Vacation travels part 2

To resume the story of my past month: After my all-too-brief sojourn at home, I headed off to Washington DC to attend the reunion for Legacy Keshet (properly known as Legacy Heritage Internship for Young Scientists, a mouthful of a name), the science-focused trip to Israel I took last summer. I had really missed the people from the trip and the wonderful energy we had, and I justified the trip back to the US partially by the fact that I could make the reunion. And true to my expectations, the reunion helped solidify my friendships from the trip and got me reenergized to do my advocacy project. The picture shows some of us in front of the White House. The weather was very abnormal, with 70 degree days in early January; we need to start actually paying attention to global warming, because it's only going to get worse as time goes on. Anyway, I also reconnected to the personal empowerment I felt I gained over the summer, although once again I could tell how I had matured over the past few months. I was very sad when the three day reunion ended.

I flew back to Paris with a paper to write on the overnight flight, which I finished five minutes before the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport and handed in that same day. (Good college training? I hope not.) When I returned, though very jetlagged, I found Emma and her mother waiting for me. Emma Johnson was here for three and a half weeks during Oberlin's JanTerm, taking French classes in the morning, and we spent the better part of that time together. I had one last week of class, and then we were able to go out on the town. Emma's mom took us out to several places; I got to sit in the Lost Generation haunt (only a few minutes away from me) of the Cafe de Flore, visited the dark, hip BuddhaBar near the Louvre, and ate in the ornately gilded restaurant at the Musee d'Orsay. This was a different side of Paris, and it was so nice to get to share it with a very good friend. Her mom left after a week, leaving us the run of their rented apartment in the Marais. We went out to several plays and movies, including a production of "La Cantatrice Chauve" by Ionesco that has been running uninterrupted in the same theater (La Huchette) for the last 51 years, and the great classic of "Cyrano de Bergerac" at the Comedie Francaise from last-minute seats which required considerable gymnastics to be able to see the wonders happening on stage. We visited the Louvre on a night when it was open late, used Bisquick from the American store "Thanksgiving" to prepare a pancake dinner, shopped (Paris now has "les soldes", where everything is marked way down at the same time; it's one of only two times a year that stores are allowed to have sales), saw the Tintin exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, and watched "Paper Moon", "12:08 a l'est de Bucharest", "A Night at the Opera", and "Paris je t'aime", a collection of short shorts by different directors about different neighborhoods of Paris. It was pretty American-in-Paris centric, but gave a fairly authentic sense of the flavors of the neighborhoods, and I loved it.

Most importantly, we traveled to Barcelona together for three days. Barcelona is an absolutely beautiful city, with stunning and original architecture that rivals the more uniform elegance of Paris. I tried to put my two years of high school Spanish into effect, only to find that everyone there speaks Catalan as a first language and that their accent threw me off. In any case, we were able to get by. We ate delicious food (especially vegetarian paella) on a Spanish schedule: breakfast at 10, lunch at 2 or 3, dinner after 9 PM and as late as 11 PM or midnight. There were lots of people on the streets even at 1 or 2 AM, which fit my current sleep schedule much better than the Parisian schedule does. We explored the city a lot every day, walking up to 10 hours a day, through the city, on the great touristy avenue La Rambla, Mediterranean seashore, and through the charming narrow streets of el Barro Gotic, where our hostel was located. We discovered the history of Catalonia along the through the museum of Catalonian History, saw the Picasso Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and explored the beautiful chaparral climate plants in the botanical gardens at Montjuic. We also got to see Gaudi's genius at the Sagrada Familia (an amazing Modernist and naturalist cathedral still under construction after 120 years) and La Pedrera, an innovative apartment building. It was a wonderful trip, and as always great to be with Emma.

Another recent development has been with Sofia Coppola. Although I announced in my last post that I was going to babysit for little Romy, I only just babysat for the first time for her last Tuesday. Romy is a quiet and goodnatured eight-week-old baby, especially when I walked around with her and sang to her. And Sofia and Thomas Mars are both very nice people, and very natural. I also ran some errands for her yesterday, stopping at a baby furniture store (?) among other things. Along the way, I saw a teacher strike- I wish we had had those sometimes- and a group of Hare Krishna by a metro stop chanting to the sound of an accordion... so French. I'm getting psyched for the new semester; my Reid Hall classes are starting this week, but my Sorbonne classes are not starting until two weeks from now. I'm still finalizing them. I'm looking forward to getting to know the new AYA people, who just arrived two days ago. Au revoir!

