La Ferme!!

August 30th, 2008:
I have no idea why we went to a farm. But we did.
I felt like a first grader running around chasing all the animals and trying to pet them.
This post is just going to be for fun. It's just pictures of me and the people in my program playing with the animals.
This is the farm.

Wilnerys, Melissa (Residence Director), and Ahmie petting the donkey.

Melissa and Ahmie showing the donkey some love.

Mr. Piggy. (My sister loves pigs - I thought that she'd find this funny)

My two besties in France :]
The whole group ate lunch at the farm. The food was amazing!!

Half of the group (we were too big to fit at one table).
From front left: Melissa, Andrew, Melisse
From front right: Pat, Mike, Rob

The other half.
From front left: Ahmie, Jon, Wilnerys
From front right: Me, Anna, Marisol

French coke bottles are so much cooler.

Melissa with the baby goat.

Again.
(you can see the goat better in this one)

Ahmie feeding the pig.

Again.

Melissa and Ahmie with the baby ducks. (In case you couldn't tell by now, these two were the biggest animal fanatics on the trip)

Ahmie caught a duckling... he wasn't happy about it.

Me and the donkey :]

A goat.
They were causing a lot of trouble... I went to go wash my hands after holding one of the ducklings and two goats decided to follow me up the stairs. When I came back out, I heard some woman yelling and swearing in French.
The goats had jumped over the gate and in to the kitchen. I ended up having to go into the kitchen to help the women get them out.

A few minutes later the pig went up the stairs and decided to give it a try. Too bad piggies can't jump.

Ahmie and the pig.

La Puisaye

August 30th, 2008:
Wow... I just noticed that I start off almost every blog entry with the word "today." If it's not the first word it's at least in the first sentence... crazzyy. Sorry for my awful writing style - I'll have to work on that.

Well, well... These pictures are from my trip to La Puisaye - a region of France. It's about 2 hours outside of Paris and, from what I saw, it's very rural. During this excursion we visited 3 different places: 1) a pottery maker who still uses 18th century methods to create their pots 2) an organic french farm 3)Guédelon - A castle that is currently being built using all the same methods that were used to make castles during the 14th century.

I almost didn't make it on this trip - I stayed up till 3am unpacking so the next morning I was wicked tired... I ended up sleeping through my alarm and got to the bus 15 minutes late. Luckily, I wasn't the only late riser so the bus waited. Phew!

This is the outside of the pottery shop.

This is the inside.

This is our tour guide explaining to us the type of soil found in the region. It is especially good for pottery making - there are three different layers of the soil all of which are used to make pots.

** I have three videos that I wanted to post here - They showed the progression of pottery making techniques over time. Howeverrr, all my videos downloaded to youtube sideways and I don't know how to fix it :-\ just check back here later and maybe I'll have figured it out **

Our guide making a pot on the electric wheel.

This is a picture of an 18th century pottery oven. It's a man-made cave built on top of a natural hill. Apparently, it has to be on a hill because the oven needs to slope down in order for the pottery to cook properly - I wondered why the hill had to be natural though. I mean, if they were advanced enough to know how to build this oven in the first place then, most likely, they could dig their own slope.
I was too nervous to ask though.

A few more interesting facts about the oven:
The cave is built out of bricks, however, the bricks have molded together from the constant heat; the gray color of the cave is because the bricks were coated with salt... I forget why they did this exactly - it wasn't because they thought that the color gray looked better or anything... Oh well, sorry for my less-than-thorough explanation.
Oh, and i guess it's important to mention that the inside of the oven was filled with thousands of pots. They would stack each clay piece up on top of eachother until there was no room left in the whole cave.
This is the other end of the oven where the fire was built. It took three whole days and nights to cook the pots, with people maintaining the fire constantly. The oven had to reach a temperature of 1,300 degrees celcius (2372 degrees fahrenheit). On the third day, they sealed the oven and let the fire die out. It took almost 2 weeks for the oven to cool down completely.

I thought that the pottery hut was pretty. I have fallen in love with almost all the buildings in France.

Mes Nouveaux Amis

August 28th, 2008:
Day 2 of Orientation - We all woke up and headed over to our program center for a 5 hour meeting.
Yeah, it sucked.

