Scurvy...duh...

Did you know that pirates used to eat lemons and limes while at sea to prevent scurvy?

In following that train of thought (not really), I just ate four French peaches to help achieve my goal of avoiding all French/Western European diseases (none of which spring to mind at this moment, except Mad Cow). And let me tell you, those peaches were delicious! Seriously, it was like I was sitting on a farm in Georgia, the peaches were that good. They were at just the right level of tenderness and I think I ate all four of them in approximately six minutes.

I had some peach ice cream last week that was phenomenal. There is a brand of French ice cream, Berthillon, which is so good that I actively think about it all the time, and their peach ice cream is incredible. I have also had their banana, nougat, vanilla and caramel ice cream as well, and all are fantastic.

In Spanish, Caramel is Dulce de Leche. The best cake that I've ever had was in Guatemala City, and it was tres leches cake, with dulce de leche ice cream, technically making it quatro leches because of the milk in the icing. Seriously, this cake was great, if I remember correctly, I ate my slice and my neighbor's slice as well.

In the house I grew up in, we had a neighbor who bought a $10,000 cat which was part ocelot (Fun Fact: ocelots are my favorite jungle cat. They are both striped and spotted!) that one day escaped. It was roaming the wilderness of the Houston suburbs, probably terrorizing the local dogs for a couple of weeks before anyone had an encounter with it. One day, my dad came home and told us that he had seen a mountain lion in our neighbor's ditch. We told him that it was probably the missing part-ocelot-cat, but he refuses to believe that and to this day he swears that he saw a mountain lion.

That was just a little free association. Apparently I'm hungry and I would like to go to the zoo.

Paris By The Numbers

Number of:

People in Paris: 12 million
Arrondissements: 20
Islands in the Seine: 2
Museums in Paris: more than 70
Hours I spend in class a day: 5
Stairs I have to climb to get to class: 136
Elevators in the building: 0
Subway lines I take to get to class: 2
Cute boys I made eye contact with this morning on the train: 4.5
Creepy men I made eye contact with this morning on the train: 198
Blow Pops that I have left from the stash I brought with me from America: 5
Green Apple ones (dislike): 4
Crepes I had this week: 2
Times I visited Shakespeare & Company this week: 4
Books I've read while in Paris: 8
Tex-Mex cravings today: 8
Times I've been homesick: 1
Pounds my suitcases weighed combined pre-Paris purchases: 84.5

I Love British Airways

This past weekend I went to visit one of my good friends from high school, Theresa Valach, in London. I flew from Charles de Gaulle to Heathrow on British Air Friday night, and the events of my flight are as follows:
4:50PM: We board the plane, a good thirty minutes after we were supposed to
5:17: I fall asleep in my window seat
5:20: The plane takes off
5:30: The drink/snack cart passes my row
5:32: I wake up
5:33 - 5:50: I mentally debate whether or not I want a ginger ale badly enough to make the two people between me and the aisle stand up and move, sit back down, and then stand up again when I come back with my ginger ale and a bag of assorted pretzels and crackers.
5:51: I decide to call over another flight attendant to ask for my ginger ale
5:51 and 5 seconds: The pilot tells us to put our seats and tray tables up because we will be landing in Heathrow in approximately seven minutes.

Once I got through border patrol and customs (very efficient at Heathrow, I was very impressed) I took the tube to Covent Garden where I met Theresa and her boyfriend Matt. We went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant that was actually pretty good, but we spent most of it reminiscing about Houston Tex Mex restaurants. We also spent a portion of our night at Los Locos, a bar with a very lively dance floor, complete with a troupe of men who all knew the same dance moves which Matt and Theresa and I tried (rather unsuccessfully) to copy and execute.
Saturday we spent in Windsor, and then Saturday night we ate at Maze, one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants, and it was definitely in my top 5 favorite meals of all time. Sunday morning we went to Westminster Abbey for church (free admission!) and then we met up with Tyler Carlson to have high tea at Kensington Palace.
I was running a bit late trying to make my flight back to Paris, but I did make it just in time, and my flight home went like this:

5:00PM: Flight was supposed to leave now, we haven't boarded yet
5:15: We board the plane
5:20: I take my seat in the very last row of the plane
5:22: I fall asleep
5:30: The plane takes off
5:55: I wake up, the drink cart is still a good ten rows in front of me (Success!)
6:03: The pilot announces that we are descending into Charles de Gaulle in six minutes and to put our seats and tray tables in the upright positions. The drink cart packs up and heads back to the back, without having served the last three rows.

Moral of the story: bring your own snacks for planes, it will be far less stressful.

Happy Pre-Bastille Day

So, the internet in my dorm isn`t working at the moment, and this post is the best that I can do for now with a French keyboard.
A few days ago, I attended a curious phenomenon called the "Paris Kiss Party." This festival was a gathering of young and old in a Parisian park with an incredible DJ (Pony Pony Run Run), and apparently the purpose of this festival was to celebrate the kiss. Attendees were encouraged by a very enthusiastic MC to kiss their significant others, their friends, and even random strangers, and, for even more excitement, everyone was given free balloons, stickers and t-shirts. The kiss festival is going on tour to Berlin, Madrid, and London later this summer, and if it sounds as if I've made this up (it kind of does) they have a great website that you can check out:

http://www.desigualkisstour.com/

It was such a surreal experience to see thousands of people making out with each other in a field, but then again, this is Europe. I got three t-shirts, and if you are nice to me when I get back, maybe you can have one.
And don't fret, there were plenty of ambulances on hand just in case anyone suffered from, um, exhaustion.

