Normandy Excursion

This weekend was the Normandy Excursion with AIFS. Leading up to it, I wasn't sure how excited I was to go or if it was going to be boring or fun. Plus I haven't been hanging out with most of the people who were going so that added to it a bit. But it turned out to be a ton of fun. Plus when I read the trip itinerary I found out we were spending the night in St. Malo, which I found out is probably where my mom's French side of the family probably came from.

We started off the day early and left Paris for The WWII Museum in Caen. The Museum was really interesting. Not only did they have lots of equipment and stuff from the time period and war, they also had tons of photos and videos, plus a walking timeline of events leading up to the war. It was really interesting to slowly see the peace from after WWI slowly deteriorate and effectively launch the second war.




After the museum we went to see two of the D-Day beaches. The first was just a view of the ocean, another had lots of the remains of the German bunkers along the water. It was pretty chilling and interesting because there were probably hundreds of huge divots in the ground left from the shelling of the invasion as the Allied forces approached. Now they're all covered in grass but there are huge indentations over 10 feet deep.







We also visited the American cemetery, which I'm sure everyone has seen pictures of. None of the picture's that I've ever seen have really done the place justice. It's just an incredible site to behold and to walk around among the thousands of tombstones.



We finished off the night in St. Malo, which I've already mentioned. It was awesome I thought. It's a small town surrounded by walls right along the water. The night we got there I went out to dinner with a few people and had salmon for the first time. I figured I'd like it and it turns out that I did. I also tried a raw oyster. However, unlike the relatively mild salmon, I didn't like it at all. I almost yacked while I was trying to get it down. I don't think I'll be going back for more haha.




The next morning we had time to explore the city some more. It was a beautiful day and we got to walk around the ramparts (the walls) and check out the city and eventually the beaches. It was really cool to get to see the Atlantic again, and touch it. Just a few thousand miles across it is the US, pretty cool to think its the same body of water. The views of the rocks and everything were spectacular.





We walked on the beach a bit and climbed some of the rocks. There's an island off the coast of the city that had a walkway to it, but you can only get to it when its low tide. They also have a pool built in the ocean that holds in water when the tide goes out. It even has a diving board that just looked like a staircase in the middle of the water.




We visited Mont Saint Michel during the day sunday. It's a huge rock in the middle of the water which has a small town built on it and a monastery on the top of it. Its inaccessable at the highest tide (every other week), but we were able to get to it. It's funny because when its not flooded its just a desert of gray clay sand mud, which apparently swallows people on occasion! The whole place was a marvel to look at from a distance, but the city and monastery themselves were pretty bland. I suppose because I've seen a bunch of old castle-like cities already on this trip.





Anyways, for starting off not sure how much fun I would have, this was quite an awesome trip. It was definitely worth the weekend. Plus, I finished reading The Sirens of Titan on the bus ride, I really enjoyed it!



Both from the American Cemetery

Le Centre Pompidou

Tonight I went to le Centre Pompidou with Adam and Alix. It's so cool. Luckily its free on Wednesday evenings, so I'll be back to continue seeing the rest. We were there for a bit over an hour but didnt come close to seeing everything.


Here are a few of my favorites.

Auf Weiss II - Vassily Kandinsky


Gelb-Rot-Blau - Vassily Kandinsky


Le violoniste à la fenêtre - Henri Matisse


Guillaume Tell - Salvador Dali


Les marches de l'été - René Magritte


L'homme à la guitare - Georges Braque


One last thing, I attempted a panoramic view of a painting. It came out kinda distorted as far as shape goes but other than that everything is fine. So check it out if you want.
Le Bal Bullier by Sonia Delaunay

Belgium: Brussels & Chimay

Tuesday Cao and I took a train to Brussels. The train station wasn't in the best area, as they never are, but we made the best of it by visiting a brewery in the area. It was the first brewery I've ever visited, and so, it was pretty educational. We got to see all the steps to making beer, and in this particular case Spontaneous Fermentation, the original method of brewing. The factory was the Cantillon Brewery which produces one of the few remaining traditional Lambic beers in the world.

