star Wars party mixed with a Star Trek Party mixed with much stranger stuff, mixed with a healthy splattering of Jules Verne, mixed with a little bit of reality. In addition to the obligatory R2D2 and C3PO, there were models from I, Robot and costumes from Planet of the Apes and tons of movies I had never heard of. You get 3 nerd points if you can name the Star Wars character in the picture. There were two real robots also, one of which spoke several languages. There was also a film on four different screens that gave an immersive overview of the possibilities and dilemmas of time travel.

At the end of the day we visited a light and shadows exhibit for kids. There were lots of games and experiments using light.
 

Well, I hadn't seen enough, so I went back the next day also! The first thing I did was stand in line for more than an hour so I could do what you see in the picture. They strapped me in under the balloon and off I went, using the big wings to maneuver above the crowds. It was kind of like swimming but more clumsy. I think with practice it would be a lot easier. It was really neat! I lifted off from the second floor balcony and floated up until I was above the level of the third floor and looking down at the first floor lobby.

From there I visited a very interesting section about rockets and satellites. I used satellite data to predict the flow of icebergs below South America and decide if the palace in Venice is going to sink into the ocean any time soon. Then I spent several minutes trying to dock a spacecraft to the International Space Station. I tried to hurry for the sake of the people watching, with the predictable result. I ended up above the station (higher orbit due to higher relative velocity) and had to use my jets to reposition, then rotate, then reposition again, then rotate some more... and then I got my controls mixed up and I nearly blasted a hole in the space station. At that point I decided to continue my adventures elsewhere. There was a collection of films you could choose from so I watched short documentaries about Yuri Gagarin and MIR, a publicity piece about the French Diamond project, and footage of the Challenger explosion.

I saw an expo about new technologies showing a car that was more like a big scooter than a small car (it made a Smart look beefy) and an SUV that Nissan hopes to release by 2015 that runs on hydrogen.
After that I visited an expo about counterfeiting. It was very sobering. They had several examples of counterfeit items right next to the real one and it was hard to spot the differences. I was amazed at the types of items copied. I knew about counterfeit money, but I didn't realize that name-brand merchandise is also highly susceptible. They had a ton of Nike shoes that were fake.  For the most part you couldn't tell by looking at them. The counterfeits were using cheaper rubber and cheaper materials, but you wouldn't be able to tell until they were worn out 2 months after you bought them or you started to develop back problems.

Other counterfeited objects included an iron, an ink cartridge, brand name kids toys, A Microsoft Windows 2007 CD and packaging complete with holograms, a perfume, and a DVD. I had never realized just how good a job counterfeiters can do. The inc cartridge was almost exactly like the original, including the packaging. It even had the holographic verification sticker, and you had to use the official hologram verifier tool from the company to see that the color was a tiny bit off.

Even more sobering, one sign said that 50% of medicine sold online in Europe is counterfeit. Maybe it works, most likely it doesn't, and maybe it is toxic. Who knows. DON'T BUY MEDICINE ONLINE! After going to this expo I am also really hesitant to buy anything else online either, at least brand name stuff. Counterfeiters won't bother copying an off-brand because they don't make as much money off of the name. Street vendors are also very, very sketchy. Think twice and study carefully before making a purchase.

After that I visited math land and studied chaos theory and statistics. I started an interactive display about chess, quickly landed myself in a stalemate, and left when the computer offered to let me see if I could do better than Kasparov. Nope, not likely. I played with fractals for a little bit and then headed over to a section dedicated to sound. I used software to make a computerized mouth say different vowels by moving the lips, jaw, tongue, etc. Two other programs required you to come up with ways to reduce unwanted noise. I did both of those in French to pick up some vocabulary.

They had a room outfitted with the ultimate in surround sound -24 speakers- which carried me, with my eyes closed, into exotic locations like the beach and a tropical rainforest. I also heard a rabbit sighing in his sleep, snails eating, and a volcano venting just before an eruption. Outside they had an little exhibit where the music played at the tempo you kept with the conductor's wand. Unfortunately for everyone in hearing range, they were letting the children try it.

From there I went to two related exhibits. The first dealt with perspective and how our eyes and brain use it to make sense out of our surroundings. The second dealt with light and how our eyes and our mind process it. There were lots of optical illusions in both displays and plenty of things that made you shake your head and say, "Did I just see what I think I just saw?" There was one room split into many bizarre pieces that only made sense when you saw them from one particular spot. Then someone would step into the room and it looked like they were cut in two by a wall. Another room was built in two different perspectives so that if two people walked in at opposites sides one would like a hobbit or the other like a giant. In another room there was a miniature movie set with lights all around it and a camera projecting the view onto a big screen. You had to turn the lights on and off to get the right effect for a particular situation or time of day.