Vacation travels part 1

Many things have happened over the past month. I visited three countries (France, the U.S., and Spain), entertained and was entertained by three visitors (my mom, my brother Eli, and Emma Johnson from Winsor), got a new job, went to a reunion for my Israel trip last summer, and realized how much has and hasn't changed when I went home for a week. As the new semester is starting tomorrow, I thought I should update before things change again.

I'll start roughly chronologically. I had a spate of work near the end of December, with about 30 pages of essays in French due during one week, and then another 15-20 pages due after vacation. Luckily, everything turned out very well. I hope that Harvard takes my credit next year. Around and after this work, my mom and I went to see Les Invalides, the Musee Rodin, the Musee de l'Armee, Deyrolle, and the Catacombes. Mom and I explored Paris intensely for a week, and then Eli arrived. He's 15 and this was his first time spending a length of time in Europe. He takes Spanish in school, but picked up a little French over the stay. My uncle Tom, who works in international finance, helping small enterprises grow in developing countries, stopped by from his post in Nigeria. All of us visited such classics as the Tour Eiffel, and occasionally the four of us split up so Eli could see some things that he specifically was interested in. Together, we did a lot of exploring, and made a significant dent in Paris's more than 200 museums. A partial list of things we saw includes: the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, Les Halles, rue Mouffetard, Arenes de Lutece, Musee Jacquemart-Andre, the Sacre-Coeur, Shakespeare and Company, Ste-Chapelle, and the Catacombes of Paris. The catacombes were especially creepy. They house the bones of over a million people who were excavated from various cemeteries when they became overcrowded and centers of disease, including many victims of the Guillotine during the French Revolution. After passing a door with the inscription, "C'est ici l'empire de la mort" (This is the empire of death), we walked along seemingly endless corridors of piled up femurs and neat rows of skulls, punctuated by plaques of morbid poetry and pictures of churches and skulls drawn with skulls among the other bones. I wasn't sure how to react, but I definitely did not want to smile. (See the picture- those are real people's skulls behind me. As my mom pointed out, it looks like a Rembrant painting with the light.) It was so nice to have my mom and brother here; it was a little strange to be taking care of the family, but I was glad to know that the role worked out.

My host family welcomed me in for their reveillon, or Christmas Eve dinner. I was a little confused about whether I was supposed to be there for dinner or not, so I hung out with Mom and Eli until 11 PM, when I thought they'd be finished, and then came back. Instead, they invited me to have some of the chocolate buche de Noel that they got from Laduree, the famous dessert maker. Then we exchanged presents under the tree; they gave me some chocolates, a necklace, and a Tintin comic book, "Tintin aux Ameriques". The book presents the US as a wild, untamed place populated mainly by Chicago gangsters and les peaux-rouges who live in Redskincity. Given the classic popularity of the series, it's interesting to see how that stereotype is played out. Camille, the Guichards' oldest daughter who lives in Berlin, and her father (Sophie's first husband) and his boyfriend were also there. Some time after Sophie and her first husband had Camille, he came out of the closet and the two got divorced, but he and his boyfriend still are close to Sophie and Jean-Marie, Sophie's second husband. In the picture, from left to right: the first husband's boyfriend, Paul my host brother, the first husband, Camille, Adele, Sophie, and me. Jean-Marie was taking the picture. Paul, who's taking a break from university this year, has decided to try his luck working in London for the rest of the school year. He's moving there in two weeks with a friend, and plans to look for a job and an apartment once he gets there. I'll miss him.

Then I went home for a week. I'm so glad that I was able to go back; being away from everyone for nine months would have been very lonely, and might have weakened the friendships that are so important to me. Given the length of time, I ran around a fair bit, having doctor's appointments, visiting Winsor, and seeing friends and family. It was interesting to see how things had subtly changed. It was nice to be back, but I missed the independence and the right to determine my life for myself. I also realized how much I depend on my friends and family to back me up, and that's why I've been feeling lonely here (which is dissipating as I spend more time with friends here). I had been worrying that people would have moved on a lot in my absence, but to my relief, although some things had changed, I'm still friends with my old friends and it's going to be ok. We had a Winsor reunion at Fire and Ice in Harvard Square, where I got up to date on people from my class's college experiences. It was a little strange having so little in common to talk about, so I mainly gathered information and told a couple of stock stories about Paris. I went to two parties, got back in touch with my hometowns of Brookline and Boston (especially for First Night), and visited Megan and Weslie at Harvard, which got me excited again for next year. The pictures are: my cousin Rachel and her daughter Ellie at her second daughter Jessica's naming ceremony; friends at Emma's house after the Winsor '06 reunion; and the W'06 reunion.