Paris! Now with pictures

Wow- I realize that it's been a long time since I last updated. Once it's been a while the time just snowballs and then it's intimidating to catch up. So I will do it in small bits.

For the past week or so, my mom has been visiting me in Paris. It's been great to have her here. Our relationship has changed a bit, because I have to be on top of what's going on and be her translator (although her French is definitely usable) and show her around, so we're on a more equal plane than before. I also realize how much I missed having her around. For the past few weeks, I've been scurrying to finish my work for my classes, and my finals finished on Wednesday, so I couldn't do as much as I wanted with her until Thursday. All the same, I've been showing her the corners of the city that I've discovered, eating delicious food, going to museums, and sharing Paris with her.

Some highlights:

The Opera last night. We saw "Idomeneo" by Mozart at the Opera Garnier. It was absolutely incredible. It was my first real opera, but the opulent, magnificent building would have been worth the trip all by itself. Of course, the singing, the music, and the acting (viewed via binoculars from all the way up on the fifth balcony) made it a much better experience. We got last minute tickets for 10 euros each, and although we could only see two thirds of the stage and had to lean over to see the subtitles in French for the Italian opera, the price means I can go and get myself an opera education in the setting of "The Phantom of the Opera". (The photo shows me on the grand staircase.) Its color scheme matches that of Paris- I always think of the city in terms of black and light gold. It's a city of darkness and light, of black fashion, restrained intellectualism, and opulence.

The Khannoucca dinner with Anais's family. Anais, my friend from Yom Kippur, invited me and my mother over to dinner to celebrate Hanukkah in a family atmosphere. They are absolutely lovely people. We ventured out into the banlieue (sometimes sketchy suburbs), but of course they live in a perfectly nice neighborhood, and were warmly welcomed into a gathering of 22 people. The meal was delicious, we all took a little "Hanukkah quiz", and everyone got presents, even the two of us. We got to share in lively discussions of art, politics, and marine biology (Anais's major) and meet her actor grandfather whose parents were deported from Paris in the Holocaust. It was a nice sense of getting to know the Jewish community here in more complexity. We stayed the night, and talked politics with her parents in the morning.

Wandering around Paris. We hit up: rue Mouffetard (a great student hangout street with everything you could ever want), Montmartre around Abbesses with its bohemian past and artsy and charming present, St-Germain-des-Pres with its big name stores, tourists, tinges of the Quartier Latin, and marches de noel, Shakespeare and Company the paradise for book-lovers, Boulevard St-Michel, and the Marais for its falafel and Hanukkah spirit.

Other things I've done in the past few weeks:

Strasbourg. I went out to the city in the East of France for a long day with Chesna from AYA to see the Marches de Noel, huge cities of booths selling Christmas-specific and other nice, wintery, shiny, good-smelling things like gingerbread, hot spiced wine, ornaments, clothing, jewelry, puzzles, and pastry. The city calls itself the "Christmas capital" and was beautifully decorated. I especially loved the cathedral with its miraculous clock with moving wood and metal figures of the saints who come out every 15 minutes; Death rings the hour bell. We got some presents, explored the city, and warmed ourselves quite pleasantly against the cold.


Brussels. I went to an Israel rally with the Union des Etudiants Juifs de France in Brussels for a day, and met some really great people on the 10-hour bus ride. We exchanged cultural references and became good friends. The rally was interesting, and I also got to see the inside of the European Parliament building.

One last note:

I wrapped presents for Francis Ford Coppola today. And we were chatting. At his house. I'm going to see if I can babysit for Sofia's baby Romy (a very cute girl). They seem to want us to treat them like normal people, so I will. Very nice.