Paris through pictures (with a bit of Italy too)

When I first got to Paris, I made a mistake and bought the incorrect subway ticket.  When I realized, I promptly went to the information desk to ask what to do, since I didn't see any ticket booths or machines around.  I explained my situation.  He plainly told me I was one of the "bad people" that ride the subways for free, and that there was nothing he could do for me, my only option was to stay in the train station forever.  Eventually, he gave me a ticket, but not before nearly making me cry.  The combination of waking up at five in the morning with independent travel with angry mean men is not my favorite.  However, after this incident, I made it to my first CouchSurfing host's neighborhood, went to a cafe.  This already made my day improve substantially. 

Next, I went to my first host.  She was incredibly welcoming and kind and had a very colorful kitchen that I took about a million pictures of. 

That night we went to Centre Georges Pompidou.  This is a picture from the restaurant at the top of it.

Also at Centre Pompidou, we went to a temporary exhibition on dance.  It was one of the best exhibitions I have ever been to.  Usually I don't love taking pictures at museums, but I took so many here.  I also went back a few days later to visit the permanent exhibition which was also really great. 

Another photo from the top of Centre Pompidou

Cool Parisian graffiti

Versailles 

On the last day I stayed with Julia, I went to a market with her and the older couple she is currently living with.  It was a really nice, colorful market with a lot of antiques and produce. 

(Of course)

More street art

Sainte Chapelle. So beautiful.

Love Padlocks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_padlocks

My third host, Giovanni, and some really delicious pizzas

Como, Italy

Pahriss, juhtayme!

I can't upload any pictures while I'm away, which is half the thrill (that I get) from this blog, but I just wanted to check in with everyone/anyone who would like to know whether I'm alive or not. It turns out that I am.  I had a very long day though, but also very nice, which started with the decision that I would not use any kind of public transportation and instead walk to everywhere I wanted to go.

Currently, I am staying with a CouchSurfer named Claire.  She told me that the best falafel in Paris was a place called L'As du Fallafel (The Ace of Falafel) so of course I went there, and it was delicious! They put eggplant on it! It was also in a very Jewish area of Paris, which was nice to visit.  I then walked to Notre Dame cathedral and Sainte Chapelle cathedral, which were both very very beautiful, and cool to see after learning about both of them in high school art history.  My last stop (by this time I was quite tired and my face felt like it was melting into my neck) was Musée d'Orsay, which had beautiful Impressionistic and Neo Impressionistic paintings (and other things but those were my favorite parts).

So, in addition to my various wanderings and getting losts, this was today's journey! I took the metro back though. Oops.

Both my big toes hurt.  I wasn't expecting this.

Also, I went to L'Orangerie yesterday and loved it so much.  Pictures weren't allowed though, so I feel ok posting this one in place of the photo I would have taken of it. 

It is magnificent

Enteric Unknown: Serratia marcescens

The title is what the computer automatically assumed I would be writing about when I typed the letter E.  I decided to let the computer control my future, at least for a couple of sentences. I miss Microbio. And science in general.  Good thing I'm taking Chemistry 1, 2, and Pathophysiology this summer. 

My ticket came today!  I'm seeing The Shins!  In Berlin!  At the end of March!  I am so excited.

But apparently not as excited as I was here...

 

I miss my roommate

Learning new things: ü! ö! ä!

At least once a day, somewhere close to my apartment, there is a man that screams in (what sounds like) agony several times.  I have no idea what to do about this, but it disturbs me every time.  I’ve talked to other people that live in my building and no one can hear it but me (and the people who are in my apartment at the time of the screaming.  I have received confirmation, I am not imagining it).

On another note, midterms are this week and it’s been a little weird/difficult trying to remember how to effectively do work.  At least I didn’t go to Amsterdam this weekend, which seemed to be the brilliant idea of several people on my program.  So, instead of studying I’ve been cooking (or more accurately watching a friend cook) orange chicken and having lengthy conversations about tea infused chocolate, homemade truffles, berry picking, Surrealism, and the very realistic prediction that we’re all going to go home obese.  But alas, I can do nothing about Gunter, the friendly German kiosk owner, practically forcing me to buy chocolate croissants from him way too often.  Also, I am very passively working off the tremendous amount of food my parents insisted on feeding me on their wonderful visit here.  Good thing I ate all the leftovers so they wouldn’t be around to tempt me anymore.

Getting caffeinated with Mutter und Vater at KaDeWe

 Yummy pizza in Mitte-- I obviously dressed to hide the expected sauce stains

Exploring the very weird world of German sushi

On a less food related note, I went to the Jüdisches Museum this week, partly because I had to write a paper on its architecture that was due the next day but mostly because I’ve been meaning to go there since I arrived.  The architecture actually turned out to be my favorite part of the museum, and I don’t mean that in the same way I meant it about the Neues Museum.  In this museum, the architecture was actually a really effective part of the exhibit, and explanations from the architect Daniel Liebskind are placed around the museum to ensure that some message is getting across, though it was repeatedly stated that the structures were open to a variety of interpretations.  It really inspired some powerful feelings, though they were kind of unclear to identify.

Jüdisches Museum

An excerpt from my essay:

One component of the layout of the museum that strike me as both unique and meaningful are the empty spaces that Daniel Liebskind incorporated into the structure.  In a museum with such great depth and gravity, it’s important for one to have sporadic moments to reflect upon the information that they have just seen, and being surrounded by tall walls solemnly decorated with the absence of information promotes the digestion of everything the museum is trying to impart.

