Nothing Works in Europe. But Actually.

So I don't want you to think by the title of this post that I'm terribly frustrated with Paris or anything or dislike it, but a love story with Paris is extremely complicated, and I think that now I've passed the "honeymoon stage", as they say, all the little quirks (and glaring faults) I had overlooked in the excitement of discovery are now becoming very apparent. For instance, how nothing in the university system is online. Literally. Professors/departments almost never email students, and it's very difficult to track down useful information like what room your class is in, if not impossible. Basically, the French universities still rely on the poster system. Need to know where your class is? You have to show up an hour early the day of and pace up and down the halls trying to find the poster that tells you the room number. That is if they've put it up yet. And none of the rooms are equipped for projection to do PowerPoints or anything "fancy" like that. Maybe this is a way of "living simply" or something, but to me it just seems like a way to waste more time. I have been told, however, that fads/technology/fashion trends that come out in the U.S. tend to take about 10-15 years to make it over to France. So since "we" invented the internet, maybe that's why. And also why they don't have Hulu or Netflix or Pandora. The poor souls. And then there's the restaurants. On a Friday night, you'd think cafes would stay open just a bit later, right? Not always the case. It seems like everyone wants to go out, even the storekeepers, so they just close up shop. But then I don't understand where they go. It's sort of like wondering where chefs go out to eat when their shift is over. And then there's the notebooks. I can't seem to find normal looseleaf paper here. It's impossible. The French kind has about a bazillion tiny blue and green lines zig-zagging all over it, which makes it really hard to read. But then when another Tufts student finally did find some "normal" paper, we realized it was too big for our folders. Because French paper is just a tiny bit smaller. All I have to say is: Why?. But then what really killed me was when I went to a Mexican restaurant and tried to order a brownie. On the menu it was spelled the same way, so I asked my question in French my pronounced "brownie" with my American accent, assuming the word had transferred. The waitress asked me to repeat myself. I said it louder. She gave me a blank stare for about 5 seconds, stared at the menu, and then said "Oooh, a 'broooneee'." Now, I understand that this is a foreign word, and the sounds may be difficult to pronounce, I don't feel that I should be made to feel foolish when it's an American word! We invented it, for goodness sake!  But I'll stop complaining now. I don't want to sound too harsh, I find most of these events comically frustrating as opposed to actually upsetting. Just needed to rant a bit. I'll tell in pictures now about what I've been doing lately.

This was last weekend, during the end of fashion week. My friends and I got lunch at these food stands at the Place de la Concorde and then went to the Tuileries Gardens to watch the designers/models/bloggers/important fashion-y people walk back from whatever show they were at. It was crazy. There were street style photographers and paparazzi all over the place. 

A giant pot of cheese. Typical France.

My lunch. A chocolate covered waffle and Nutella and banana crepe. I love my life.

This was at the Paris vu par Hollywood (Paris viewed by Hollywood) exhibit at Hotel de Ville. These are some of the clothes worn by Audrey Hepburn in one of the movies she is in that is set in Paris. Sorry I can't be more specific. 

This is one of the storyboards used for the movie "Midnight in Paris"

This is me, chillin' in a lounge chair by the Seine. 

This is the Centre Pompidou, a library and cultural center near the Marais. I studied for a bit there on Sunday, but it's always super crowded and awkward because there are not really individual cubicles, just long tables with chairs, so you have to sit really close to strangers, which I'm not a fan of. Plus I think the guy next to me had pneumonia or something. Anyway, afterwards I got some really good shwarma and sat out here and watched the performance artists and painters do their thing.

On Tuesday afternoon (my birthday) I went with another Tufts students to a really great chocolate shop near Montparnasse. It was amazing there. For the hunting season they make huge chocolate covered pheasants and dogs, and then just normally they have all sorts of other crazy-intricate sculptures and such. I just got this little thing, which is a dense, nutty chocolate cream covered in dark chocolate with some crunchy bits thrown in. It's called a rocher. I think that's what Ferrero Rocher chocolates in the states are supposed to be like.

This was the plate of seafood my host family made me for my birthday. There are oysters, sea snails, big shrimp and little shrimp. It was all delicious.

This was my birthday cake. They even put a candle in it for me, which was really sweet, but then it fell over.

This the Sainte Chapelle, where we had our art history class on Friday. It's a church from the middle ages with stunning stained glass windows, with hundreds of panels that tell the entire story of the Bible entirely in pictures, as at the time almost everyone was illiterate. The fancy shrine thing you see in the picture was built by a king to house what they believed to be the crown of thorns of Jesus, brought back from the Crusades.

This huge circular window is the one depicting the Apocalypse.

This is at the Palais de Justice, and is the room in which Marie Antoinette was kept after she was pronounced guilty by the revolutionary tribunal and before she was beheaded. Her husband Louis XVI was not kept at this location, and was beheaded several months before she was. 

This is a recreation of her prison cell (the woman sitting in the chair is not real), as her original room is now a small chapel. Apparently she was under constant watch by guards, and was extremely sick and miserable towards the end, as one might imagine. I have to say, though, I will forever imagine her as looking like Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola movie "Marie Antoinette."

Some macarons at another chocolate shop in Paris, in the Latin Quarter. They are not like American macaroons, but rather a really sweet, melt in your mouth cream filled cookie that comes in every flavor under the sun, from chocolate to pistachio to lavender. You can even get them at McDonald's here. It's on the Dollar Menu.

An example of some hunting themed chocolate confections. 

This is the Great Mosque of Paris, built in the 1920s. We visited on a Friday, which is a prayer day so we couldn't actually go inside, but the outside is amazing, and the place is huge. There's several markets, cafes, cultural centers and classrooms in one entire compound. It's like its own little village.

This is me at one of the cafes in the mosque compound, drinking delicious mint tea You can also smoke hookah there. It really feels like you are in Tunisia or Morocco or something when you are there. The French have a word for that, called dépaysement, which has no English translation but means the disorienting feeling of being in a place other than the one you are in. Pretty cool.

This is a photo of Le Lapin Agile, a neat little cabaret bar tucked into the side of a hill in Montmartre, near Sacre Coeur. I went here on Friday night, and I highly recommend it. The owners are amazingly friendly, and the atmosphere is very cozy and really French. Apparently this is one of the last vestiges of the traditional French cabaret, (think Edith Piaf). They sing only traditional French "chansons" and original compositions of that style, and there is lots of accordion playing. 

These are French profiteroles, a sort of gigantic cream puff filled with vanilla ice cream, then drowned in warm chocolate sauce and sprinkled with slivered almonds. These are also what they make traditional French wedding cakes out of. The just stack them up into a sort of conical pyramid, drizzle them with chocolate and caramel so it sticks together, and call it a day. Brilliant.