I had to leave the perspective exhibit without spending much time in the virtual reality area (though I did see the creepy artificial intelligence girl who follows you around the room with her eyes) because they were in the process of kicking us out for closing. I succeeded in seeing all of the exhibits but I am a little sad that I didn't get to watch any of the demonstrations and mini-seminars that were going on all weekend. It was such a huge place with so much to see, it would probably take a week to do a "proper" job of seeing it. But I praise God for giving me two free days in this museum, one of the best in Paris.

Look what hatched!

Music for the Soul

I'm sorry I haven't written in so long. It isn't that I have forgotten, rather that our internet has been crummy with a capital C for about a week. Monday was the first time I could get on in several days, and ever since then access has been slow and unpredictable. There is no chance of getting pictures up.

Anyway, I went to a really neat service Sunday night by a group of very talented Christian musicians. They did a church service in Paris that consisted of classical music and a brief reflection on who we are in relation to God and where we fit into creation. It was also a call to live our lives as if we would die tomorrow, because that is certainly a possibility. The music was phenomenal! Check out the Crescendo page at http://www.crescendo.org

I also found out about another cool group named Slemish. If you like Irish music, check out http://www.reverbnation.com/slemish

Friday night I "babysat" the neighbor boys. They aren't babies, though. We hung out, ate pizza, and then watched Ice Age 2 while their parents went out to eat. Saturday night I rode my bike to church for youth group but I got their late and nobody was there. So I rode back. That was almost a 2 hour round trip. Sunday night was the concert with crescendo. Last night was cheesy buttery deliciousness that is my own take on a French favorite, followed by a vigorous cram session. Today was our midterm exam, which I probably did so-so on. And tonight is getting late. I was going to watch Cyrano de Bergerac, but I might not get to it.

Bonsoirée!

Chevreuse

Yesterday after class I through some change in pocket, strapped on my bike helmet, and flew out the door. Half an hour on the RER, 20 minutes on bike, and I was once again at the chateau above Chevreuse- but this time I got there before it closed! I don't have time right now to give you the grand tour, so I will just put up a couple of pictures and post the rest later.

The first image is from the bike path between the RER station and Chevreuse. I had to do some VTT (mountain biking) to get up the hill to the castle. There is a path that brings you right underneath the ramparts and then up to the road that runs to the castle. You can see it over the wall. The panoramic shot is, of course, from the wall inside the castle.

And this picture has nothing to do with the castle. I actually took it in Anthony during the Cheese and Wine festival and then edited it to make it more dreamy-looking. I couldn't find any way to work it into that post, so I will simply tack it on here. We call this thorough planning.

Cheese & Wine Festival

The primary purpose of this post is to disgust my mom. So I'll jump right to it. Voilà the "Blue Cheese."

My mom can not stand mold, and this cheese is injected with it in order to ensure that it will have the characteristic, incredibly strong taste. I have tried moldy cheeses three or four times here and, unlike other French cheeses, they have not grown on me. In me perhaps...

This festival is a major party, perhaps one of the most popular in the Paris area. I took two random crowd shots that don't do justice at all to the crowd that was milling in the "centre ville" of Antony.


The name suggests a fantastic selection of wines and cheeses. That there were.


But it was really a festival of all things culinary. I even watched a cooking demonstration. There were many products, nearly all of which could be sampled. I tried jellies, different flavors of honey, cooking oils, fois gras, sausages, and pastries.


And of course they were selling French bread.


There were even the famous French snails, although they weren't offering samples :-( These were the leftover shells.


One of the icons of the event is the "mountain chalet" of Swiss food. They have three gigantic vats of cheesy potatoes and other goodness. I didn't witness it myself, but my friends said that when they add cheese to the mix they toss in a whole wheel at a time.


All of the free samples are geared towards getting you to buy expensive products. Some examples:

Good cheese from Switzerland, 30 Euros per kilo. With the current euro to dollar exchange rate, that is about $1.16/oz or $18.64/lb


Excellent sausages, also from Switzerland: $1.51/oz or $24.28/lb


The French are less squeamish about being reminded where their food comes from. The sign on the table says that it is all natural and costs 120 Euros per kilo. That is $4.66/oz or $74.72/lb.

But fear not, I didn't buy the deer leg, nor any of the other stuff either. I did enjoy the festivities, though.

Nuit Blanche

I went into Paris on Saturday with a bunch of friends from school for "Nuite Blanche," a big contemporary arts festival and general party in Paris. We started at the Hotel de Ville because that is where they were handing out maps. If I had been flying solo I probably would have missed this minor detail and blundered around in ignorance all night, but there were females along so that hazard was avoided.

The neon squiggles on the Hotel de Ville (City Hall) are the words "Love Differences" in a bunch of different languages. When I was on that bridge in the picture I turned back towards where I was standing as I took that picture, and got this picture:

Okay, so not exactly that picture. I took two pictures, mushed them together, and edited them to death for 15 minutes. It was already dark at that point so my camera was having a hard time. The picture is slightly brighter than what I saw in real life and also less pretty. And it is more blue because I forgot to change the white balance before I took the picture. Rats.

