Français... c'est trop compliqué

So I know I haven't updated in a while. In all honesty there hasn't really been a lot to report. The beginning of this past week I was bogged down with math homework. It was interesting how I kept telling myself I'd do it but I kept on winding up somewhere downtown which then made it all pile up over the week. Oh well, I like complexity theory just as much as the next guy...

There were a few interesting things that happened over this past week. On tuesday, for example, I went to go tutor a French girl in introductory calculus. It was very interesting learning how to say things like "2 times 3" or "x to the fourth power" in french. More than that, though, was the dynamic of actually seeing the way that French kids worked. The entire university for first and second year was encompassed in one building. Then the top story was a library, half of which we were allowed to talk in. French kids talk so fast it's ridiculous, though. I was pretty sure that people noticed the fact that I wasn't French very quickly. They do that everywhere, but it was nice of this girl to just put up with it. She was very smart, and she got the hang of the whole integral thing really quickly even despite my french abuse. I don't know if she enjoyed herself though, because she hasn't responded to my e-mail and I think she has a weekly homework due again. Oh well....

On Thursday we had conversation again in which we went to some dismal part of town that had a few cozy cafés, but was otherwise dirty and somewhat run down. After sitting in a café where the owners very clearly realized that we were American, there was a point at which our conversation leader seemed like she wanted to leave pretty badly. I'm not sure if the two events were connected or not, but it seemed like the guys that owned the café were kind of mean to all of the girls in our group. I wasn't too happy about that.

We went home that night fairly early because we had to get up the next day. Unfortunately what happened was that I slept too well and ended up completely missing my alarm. Actually, my alarm seemed to have been set for 6:30 PM instead of AM, so I ended up coming back to a ridiculously loud room. What I was coming back from, however, was the Chateaux de la Loire, a huge castle that was built over a few centuries. There were a lot of interesting things that happened there including the assassination of one of the Henry's. I don't really remember much of the specifics. There was a pretty cool terrace where you could stand and overlook a large part of the town right next to the water. It was nice with all of the red roofed village houses all of them with antennas. Paul and I were able to convince one of the girls with us that the antennas were actually early 17th century pigeon catchers. During that time when the peasants weren't able to get bread and cheese as easily they had to survive somehow, and they decided to make it via the pigeons of France. It was pretty funny.

Before that chateaux we went to a different chateaux (I know...) called Chambord which was Louis the XIV's hunting lodge, so you can imagine how huge it was. There were paintings on the wall of flamboyant ol' Louis standing on top of a boar which I can only imagine he didn't actually kill himself. The coolest thing by far was the architecture on the outside. There were gargoyles and staircases that were very ornate and crowned by domes and whatnot. I could see myself living there if I was King. There were two things that I found particularly interesting. First was the fact that the beds were about 5 feet long. I can't imagine that it was actually comfortable to live in them, but hey, they were kings. Second, there was a playground about four feet away from the castle that was arguably about as exciting as the castle itself. I know, I know... you're all invited to my 6th birthday next week.

Then yesterday after visiting the Sacré Coeur at Montmarte,  we got ready to go to a party at one of the Maisons of the Cité. The dynamics of this party were very very confusing. There was nothing short of 6 different languages that I heard within 10 minutes and choosing which to use was infinitely difficult (considering I only knew 1.5 of them) Bad French got me only so far, and it was no surprise that the majority of the attractive women at that party were in fact French. Unfortunately you can only imagine what kind of competition I have when I try to speak to people in French when there are equally attractive French men who are able to pwn me in everything related to smoothness. Oh well, c'est la vie.

Back to Math homework. By the way, if anyone can successfully install and run a sample application of  Crystal Space on a Mac running OS/X 10.5, please send me an e-mail.

A bientot.

-Pavel

Cliché

Hello, everyone. I know, it's saturday night and I'm staying in doing homework because I'm cool, but I'll have you know that I haven't just been idly letting the wonders of the city slip through my fingers. Oh no!

First of all, Thursday evening was the first time that my group met up at a cafe in the gayer (literally more homosexual) part of town to chat and have a few drinks. It was interesting to learn a bunch about the french colloquialisms that I'm sure we also have in English but never really realize we're using. It becomes apparent when we need to translate phrases like "to run into" someone, but overall our discussion friend/leader/person was very nice about the whole procedure. On top of speaking french for a good two hours without having anyone resort to anglais, I found a new beer that's absolutely fantastic. I don't know if it exists in the US, but if anyone finds a beer that goes by the name Adelscott, please don't hesitate to tell me where so that I can buy it by the barrel. Other than this wonderful discovery, the consequent adventure into boys town really required me to stick close to the two other girls in my group. We actually walked down a block where out of about 200 people I counted about three women.

After realizing that we probably weren't going to find anything that we wanted there we decided to venture over to the Eiffel Tower just to walk around and absorb the city. After somewhat orienting ourselves in the right direction from boys town we came across a street that caught me pleasantly by surprise. If any of you have seen that M&M's commercial it was a very "He does exist!" moment. In order to satiate our hunger, on the way to the tower we found a few sandwiches that only cost us 4€ each, which is pretty good for France, so we got our dinner along the way. If any of you have ever been to France you'll know that the Eiffel Tower is simply magnificent although taking pictures of things that emit light at night without a tripod is somewhat difficult, so you'll have to bear with me. Another thing that I didn't know is that every hour the tower decides to sparkle with a bunch of camera-flash-esque bulbs that go off at once. It makes for a fireworks show every hour without all the smoke and annoying things. Apparently that's where people go to propose to their girlfriends, and I don't blame them, it's very pretty. We ended up just sitting at a bench with a bottle of wine chilling and wondering how we ended up under la tour d'eiffel. 