This is how I feel in France

Vocab

Things I need to learn how to say in French:

ice
changing room
speak slowly, please
can we stop walking? i can't feel my toes
i've broken the language lab machine...again...
i can't afford lunch, i've spent all my money on shoes

Georgia

So, my mom came to Paris for the first week of my stay here to “move me in” which I’m sure means that she just wanted to go to Paris for a week. We had several adventures, one of which I will recount for you, and I’m going to miss her over the next few weeks.

One day, we decided to go to Versailles, and after we got on the wrong train and just barely made it off before the doors closed we spent a lovely sixty minutes on an un-air-conditioned train with pleather seats and very loud American teenage tourists with some questionable chaperones. It was a gorgeous day, and the castle was fantastic. If you have made it your mission in life to see every Bernini in person, like myself, Versailles has tons of them, including a fantastic bust of Louis XIV. The Hall of Mirrors was also incredible, as was Marie Antoinette’s secret exit chamber where she escaped the revolutionaries. But my favorite part, by far, was the gardens. The French have a compulsive need to sculpt nature into neat little rows and squares, and consequently these gardens are unbelievable amazing. As we are tourists, my mom and I decided to rent a golf cart to drive through the gardens. The golf cart played us some very enjoyable and authentic French Baroque music (as we were told by the golf cart), and we stopped on our little tour of the gardens to buy ice cream from a very pleasant man with a little cart. I got melon ice cream and it was one of the most refreshing things I have ever consumed. My mom got pineapple and it was equally as delicious, and I encourage everyone to go find this man and buy lots of his ice cream.
As we were continuing on our tour of the gardens, we accidentally made a few wrong turns, and we ended up picking up two hitchhikers who flagged us down and asked us for a ride back to the chateau because they were tied of walking. They turned out to be the aunt and the grandmother of a girl who goes to UVa, which was very serendipitous, and really cool. When we got back to the train station, we sat on our train for a good twenty minutes in very close quarters with some Italian tourists, and then, in French, the train conductor told us that the train wouldn’t be running and that we needed to go to another train station to get back to Paris. So, we followed our fellow passengers, running through Versailles to get to the station on the other side of town. During our frantic run (seriously, just picture it), the heavens opened up and started pouring down rain on all 400 of us headed to the other station. So we arrived at the other Versailles station soaking wet and throwing ourselves onto a train that was about to leave for Paris. When we got back to Paris neither my mom nor I had thought to bring an umbrella or a rain coat, so we proceeded to walk through the rain, once again, and when we got home we were thoroughly soaked. At the beginning of the day I was wearing a cotton, light weight, light pink dress, and at the end of our Versailles trip it was red and so heavy with water as to be very unwieldy.

I can only hope that the rest of my trip will be this exciting, but not as damp.

First Full Parisian Day

Day two of The City of Lights – and it gets better every minute. I love this city. I love the juxtaposition of the old and glamorous and ornate with the slightly seedy and modern graffiti and all smothered with that air of unmistakable frenchness. I like that people are out and about here, that you can be surrounded by swarms of people on the street and on the train and also spend a few hours looking out your window at the Fondation des Etats Unis of the City University de Paris completely alone and fantastically happy.

Despite the reputation of Paris for consistently being on the cutting edge of fashion, there are a few trends that I have encountered over the past two days that, frankly, baffle and unsettle me.

Trend 1: The Man Purse.

Seriously guys, this is a horrible idea. Seeing men all over this city with the same messenger-bag style purse as I have is deeply, deeply disconcerting. I mean, all of their shorts clearly have an abundance of cargo pockets, can’t they just put their stuff in there?

Trend 2: Razor scooters.

I honestly haven’t ridden a Razor since maybe the seventh grade, and I am sensationally jealous of the myriad of people that I have seen riding them all over this city. Seriously, men, women and children alike are all scooting it up around this city, much to my surprise. I am so confused as to why they are so popular, but most of the time (especially when my feet are hurting from hours and hours of walking) I really wish that I had one too.

Trend 3: Public Displays of Affection.

If I see another couple very obviously in love and shouting it to the world by holding hands and spontaneously making out and giggling incessantly I’m most likely going to vomit that banane et nutella crepe that I had for lunch all over the Champs Elysees. Again, this deep-seated dislike of those in love in the most romantic city in the world stems from jealousy very much like that of the Razor scooters.

I’m going to stare out my window a bit more until the sun goes down while listening to Furr (works cited: Bob and Patrick) for the billionth time. And, in case you skipped the first paragraph (I don’t blame you, it was my first feeble attempt at blogging, after all), I LOVE this city.

A Brief Explanation

I honestly never thought that have a blog, so feel free to judge me to your heart's content, I certainly am. I honestly think that I have nothing worth saying that somebody hasn't already said in what is certainly a much better format and tremendously more eloquent to boot. But, as I am having a FANTASTIC time in Paris, I feel the need to brag about it incessantly, and so here I am, pushing my experiences on an audience who probably has better things to do. Also, if the world doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012, I'd like to have something to show my kids as proof that their hip, successful and attractive mother was once adventurous and somewhat witty.

So, enjoy my adventures in Paris and thanks for reading!
Au revoir,
Alexis