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!