So once again, I have not updated the few people who read this blog in quite a while.  The time is just flying by so quickly here and my days are becoming more and more packed and everything is so surreal it is weird to take time out to sit back, relax, and reflect on it to share it with you all.  Most of the time, before writing these, I actually have to go back and look at the pictures I took for the week just to make sure it's all real and I'm actually experiencing what I think I'm experiencing.  And also, I am seeing so many new things and trying so many new things and experiencing so many things I could never before have dreamed of, that I can't honestly even remember some of it, it's all blurring together.  And I know I say this a lot, but I really feel sometimes like I'm not even here, I still don't believe when I wake up in the morning that I am here sometimes, but at the same time, I've never felt more at home. 

My favorite thing to do here is just to wander.  And most of the time, my favorite place to wander is through the local market, or through the local grocery store, because the types of food are all so interesting.  No one here needs channels like the food network, because honestly, I feel as though I am LIVING in the food network everyday of my life.  It is just so phenomenal here, and the complete opposite of the grocery stores back home.  Here, almost everything is fresh and organic and brought straight in from farms, and when you look at the back of an ingredients label here, you actually see what you would expect to be in that bottle, and not things such as "yellow 40" or red number whatever like is in everything back home.  In fact, there are many laws in france that forbid preservatives and such from being put in foods. 

Now to talk about french eating habits a bit.  In fact, I think most of this blog will be devoted to food.  I will get to Provins later, and my friends visit from nantes and a couple other things later.  But back to french meals.  For breakfast, french people normally eat a really small bread product, such as a madeleine, a croissant, or a little bit of baguette with jam on it, with a cup of coffee.  After that, around 12 or 1, they eat lunch.  And they do NOT snack in between breakfast and lunch, that is just unheard of.  And dinner takes place around 8 or 9.  I have noticed that the french generally have a snack around about 4, which is generally very small, maybe including a piece of tart with a cup of coffee or tea.  But dinner, now dinner is the big meal, it is what people look forward to all day long, and is the most important.  Normally, people spend about 2 hours "à table", and the meal is at least 3 courses.  They start with  little cocktail items, perhaps some crackers, or little pieces of baguette with hummus or this puréed fish eggs spread on them.  Then they move onto soup, then some type of meat and veggies, then bread, salad, maybe more veggies, then maybe some bread and cheese and then dessert.  I love the desserts here, because they are generally so healthy for you.  Generally, at my homestay, dessert includes a sweet yogurt or apple sauce with fruit on the side.  Although, sometimes for special occassions, we have a hodge podge of different little tarts and cakes, which are absolutely phenomenal.  And of course, there is always wine.  Normally it is red wine of some sort or the other, but sometimes, though much more rarely, it is white wine.  And for occassions of celebrations or something, they drink champagne, which is absolutely phenomenal here also.

French people also love "l'eau qui pique" or mineral, bubbly water we would say.  And I've grown to really love San Pellegrino water, though I'm not a big fan of perrier.  I know there's not that much difference between the two, but to me, I can kind of taste it.  Meals with company are always interesting though.  There is always one person who serves everyone, and when company is over, you very very rarely serve yourself, and you never serve yourself first if you are the one serving.  Also, there is normally a lot of emphasis placed on where everyone sits at the table, and I believe placement to them is all part of making sure the company intermingles and is really very important it seems.  Another thing they do here, is they never put the bread on the plate.  The bread always is placed beside the plate.  And also, there is no word in french for "salad dressing", it is just "vinaigrette" because that is really all they put on their salad.  That or olive oil.  And the dressing of choice for my hostess seems to be red wine vinaigrette mixed with dijon mustard, olive oil, and ground pepper.

I know by now you are probably worn out by all my talk of food, but really, that is one of the most important aspects of the french culture, and they take sooo soo much pride in their cuisine.  Their day to day expressions, their colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions all deal with food in some way or another.  And it seems their lives revolve around it.  Whereas, in America, we solve everything by taking a pill, I believe they solve everything by changing their food intake or eating habits.  For example, here, if you are sick, you are obviously not eating right, and you must eat more vegetables and less cheese and bread, which I think is a) kind of true, and b) very cute.  But also, I think it's very funny how here, when my friends from nantes were here, our cheap, thrown together, smorgasboard type dinner was actually 5 times healthier than what I would eat on any night in the US.  Whereas a smorgasboard in the US includes maybe some chips, something fried, maybe salsa, or some other processed something, here it is the complete opposite.  Our smorgasboard dinner the other night included hummus with sesame seeds on a baguette, a soft and mild cheese, kiwis, banana, white cheese yogurt with honey in it, slices of cold turkey, madeleines, and red wine, and it was very good...it's just so much easier to eat healthy here than in the states, especially because all the signs advertising desserts or something like that always have notices somewhere on the ads that say stuff like "avoid snacking between meals," "make sure you eat your proper servings of fruits and veggies" etc. 

But now that I have thoroughly exhausted your attention span on food, and made you want to run to the kitchen to grab a snack, allow me to continue with what else I've been up to lately.

I went to Provins last weekend, which is this medieval village about 1 1/2 hours outside of paris, and it was pretty cool.  We got to go up on the ramparts of the old wall, through the count's tower, and then down into the subterranean levels.  It was definitely interesting, especially because I got to deal with 2 of my biggest fears within a couple hours of each other (fear of heights and claustrophobia), but I made it through.  And got a free, 3 course lunch that was included with the field trip because it was through my center.