At 4:00pm, we had a scheduled "Tour en Bateau Mouche" (boat tour of Paris). I learned some things about various French monuments that I didn't know. Nothing worth mentioning at the moment, although, some of those facts might come out in later posts.
Here's a picture of the Eiffel Tower with the circle of stars from the flag of the European Union (I mentioned it in my last post).

From the boat I got some reall neat pictures of Notre Dame...
This is the Rose Window.

This is the back part of Notre Dame - Until this boat ride, I had never seen the back so i figured you guys might find it cool too. (Sorry that it's kind of blurry)

This is a famous hospital in Paris - I just think it's funny that it says "Hotel God."

Here's a picture the back of everyone's heads... I put this up because the very first guy in this pic on the right (you can only see half of him) is Jon. He's another one of my close friends - we started talking because he sat in front of me and Ahmie on this boat ride. I'll post a better pic of him later haha.

Anywayyyy... the exhilartion of the boat ride got us all pumped to go out (or something like that). However, we all disagreed on where to go.
Me and Ahmie decided to split from the group and head to the Latin quarter where we knew there were some good bars.

Here we are at bar number one.
We are doing free advertising for Bacardi and Heineken...?

Bar number two had a beach theme... There was sand on the floor and everything - How cool?!

Me and Ahmie and some guy who decided to jump into our picture.

David, the bartender, took this pic. He's the one up front point back at all of us... Those people with me and Ahmie are just some random french folks that we met.

It was definitely a fun night.

Meetings and Greetings

August 27th, 2008:

Today was the day that everyone from my program would finally be coming to join me in Paris. At 11:00am I checked out of my studio hotel room, put my luggage in storage, then waited at a cafe for everyone to arrive.
Ted came with me.

At 3 o'clock I returned to the hotel to meet everyone and to get my new room assignment. The first person to greet me as I walked in the door was my Residence Director, Melissa Ladd. (You will see pictures of her in later posts).
She gave me my new room key and introduced me to the two girls who would be my roommates during orientation. One of them, a Tennessee-gal named Cheryl, had messaged me on facebook a few days prior so I was already familiar with her. The other girl, a New Orleans native, was named Melisse (pronounced Mel-iece).

After getting situated in our new rooms, we all headed down to the lobby so that we could be escorted to our program center a few blocks away. There, we had our first orientation meeting. Nothing too exciting except I met my third roommate, Ahmie, who had just finished up a mini-Eurotrip and would be joining us in our hotel the following day. I already knew her from my French class last semester but never really talked to her until now. She ended up becoming my closest friend in the group.

The meeting was uber boring - Everyone was exhausted from jet lag. I was exhausted from staying up until 2:00 am.
(I had dishwasher trouble lol)
It made being stuck in a cramped room for 2 hours quite a drag.

Around 7:30 Melissa took us out to eat at a nearby restaurant called L'Amazonial. There we waited to meet our Program Director, Anne-Marie Grimaud. After a delicious entree of onion soup Anne-Marie came shuffling through the door. A corpulent French woman, she offered her services in answering any questions about the french culture that we might have throughout our stay. As she explained it, she is our best resource when it comes to understanding the French customs being that she was born and raised in France. Melissa on the other hand, was a UMasser just like us and is better apt at answering questions involving school, although, living in France for the past three years makes her very helpful with some cultural questions too.

When dinner was over we all headed back to the hotel sans directors. With this new freedom everyone got a second wind and after 30 minutes of getting ready we all headed out towards the Eiffel Tower.

We never got there. We were about 2 blocks away when everyone decided that they were tired of walking. So we took the metro back and went to bed.

Here are pictures from our walk:
From left to right: Melisse (in pink), Wilnerys (taking a picture), Marisol (up front in black), John

Cheryl

Andrew and Cheryl

From left to right: Cheryl, Marisol, Wilnerys, Pat, Melisse

The Eiffel Tower at night - It's blue right now because France is hosting the European Union Convention or something and it's supposed to look like the European Union Flag. It has a circle of yellow stars on it too (you just can't see it in this pic). After I took this pic we turned back and went to the hotel.

Fragonard Parfums and Domesticity

This morning, I decided to get out of my room for a bit. Since I had already seen all the major tourist attractions with my dad, I decided to look up something new. I typed in the google search box "free things to do in Paris" and a Perfumerie was listed on one of the sites. It said that they had a museum right in Paris that gave free tours. Everything else that came up was something I had already done.
So perfume it was.

