P'tit weekend à Lille

Last week, most of my week was taken up with studying for a mid-term on Thursday, which actually went quite well; if anything, I tried to write too much and just kind of repeated myself and rambled on, which is surprisingly even easier in French.  After three hours, I had written 7 pages of semi-understandable legit french, leaving frustrated but actually pretty proud of myself.
Then the fun happened.  Thursday day was filled with chillin: chillin at Place des Vosges, the oldest planned square in Paris.  Jacob and I brought some hw and he did his while I took a little nap using my hw as a pillow.  Successful afternoon if you ask me.  The evening entailed some extended Seine chilling with friends, and then a trip over to Phoebe's for some dinner.  Eventually ended up at Café Oz, an australian bar with some bumpin tunes.  No one was really dancing but we decided to tear the floor up.  After a nice bike ride home during the wee hours of the morning and my morning Friday class, I went over to the Jardin de Tuilleries and slept there like a homeless man.  It was too nice of a day to not be outside!
Early Saturday morning, I set out for Lille, a city an hour train ride north of Paris.  It marked my first time going on a trip outside of Paris, and the timing was perfect.  I was meeting Tamera, a Pomona-Pitzer alum who is in Europe playing professional polo, and her friend Charlotte, who is doing the same thing but for a different team.  We went to Bruges, Belgium Saturday, an hour drive from Lille.  Bruges was great, a cute city that seems to only sell chocolate, beer, waffles, and frites (French fries).  When I ordered my fries, I got them with mayonnaise, because that is how the locals do it.  Needless to say, it was different, but the fries themselves were so good I could have eaten them with anything as a sauce and would have enjoyed it.

Train ride to Lille; not used to the absence of mountains...

chillin Bruges buildings

Belfry; wanted to climb it but it is being renovated

PP Polo, represent! Belgium style

Tamera and Charlotte, with the canal outside

Some French kids that came to Bruges to cross dress, lick the street, and drink vodka.  Quite the show

the square we had lunch in

None of my pics of the inside turned out well, but it had gorgeous stained glass windows

After a waffle covered in chocolate sauce and some fries and a couple of churches, we rolled back to Lille.  First, we went to a men's professional water polo game, which was so much fun.  Although the stadium held even less people than Haldeman pool at Pomona, it was packed full with enthusiastic fans since the game decided on whether they would advance to the playoffs.  Even with the enthusiasm, t-shirt gun, and CHEERLEADERS (what??), Lille still lost by two.  Bummer for the home crowd.

Lille on the left, bad guys on the right

Not great dancers, but you can't have it all 

Not so effective counter; Euros don't really like swimming

After that, the girls took forever to get ready and we went out to a club in Lille, an overall great time. Sunday was a wonderful day of relaxing, first going to the large Sunday market and getting fresh produce and fresh bread, all much cheaper than Paris (not surprisingly), then having a little pic nic in the park.  Although not as great as wandering in Paris, the wandering we did post-picnic was pretty cool.  One thing I have to give Lille credit on is their people: they look happy! I don't think it was anything too crazy, but compared to Paris it was like an episode of the Care Bears: people laughing, people actually raising their voices a little, and giant technicolor bears hugging everything.  The chairs in the cafés were plastic, basically just lawn chairs.  Although this does not seem that crazy, for people to be relaxed in plastic chairs on a Sunday, the scene is just not seen in Paris.
Later that night, we made a bunch of mini-crêpes and had a little crêpe party, then I had to come back home.  "Coming home" to Paris actually made me extremely happy, and I realized that over the weekend I had started to miss it a bit.  Who woulda thought, homesick for Paris!  I have to say, the weekend in Lille was EASILY my favorite voyage so far...
The next week and a half will be a bunch of work, but after that expect stories of more adventures.

Lille market!

Park that seems to go through the whole city

Lille opera 

They caught me taking a pic of the plastic chairs.  Still incredulous, no café in Paris would do that

a strange church type thing

so cool

one of my favorite buildings in Europe so far

Gare de Lille

l'amour et le soleil

I know, it's been a while! But, that isn't because nothing has happened and I have nothing to say, it is because I have been a busy bee with many the tale to tell.  In no way can I include it all in this singular post, so I will do my best to recount the highlights: two weeks ago, I went to the Centre Pompidou, the very large modern art museum pictured below, and finally went inside. It was great, a very different vibe from the classy and formal Louvre, but still as artsy and interesting.  The best part may have been the staircase on the exterior, where we watched the sunset over Paris.  C'était magnifique, ça.