One thing I have to say though, it was very difficult to walk through the count's tower, with the low doorways and the treacherous stairs, and I can honestly say I fell down a couple steps (which are about 2 times the height of normal stairs I might add, thus much more of a fall) right after slamming my head on a low hanging, stone doorway.  That is the one bad thing about paris, the streets are rather treacherous also, and I am what the french would call "maladroite" or clumsy.  Honestly, I don't think there is a piece of paper in the world that could hold all the tallies for the number of times I have tripped, fallen, sprained my ankle, etc, and it seems like each time I get a step closer to falling completely on my face.  Today was by far my worst fall yet.  It was raining, so the escalators in the metro were really slippery, and I definitely fell directly on both of my knees going up...and the grooves on an escalator hurt.  a lot.  It's been about 4 hours since and I still can't bend my knees very much, but maybe in a little while I can look back and laugh about the whole situation?  hopefully?  I don't understand how french women handle those obstacles in stilettos everyday...

Anyways, this past week I went to the Musée Rodin, who was a french sculptor in the late 1800s I believe.  And let me tell you, it was phenomenal.  The way rodin sculpts figures is just so full of movement and detail.  IN fact, back during his lifetime, people used to criticize him and say that he simply took molds from live people, rather than actually sculpting them, because he used to do a lot of things at life size.  So, to prove that he was not doing that, he sculpted what is known as "le penseur" or "the thinker", who is bigger than life size and absolutely incredible in the amount of detail it includes.  I got in free with my art history student pass, so that was excellent.  And I got to see the gates of hell, one of his most famous works, which is an amazing set of bronze doors...wow, I think I need to get a thesaurus and look up adjectives for phenomenal and amazing and fantastic, because they seem to describe almost everything here.  Words of lesser emphasis just don't do stuff like this justice.

This past friday, my friend Alicia, who is studying in nantes, and her friend came down for the weekend, and it was actually really fun, and really cool to see a familiar face from back home in such a big city.  They got in town friday night, and we went to my homestay where we had our hodge podge dinner and then I took them to my favorite bar off of Rue de Lappe, where the bartender pretty much knows who I am now...which sounds bad, but I go there about once a week because it is little, cute, and pretty decently priced (considering it's paris).  After that we went to this club/live music venue called "La Flèche d'or", because it was free that night, and I had my first experience with electronica/techno dancing, and I actually prefer it to clubs in the US.  First of all, europeans can NOT dance, it is so awesome...and we would do stuff that we saw other people doing because we thought it looked silly, but the europeans just thought we were finally getting the hang of it :)  It was really fun though, and we decided to stay after the metro stopped running and figure out the night bus.  Well, the night bus is TOUGH to figure out.  The maps are unclear, and the times the buses come are very few and far between.  We took a couple connections, and then when we saw that the next bus wasn't coming for 45 minutes, we decided to take a cab to within walking distance of my homestay.  Just a note, pay attention to where the cab driver is taking you.  A lot of the time, if they think you don't know the area or are not paying attention, they will try to take you round about, and the longest way possible.  That is what our cab driver tried to do.  But I felt really awesome because I know that arrondisement, and I confronted him about what he was doing, and suddenly he started taking a much more direct route...what a surprise.

So anyways, that ended up being a ridiculously late night just trying to get back home, but it was really fun.  Saturday morning, my nante friends went to versailles, and I met up with some people and just wandered around the 5th arrondisement (by st michel and the sorbonne) for a while.  Then we went to the champs-élysées, and then we met back up with my nante friends at Sacré-Coeur, the giant church on the top of montmartre.  It was really cool though this time because I got to go inside for the first time ever.  It's a much more modern church than Notre-dame and a lot of other churches in paris, and the stained glass all had writing and sayings in it.  Apparently it was commissioned to be built in about the 1870s, and it is a mixture of roman and byzantian architecture.  Anyways, it was pretty cool because there was some sort of religious something going on when we got there, and the choir of nuns were singing and the acoustics were just eerie, they were the kind that reverberate off the stone walls and give you the chills.

Next, to completely reverse the religiosity of the moment, we wandered over to see the outside of the moulin rouge.  And let me tell you, that area of town is not at all ashamed to advertise sex, cabarets, strip clubs, and other things...

Alicia's friend, who came with her from nantes to visit me's name is molly, just to make the next part less confusing.  Well, a couple years ago, molly studied in nantes for a few weeks, where she stayed with a french family.  Well the daughter of this french family is currently studying in paris right now, so saturday night, we went and met up with her and some of her friends.  We walked along the seine, by notre dame and the fountain there.  It was really cool, because on the weekends at night, people will always go to those places and put on hip hop performances and sing and street dance and stuff, and we got to see some really really cool breakdancing.  After that, we went and got drinks and just talked in french.  IT was really exciting though because I got to meet french people my own age, and we exchanged phone numbers and I think we are going to hang out sometime next week!  And also, they complimented my french!  They told me I speak it very well, and that made me really happy and feel like being here is teaching me something.  That was even more exciting than when I bought my paris pratique, which is a book of maps of each of the different arrondisements of paris.  I love it because I don't look like a tourist using it, and now I'm starting to know paris by the names of it's neighborhoods, by the way parisians know it, and much more intimately than before.  I'm getting to the point now too, where I don't even have to look at a map half the time, because I know exactly where I am.  I'm starting to know where to go by instinct...where to go to get a cheap crepe, or cheap coffee.  Which metro line to take which direction to where, without needing a map.  And I love that feeling.  In fact, living here, and knowing my way around now, I almost feel weird and out of place when I go do the touristy things.  My whole perspective on this place is changing, and I feel like me and the culture here are kind of starting to meld together, to go together, and I love that feeling.

So now I'm going to wrap this up, if I go on any longer I might as well just write a novel for you...I'm sure this would be at least a chapter's worth, but I'm gonna leave you now.

hope you are all well and until the next time...