Hey guys, so here's your update for the whatever length of time it's been since the last one.  I've been having trouble getting pictures up lately because the uploader thing hasn't been working and the wireless at my center has been out for a couple days....lame.  But yea, I promise I will get them up as soon as possible.

So I went to the pompidou center again, and this time I finally made it inside!  It was actually really, incredibly cool.  The inside is an enormous modern art collection, including stuff from the turn of the 20th century up to the present day.  They also had interactive art, such as video art and giant, igloo type things you could walk through and some of it was really weird but a lot of it was pretty cool.  I'm starting to gain much more of an appreciation for that genre of art, and abstractionism and all that.  They had a section on 1960's art, and they had painters such as Matisse, Pollock, etc.  And I got in for free with my art history pass, so that was cool.

Friday morning I had to get up early to go to a museum exhibit for my class, democracy and the media.  The exhibit was called, "les héritiers de Daumiers" and was about this early french political cartoonist and his influence on modern day political cartoonists.  It was pretty cool, and again, it was free, but this one was free to everyone. 

That's the nice thing about here, notice the trend?  People under the age of 18 get in most places for free, and people under the age of 26 get in most places for a serious discount, and then art/art history students get in for free to almost every art museum.  It's nice because they really do not do stuff like that in the states.  At least not where I am from.  And here, they also have nocturnes, which are generally from about 6 to about 10 at night on certain nights, where everyone under the age of 26 gets in for free.  I wish they would do stuff like that back home, and then maybe more people would go, and spend less time in front of the tv watching reality shows and more time expanding their minds.

Anyways, my plan was to just spend the whole day in the Louvre after that, but the weather was just waaaayyyyyy too gorgeous to spend the day inside.  It was sunny and warm and wonderful out, so my friend and I decided to go to the cemetery Père Lachaise, which is incredibly famous and where people such as Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Delacroix and soo many more are buried.  The only tomb we really wanted to see that day was Oscar Wilde's.  So we did that and then just wandered, because that is a really cool place to wander in.  Traditionally, when you visit Oscar Wilde's grave, people kiss it in brilliantly colored lipstick, and that is exactly what I did.  I borrowed my friends brilliantly red lipstick and I kissed Oscar Wilde's grave.  He ever only wrote one full length novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", but I read that over Christmas this year and I loved it.  And he was a very quotable writer.

There were also the graves showing the beautiful tragedies of love, and that love transcending death.  There was an old, old tomb, covered in ivy or something like it, with this inscription on it:

Absente je te parle toi
Seule ma voix appelle
Sans toi nulle nuit arrive
Sans toi nul jour se leve
 
which translated, means: absent, I speak to you, alone my voice calls, without you no night arrives, without you, no day rises.

I just thought that was kind of tragic and beautiful, so I figured I would share.

Another tomb I will share with you later, when i can include pictures, because that one needs them.

So Saturday I had to wake up early again because it was time for another trip with my center, this time to Vaux-le-Vicomte and Fountainbleau, 2 castles just outside of Paris.

First, we went to Fontainebleau, it was wedged into the middle of town.  It was pretty and castle like, and we were given the touristy tour, but the next castle was my favorite.

Vaux-le-Vicomte was where we went next, and I loved this castle.  It was much more secluded and older and not as haphasardly/eclectically built like Fontainebleau, because all of this castle was built by the same architect.  It's actually got an interesting history to it too, because this castle served as the model for Versailles, the famous ornate castle of Louis XIV.  Vaux-le-Vicomte was built by his finance minister, Nicholas Fouquet, as Fouquet's residence.  but the king, when he saw the castle, was jealous that his minister's castle was nicer than his.  Thus, he threw Fouquet into prison for the rest of his life, and practically stripped the inside of his castle, building Versailles and furnishing it with all the things that once belonged to Fouquet.  Got to love royalty.  Anyways, the best part of this castle were it's gardens, and the fountains weren't even on and the flowers weren't even out or anything.  But basically, these gardens are perfectly symmetrical, and a total optical illusion.  When you first look out on them, you think they are all continuous and connected, but when you walk into them, it's like, all of a sudden they cut off, drop down and there's this big lake right there, where you never expected it.

So that was really cool, me and a friend walked a long ways to get to the big grassy hill on the other side, and it was so nice to stand on and walk through grass for once.  That hasn't happened since I've gotten here.  Apparently the grass here has to hybernate for the winter, that's what all the signs everywhere say at least.

So then Sunday I went to a movie with a friend called "Il y a longtemps que je t'aime".  It was pretty good, but very sad.  It was about some lady who killed her son because he was mortally ill and she didn't want to watch him suffer and then she spent years in prison and it was all about her trying to overcome her guilt.

But yea, that's the scoop for now.  I actually don't think I ever talked about my mom and sister's visit, so I'll do a little blurb on that in the next bit.

but for now,

ciao