The following day after getting a disorienting 13 hours of sleep, I met up with one of my new friends Paul (who's super cool by the way) to go downtown and check out one of the jazz clubs close to an area in the Latin Quarter. There was a great band that we weren't really able to see very well because of the venue was packed tighter than calories in a Big Mac. We got there before the band actually started playing, but since they wouldn't let us down to the music area we decided to go walk around a bit and come back, but by the time we came back it was full. Go figure. There were some interesting rules, however, and overall it was a good experience. Not only that but the neighborhood that we got to walk around had a lot of street vendors and general night life which made it pleasant to walk around in. Not to mention we got to watch a group of street performers do some ridiculous break dancing. The group of 5 policemen watching made it kind of disconcerting though...

Today (that's saturday if you're keeping track), Paul and I went to go see the Musée d'Orsay. I'd already been, but I didn't mind going again since this time we were able to get in for free since I changed my major to something that appeases the government of France. Along with that I got to find that painting that I liked but forgot the name of. It turns out it's Vitrine - Rue de Sévigné (2005) Impression jet d'encre sur toile by Bertrand Lavier. It looked like something that I could make myself... basically just white paint smeared interestingly over a black canvas, but there was something about it that just struck me as really cool. I don't really know what...

Anyway, after a while we realized that we were kind of hungry so since the café in the museum was closed (bastards) we couldn't buy the famous chocolate waffle. Instead we went downtown to walk around and look at the local shops and restaurants ultimately finding a pizzeria where I was at long last reunited with my lost love: the Pizza Regina. It was every bit as wonderful as I remembered and the house wine was also cheap (6€ for 50 cl) and pretty quality. As the day turned out to be a lot nicer that evening than it did at its onset we decided to walk the rest of the way home, which only took us about an hour. It's ridiculous how large the city is since it takes a good amount of time to walk from one part to the other even though the entire city is lined with cafés and boulangeries and everything you could ever need. I bought myself a baguette on the way home and it's proven to be a great investment overall.

Now the rest of the weekend I will be punished by my procrastination over the past week. =(

A bientot.

-Pavel

Rogue Vinophile

Yesterday night I got to be a tourist for a second time, this time scaling l'arc de triomphe which has one of the most spectacular views I've ever seen. Unfortunately my camera's battery wasn't charged again so there isn't really any documented evidence, but we got there just as the sun was setting, so we were able to see most of the metropolis switch from daylight to nighttime. The best part, I must say, was watching the eiffel tower light up in the not so distant distance, creating a perfect parisian landscape. There was something picturesque about the whole thing... I felt like I was in some sort of postcard moment, and maybe I was. Who knows?

Today started out in a state of panic. The last few days I thought I was doing alright with the whole jet lag thing, but it turned out that I'm over it now... nice and acclimated. The problem was that I went to bed at a reasonable time (12:30) and set my alarm for a different reasonable time (7:30) but ended up waking up when class starts (9:30), so the morning scramble was a little hectic. I had to make quick decisions as to what to do in the morning while minimizing the impact of the 45 minute commute to class. Needless to say, I got to lecture not disheveled and very noticeably late out of my extremely large class of 5 people. Fortunately the teacher seemed OK with it after I apologized profusely, but my knowledge of the definition of randomness and bernoulli measure suffered significantly.

Afterwards I had a relatively uneventful french class in which we were assigned a significant amount of homework dealing with the explanation of differences between the educational systems of France and the US, but the really interesting part of my day was the wine and cheese tasting that I got to do but wasn't actually supposed to. As it turns out, the wine and cheese tasting for the math and astrophysics kids is tomorrow at 5:00 and I just kind of crashed the other programs' party. It was alright since not a lot of people showed up and there was extra wine/cheese, but I kinda felt bad after I realized that I wasn't actually supposed to be there.

The guy who was hosting the tasting had a strong french accent, and it was clear that he knew about as much english as we knew french, so it was really endearing to hear him explain the differences in wine, most of which I don't remember. Not only that, but both the wine and cheese selections were large and very good (5 of each). It was very cool to see what kind of wine went with what kind of cheese, and to learn the different ways to inspect wine to see if it was good. The first thing you're supposed to do is let it slosh against the side of the glass to see if any residue sticks. The French call this residue the "tears" of the wine, and that's what determines the sweetness. Apparently if there's more sugar, the alcohol binds to it better and creates a thicker wine which will stick to the sides of the glass more readily. The second method of testing is to smell the wine while sloshing it around to let the smell permeate and extrude from the simple sitting wine. This also makes it smell a lot stronger and better than usual. For someone like me, all wines were before this more or less the same. This time, however, there was a significant difference between the wines with just the smell even, which I was surprised to discover. The third and most important method of determining the quality of wine is to take a sip and then slosh it around in your mouth to get the taste out of it. Needless to say, all of the wines were French, and hence very good. I was very impressed and I realized why people drink wine when they want to be classy.

On top of the wine tasting, the guy who was teaching us how to find the quality of wine also owns a wine shop about a block away from the U of C Paris Center, and he said that he'd give us a 10% discount as U of C kids. Needless to say, he made 30 new customers that day and I myself found a new place to buy all my Pinot Noir.

Cheers.

-Pavel