Centre Pompidou

     After some proper dance celebrations two weekends ago (celebrating la vie, of course), Charlotte arrived last week for her spring break.  Although I went to all my classes (or at least almost all of them), it felt like I was also on spring break, since I got to explore parts of Paris with I had not been to and was also able to re-see some of my favorite parts of Paris.  Highlights included: wandering for days in the Marais (one of the oldest parts of Paris where every small street and every building is dripping with history), tasting a lot of macaroons, going to Versailles on Saturday (took at least 150 pics), going up to Montmartre again, seeing Wiley and some of his friends from his program, having a pic-nic at a park I have never been to but will definitely return to, going to the Pantheon and multiple other churches, and celebrating St. Patrick's day at a scottish bar by dancing up a storm.  Some background on some of the above: macaroons are like small wafers with amazing fillings that come in more flavors than yogurtland.  Versailles is a city just outside of Paris where King Louis XIV decided to build one of the most impressive royal palaces of all time.  The gardens behind seem to go on for miles, perfectly pruned and green.  It was great to get away from the buildings of Paris and actually see a landscape for once.  The Panthéon is an old church that was converted to honor the great thinkers of France's history, with a bit of an emphasis on the French revolution.  I don't know how the Catholics feel about the state turning one of their more impressive churches into a place to honor man, not god, but I do know that is is impressive.

   The weather was perfect all week (almost 70 degrees), and there were even traces of spring.  It was a week full of, as a vendor of crepes told us, l'amour et le soleil.  In the coming two weeks I have a mid-term, two dissertations, and an oral exposé.  I guess my petit spring break is over, time to return to real life (or whatever you call living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world with the ability to do practically whatever you want, most of the time for free).

formal metro performance

obligatory Shakespeare and Company visit. she stole my scarf

one of many gorgeous churches visited

shhhh...

best tea in Paris, outside part of the Mosque de Paris

Panthéon, so purty

'Tis not the pendulum that turns, but the Earth itself. Such a cool thing.

Didn't enter this one, nonetheless quite impressionable

Gardens at Versailles.

Will definitely return in spring, when the statues are uncovered and everything is in bloom.  Great here too though.

Gold gates, plenty of tourists.

chalk artists tearin it up

Chapel at Versailles, chillin ceiling

which is the real art? which is the real chair? modern art, full of strange questions.

Sunset from Boubou (Pompidou)

Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, so artsy

Some simple sketches on the ceiling...

The garden is a city in itself.

pretty sweet palace, Louis XIV went big and made it his home

Weekend warriors

It was quite the eventful weekend, so eventful that I am still catching up on sleep.  Although it seems dark, both Friday and Saturday consisted of cemetery visits, Friday to Père Lachaise and Saturday to la cimetiè de Montmartre.  Besides that, fellow Claremont friends were in town, so we did a bunch of chillin and grillin (minus the grillin).  Also, took another trip to the Marché aux Puces (where there is a bunch of cheap stuff) and wandered around there for a while.  Paris is a city that rewards wandering in the best way.  In fact, I wonder if many Parisians even have plans when not working, or if they just pretend to have a destination but actually just wander the city, finding new secret places and smiling (on the inside of course; no outside smiling aloud in Paris).
At la cimitière de Père Lachaise, we visited the graves of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, among many others.  There used to be a tradition for girls to put on lipstick and kiss Wilde's grave, but the city (or whoever runs the cemetery) decided that the lips constituted as a form of vandalism (go figure) so they surrounded his grave with glass.  Although initially bummed, once we arrived I realized it just created a perfect canvas for all of the lips  of the world.  Unfortunately I left my lipstick at home, so I just had to take pictures instead:

We also went and got a nice meal, which was just delicious (I made the best choice):

blurry chicken

my amazing bass and sweet potatoes

Maddie's hearty, delicious stew

And, in honor of the birthday Charlotte Leasia (who was visiting from Aix-en-Prevence in the south of France), we popped a bottle of champagne under the Eiffel Tower.

If only I could capture the sparkles (wish I had a camera from Harry Potter)

we meet again...

We also caught up with Ivan, one of the coolest Bulgarian, car-dwelling metro musicians in Paris that I know.

eerie

Moulin Rouge. So rouge.  They invited me to perform but we couldn't go inside, had to uphold our schedule...

Saturday night included a trip to the always-entertaining Rue Oberkampf, and Sunday night just involved a lot of procrastinating.  My Language and Culture teacher told us that we were half way through with his class and I literally yelled at him "C'est pas la verité" which means that's not true, even though it is; time really is flying. Definitely a week of work ahead of me (maybe). À la prochaine fois mes amis!