After breakfast i headed out to find Fragonard Parfums on Rue Scribe.
I'm not gonna lie, it wasn't that exciting. The website that I had found built it up way too much and had a lot of information wrong.
This is what it said: "Fragonard's Perfume Museum occupies two stories of 19th Century townhouse on rue Scribe in the 9th arrondissement. After entering on the ground floor, you head upstairs to a series of large rooms with a mixture of period furnishings and perfume exhibits." What they ment to say, is you go upstairs into one room relatively the size of my kitchen, and look at a number of display cases along the 40 or so feet of wall.

They also say "One of the more intriguing exhibits is the orgue à parfum, or "perfume organ," so called because it resembles the keyboards of a seven-manual cathedral organ with its tiered rows of ingredient bottles arranged around a balance or scale that the perfumer uses when mixing and testing fragrances."
Here's the picture they gave:
Looks cool, doesn't it?

Well, this perfume organ shown in the picture is not at the Paris Museum. It is in the Fragonard Museum in GRASSE! Go figure. The one that they have in Paris only had 300 perfumes and is about the size of a bathroom vanity.

And the free, English-language guided tour they mentioned? HA! I got an English information card. So is life.

Despite my dissapointment, I still enjoyed myself. I don't blame Fragonard, I blame the website haha. And I certainly learned a lot about the history of perfume. For one, I didn't know that musk came from deer. (You probably all knew that but oh well.) Also, i was surprised to find that you need a TON of flowers just to get a little bit of essence (i.e. you need to distil 1000 kg of orange blossom, to get 1 kg of essence.)
But yeah, that about sums up my new perfum knowledge haha - at least the stuff worth mentioning.

To learn more about all this check out the Fragonad website. (click here)

They wouldn't let me take pictures in the museum, but I'll post some pics of what I saw on my walk there:



An apartment building under construction.

A store that I really liked. Didn't buy anything though.


The store had a lot of incense and incense holders. These were my favorites.

I went in to this delicatessen shop to look for some belgian chocolate for my mom, and the lady let me sample some amazzzing truffles.

This is the "Place de la Concorde." Here, over 15,000 people were guillotined during the French Revolution, including King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie-Antoinette.

"Let them eat cake!!" (I actually heard somewhere that she didn't really say that - it was just a bad translation or misunderstanding)

Anyway, here is Fragonard (Well, the outside of it):





On my walk back to the hotel, I decided to stop at Saint-Eustache to check out the inside. Although they are currently rennovating it, the church is still beautiful. And huge. I think the ceiling is higher than the one in Notre Dame. Here are some pics:

This is Saint-Eustache. Here, King Louis XIV made his First Communion.
This piece of artwork is near the entrance to the church. I found it cute that a little french girl had decided to climb up it.
This is the inside of the church... The ceiling is SOO high!

After my day out on the town, I decided to return to my hotel and tackle some chores. First, I decided to do laundry - It cost me 8 euro just to wash my clothes - That's about $13. Ridiculous.
Once I had paid for my token, I went through the tedious task of trying to figure out the hotel washing machine. They don't have settings like we do - their are buttons with various temperature options ranging from 30 degrees celcius to 95. With this, I had to turn on my computer and do some research. It took me about a half an hour but I finally figured out which setting would be considered a warm load.
With that all sorted out, I went back down to the laundry room to try my luck. I ended up putting 3X the amount of soap needed in the machine - There was a button that automatically put soap in and I thought it was the "start" button. After pressing every button on the machine numerous times I managed to get the damn machine to work.

40 minutes later I went back down to get my stuff. Thankfully, everything survived.

All in all, my clothes survived.

My next chore was to make myself dinner - that one actually went rather smoothly. I made myself a delicious BLT sandwhich and only burned myself once.

Following suite of the washing machine, the dishwasher proved to be just as difficult to manage. I fiddled with the knob for a while - thought that I had turned it on, but after an hour of it making this horrible noise I decided I must've done something wrong. I was right. I had been putting it through the rinse cycle when the thing hadn't even filled up with water. A little more fiddling and i got it to work.

After that I quit life and went to bed.