Anyway, we got our maps and boldly went were lots and lots of people had been before and many more would be after us. The first exhibit scared me at first because it there were guards at the door and the people going in looked like the seriously artsy type. I, on the other hand, was in jeans and an EP 700 Club shirt.

We entered the room and, sure enough, there were serious-looking people milling around and pondering some black silhouettes on the wall. Then I saw that the silhouettes were moving! This greatly increased my interest in the spectacle, whatever it might be. When I finally got into good gawking position, I realized that there was a camera hidden somewhere in the front of the room that was filming the people in the room. But not constantly. It would film for a couple of seconds in color, then freeze one second of movement in place and turn that one second of film into black and white while it continued to film the action going on. The result was multiple layers of action frozen in time. And if you moved around a little, you would soon see four or five versions of yourself on the wall.

The people were slowly milling and observing their artsy selves on the screen when this bozo started doing crazy antics.

My friends joined in too, and the artsy people even managed to crack a smile.

That was definitely the coolest thing we saw all night. After that we saw some decapitated metal dinosaurs that got salvaged from an abandoned amusement park and several hundred alarm clocks stacked on shelves, all set for 7 A.M. We also saw a series of short videos of people who have immigrated either to France or Germany. Each one was asked to share one thing they brought with them from their homeland. It was really interesting, especially the guy who demonstrated how to make his amazing anti-hemorrhoid medicine. He showed us the water bottle of the stuff that he keeps on hand and promised us that if we drank it too we would never have hemorrhoid problems again! In all seriousness, it was very interesting to see the things that people found important. As a foreigner myself, I can identify.

We got home at about 11:30, which is much more reasonable than average. Nuit Blanche gets done at 7 A.M. The problem is that the RER doesn't run between midnight and 5 A.M. and we had no interesting in being out that late! All in all, a very memorable evening.

Gone to Space, Be Back Tomorrow

A couple of weeks ago I took advantage of the "Journées de Patrimoine" (European Heritage Days) to visit the Paris Museum of Air and Space (it was free!!) I spent a majority of my time in the Space section.


At the beginning was a clip from a silent film that came out at the start of the century. Several men in top hats climb into a bullet, get themselves blasted out of a giant canon, land in the mouth of the man in the moon, tumble through several layers of moon rock (interrupting the festivals of several lunar tribes on their descent) and finally come to rest at the bottom layer of the moon.
After that, I walked past a series of rockets that constituted France's part in the nuclear race. They were the third country to have a long range nuclear missile; they call it the diamond.


Moving on, I came to a section where they had the actual capsule in which the first French space man returned to Earth. It was Russian, of course. And I touched it, so I can say that I touched something that has been in space. Here is a picture of the interior. Believe it or not, they cram three people into that space.


Here is the backside of the capsule. They should have gotten my friend E to help them with their English.


On the same level was a Vostok capsule identical to the one Yuri Gagarin rode into space, becoming the first human to ever visit.


And a model of a Salyut space station (a 3rd generation version, I would guess). They didn't have any models of MIR or the International Space Station.


Then they had a section dedicated to the moon landings, where I found the item that for me was the most fascinating- the actual suit worn be Eugene Cernan, the last man on the moon. I could almost touch it.


Look at the brown edges of the patch. I have seen moon dust! As a side note, the letter hidden by the switch is an A. I don't know who "MAN" and "MOM" are, but they can't talk at the same time!



Hanging from all parts of the ceiling were full-sized satellites.


And outside were two full-scale models of European Space Agency rockets.


___________________________________
Moving on to the aviation section, they had a very fun collection of flying contraptions that predate the airplane. Believe it or not, this flew several times:


This dangerous device was launched many times from a hill in the town where I go to church:


And here is our friend Otto Lilienthal, who made over 2,000 good flights and one bad one:


From here, aviation made leaps and bounds. But some people are stark raving mad and still use gliders that are little more than a wing and a seat. Lots of them identical to this were still being used in the 60s.


The museum also had some very bizarre airplanes that came out of France's early experiments on the other side of the sound barrier:


And possibly the coolest thing France ever made, the Mirage. It is a supersonic VTOL (it can take off and land like a helicopter).


They also had an interesting collection of WWII planes.


Throughout the museum there were lots and lots of films. Old news footage, documentaries, etc. There were some really amazing films in the space section with computer-generated models and reproductions. It was easy to spend the whole day there. As I was walking home from the train station I looked up and saw the moon, so I got out my camera. As I was snapping photos, this airplane flew into the frame.


It was a perfect ending to the day. The only way it could have been better is if I had actually gone flying.