And from another part of my essay…

The sizeable area dedicated to a minority specifically persecuted in Germany’s past is also very important to me.  This structure is not a small, insignificant looking building tucked away in a hardly visible location.  It is a grand, noticeable structure that is impossible to ignore.  Just looking at the shiny zinc exterior inspires a feeling of significance, and demonstrates the fact that Germany is no longer a country of maltreatment and discrimination of the Jews.  The stairs leading into a wall invoke the same message, that the Jüdisches Museum is unfinished, and that just because the exhibition has ended does not mean that the Jewish people are solely a part of history, but rather will have a future in Germany.  Seeing the impressive effort that has been dedicated to building a Jewish museum in Germany signifies the accepting and cosmopolitan city that Berlin has become over the past decades. 

Also this week my German teacher invited my class to join her and some of her friends to go on a Kneipentour! We also learned the word Kneipentour.

Zwiebel

In response the beautiful weather Berlin has been experiencing lately, I've learned to wear every article of clothing I own simultaneously.

Me

I may as well start a food blog...

To display my shockingly edgy culinary inventions:

As it gets colder, the supermarket seems to move farther and farther away from my apartment, and I continuously hear the carbohydrate gods whispering to me that it is indeed okay for me to make pasta once again.  But after consuming a craftily prepared meal of dry muesli in a cup, I’ve realized that it is once again time to make the ten minute voyage to the store.  I’ve made grilled cheese, pasta, grilled vegetables, and yogurt/muesli/banana a number of times… so if anyone has culinary advice for quasi-chefs with limited ingredients, feel free to let me know. 

Yesterday I went to an English comedy night, an event made popular by the Couchsurfing community… I actually think pretty much all the people there were Couchsurfers.  It was really interesting talking to the people there about their successful Couchsurfing experiences and realizing that not all couch offerers are killers of children, but in fact great nice people.  The comedy show was also one of the strangest, yet entertaining things I’ve seen in a while.  There were a few regular comedians, all very funny, and then there was a puppeteer with beautifully handmade puppets, though with a skit that hardly made sense (he was the only German performer, yet did his skit in an attempt at English).  Summary: two people with huge noses are looking for each other, hit their noses on the table constantly, can’t find each other, two piles of poop are introduced to the stage, one gets killed by a foot, the other comes alive, but is also eventually killed by a foot, even after stealthily escaping the evil plastic bag.  It was interesting.

There was one man who accurately played famous compositions by slightly opening his mouth while strategically tapping his cheeks, which was pretty impressive.  He also did a series of mostly wordless skits.  I wish I could accurately act them out, they were really really funny. 

Lastly, there was a surprise performance.  A pink onesie with a completely zipped up hood was lead to the stage where it crawled on and awkwardly danced around a bit after taping large eyeballs to its face area.  After a bit, the onesie unzipped itself to reveal a very unexpected belly dancer underneath.  Also, interesting.

After the performance I spoke to some of the comedians and some of the audience members.  While talking to the comedians, the difference in personality between the regular monologue comedians and the guy who did the funny/creative skits was quite obvious.  While the comedian could not turn off entertainer mindset, the skit dude seemed more reserved and capable of having a serious conversation.  It was cool to see both of their attempts at interacting offstage and how similar their real personalities are to the ones they try to professionally portray.

After the show, the next stop was an all night showing of the first season of Twin Peaks.  Even though I slept through nearly the entire episode after realizing that it is not the kind of show you can watch from the middle and understand what is going on, it was cool to be in this strange bar with all the Twin Peaks fanatics committed to staying there till 8 in the morning.  However, we left after one episode.

To do: brush up on cartography skills

I studied Googlemaps, made my own map (which I later realized lacked many essential street names), committed names to memory.  I was ready.  But I wasn’t.  After walking for twenty minutes in an area in which the only stores I passed were an occasional grocery store and one church, I decided that it was time to take a gander at a bus stop map.  It was then that I realized I was not in fact heading towards that place where those two streets crossed and became that other street.  Nope, I was walking towards that parky area instead.  After comforting myself with the fact that I was at least capable of finding the right street (for the direction was easy to correct!) I headed back the way I came, shamefully passed the Merlitzer Platz U-bahn station I recently exited from, and continued walking down Oranienstrasse.   Earlier I had asked my German teacher if she knew of any art supply stores I could go to to procure a paintbrush for my amateur artistic masterpieces (not really) and she knew of two in Kreuzberg, an area I previously believed I was somewhat familiar with (“previously” implying this morning.  I have since shed that belief).  I walked this new direction, feeling pretty good about it.  There were people and stores and restaurants, which are all good signs for potential art supplying locations, I think.  After walking for a while, I realized that I had probably passed the art store I had located on a map earlier that day.  So I asked for directions, found out there were two stores in the area, went to both of them, they were closed.  At least that’s what I inferred from the locked doors and a German sign I could not come close to comprehending.  But the trip was not a failure! I went to a nearby bookstore and got two German children’s books, though it was a hard decision since the artwork in many of them was so beautiful, and I had little else to base my decision off of.  One of the books I bought was “Die kleine Raupe Nimmerstatt” or “The Very Hungry Caterpiller”.  It is tiny and adorable and German.  I also found a nut bar (I ordered in German!), some cool clothing shops, and a lot of cafes with wonderful seeming atmospheres.  After my series of failures (garnished with a few successes) it was time to meet my new Freie Universitat German buddy.  It was a great meeting and she seems like a very interesting girl, even though she laughed whenever I said a single word in German (she claimed that she liked how it sounded and it had nothing to do with my complete mispronunciations). 

Some day some how I will find a paintbrush, but as for now I have some delicious wasabi peanuts and Eric Carle’s greatest hit, so I can’t complain.