Day 9 – À bout de souffle, The Artist

WARNING: No pictures today.  Sorry…

 

Oh, you’re still reading?!  Alright – we got to sleep in today until crash-course French just before noon.  These classes are good, but I wish we had more of them.  It’s a good chance for us to listen to French (and understand it for the most part) and also learn some new vocabulary.  Memorization and I don’t get along, but at least seeing these vocab words helps out in Paris.  Then again, most people here understand English or you can at least get by with pointing at things and looking confused.  Anyway, we had just under an hour for lunch, so a few of us stopped over at McDonald’s for a McBaguette.  Good news – it was terrible, so I won’t be going back there on this trip!

In class today we watched À bout de souffle (Breathless).  I’d give it a 1 out of 2, unless you enjoy art cinema.  I’m all about the Hollywood-style fiction narratives, though.  After class we went to a nearby movie theater and saw The Artist.  This got a 2 out of 2 from me, especially as a film student, because it was about the progression of film from silent to sound and they played around with that aspect a bit to make it more of a modern-esque film while still told in a more-or-less classical style.

After that movie we headed over to the Latin district for dinner and walked around a bit there.  Overall, today felt pretty school-like 😦 but we were bound to have one of those days over here eventually.

Day 5 – Seine tour, Tuileries Garden, unreleased movie!

Last night we went out to bars for the first time here.  It wasn’t anything super different from home, except we were definitely the loudest (and usually biggest) group out.  I’ve actually noticed that we tend to be the loudest anywhere we go – partially because we’re a large group of college students, partially because we’re American.  It really is surprising how quiet and peaceful the city streets tend to be (but definitely not the Metros…).  Anyway, nothing else really about the night – pretty typical – but this morning we had a boat tour on the Seine through the heart of Paris, so here’s another picture of the Eiffel Tower, possibly my favorite so far (very very slight thanks to Photoshop)!

Cool, right?!  Right.  Another cool thing is the flame statue in Paris.  If you don’t know (like me, no worries) Paris has an exact replica of the flame that the Statue of Liberty has, further strengthening the bond between the two countries.  Apparently a lot of people incorrectly think that the flame is a tribute to one of their queens.

Here’s just a general view from the river.

This is a train station turned science museum, which I will definitely try to go to in the next 3 weeks.

Then they showed us a few more touristy places like the smallest house in Paris (the window in the middle) and the restaurant that Ratatouille was based off of.

After the boat tour we headed over to Marie Antoinette’s castle, now a museum dedicated to her.  It’s kind of cool after realizing how old (read: 18th century) everything there actually was.  We immediately walked into the great hall which is just enormous.  There’s a spiral staircase there that sadly beats ours back home, and is probably infinitely more sturdy.  They also have a room dedicated to all of the executions that took place there and a listing of all 2780 people executed (I checked, my ancestors were safe).  They also have the guillotine area blocked off now, and it was eerie being there where hundreds of years ago these people were just slaughtered.

We headed over to the Tuileries Garden afterwards which is just outside of the Louvre.  It’s basically the Central Park of Paris – lots of open space to walk around or sit and enjoy our 85 degree day.  From here we could see the Arc de Triomphe at the end of Avenue des Champs Elysees.  At our end of this stretch is the glass pyramid of the Louvre and the museum itself.  We’re taking a tour of the Louvre on Monday, so I’m pumped for that.  Exhausted, we headed back to the dorms.

That night we went up to see Moulin Rouge (the building itself, the show was 100+ Euro) which was disappointing probably mostly because it was still bright out.  During the day it’s just a building, but we might head back up to that area of the city at night so we can really see it.  Naturally, after that we went to see a movie in one of the Pathe French movie theater.  Moonrise Kingdom is a Wes Anderson film, played in English, and (most exciting part) unreleased in the US.  So we didn’t make it to Cannes this weekend due to the train prices, but at least we had a little bit of cinema extras here.  BTW I give M.K. a 2 out of 2, see it when you get a chance if you like any of his previous works.