The main beer they produce there is called Gueuze which is a bit sour, but also very sweet and tastes almost like Champagne. They also use their Lambic beers to make Kriek and other fruit beers. They're all really sweet and don't taste like beer at all. Pretty interesting I thought.


I also got to see some fake iPods on our walk to the hostel, which was pretty nice. It was pretty funny, I've seen the knockoff iPods on the Internet plenty of times, but I finally saw them in person. The hostel was good. There was a kitchen and a lounge with a TV, some tables, a cheap vending machine, and a few computers. Our room was as to be expected, large, with lots of bunk beds (for 14 people). It was quite an experience sleeping in a room with that many people. Everyone seemed pretty nice and basically sat around trading stories about their travels, pretty interesting and helpful.


Our first night we did some tourism stuff in the city. We saw the Bourse, the Belgian stock exhange, Manneken Pis, a very small peeing boy statue/fountain and got a waffle, very good, very touristy. After that we checked out the Grand Place and the Cathedral Sainte-Gudule.





On Wednesday morning we took a train from Brussels to Charleroi, where we searched for about 45 minutes to find the one ATM in the city haha. There were plenty of banks but they only accepted to exclusive Belgian cards. Then we took a bus to Chimay in search of my favorite Trappist Beer.


Turns out the Brewery wasn't actually in the town of Chimay but 7Km away. Desperate, we walked. We finally arrived at the Bottling factory. Where we bought some Chimay for very very cheap. We also tried to take a tour, but they weren't offering them at this time of the year. The Abbey and other Trappist related sites were also closed. But it was still worth it, I think. Plus we get to say we walked almost 15Km.




Thursday before the train we hit up a Flea Market in a town square in Brussels. We also went back to the Grand Place during the day and visited the Palace of Justice, which was incomprehensibly large. There was some pretty cool graffiti on some of the buildings in the area too. Finally we took the train back to Paris at around 4.



Brussels was a lot of fun and had a ton of stuff to do. I'd definitely go back to see more of the sites and maybe to go to Chimay again. However, I think I'd want to take a car if that were the case.

Tour Montparnasse, etc.

Today I woke up to some good news about THE NEW YORK FOOTBALL GIANTS!!!! But I don't want to gloat so much that I lose readership, haha :-p. Anyways, I hung out around the apartment for lunch then met Cao in the Quatier Latin in the afternoon. We looked around for a backpack for her travels and I got a map of Brussels for tomorrow!

We also went to the Tour Montparnasse, which I believe is the tallest building in Paris. That is, however, if you don't count the Tour Eiffel, which is just a big metal structure.




Afterwards we rode the 5 line to Oberkampf and walked around a bit. Supposedly theres some decent cafés and bars there, but we didn't notice too too many. We did see a pretty crazily colored building which is pictured below. We didn't stay too long in that area because we wanted to get food stuffs for dinner at Cao's apartment and meet up with Adam and Alix.



We met up in a Monoprix with Alix and by a miniature Statue of Liberty with Adam. Then we proceeded to take the wrong train and took three more to get to where we were going, no loss tho, just makes the value of our Passe Navigo better! haha We had a pretty serious pasta and zuccini dinner with cheese and wine etc. It was a lot of fun to get to hang out in an apartment instead of a café for once!

Anyways, this post was more like one last one to get rid of some pictures from today and remind everyone that I'm going to Belgium until Thursday as of tomorrow! So I'll hopefully have a ton of pictures of my trip when I get back. One last thing, I have a new street performer video that I was planning on posting yesterday but couldn't!

Some Videos from the Weekend

I was going to post two videos from yesterday, but YouTube has been taking forever and my battery is almost dead, so I'll have to save one for another day.


Some more of those 'cool' dancing kids.

The Eiffel Tower & The Trocadéro

Internet access has been fairly scarce the past two days. Yesterday the Internet I was mooching from my apartment died and I haven't been able to get back on, and as a I write this I'm at McDonalds unable to get on. So, we'll see where I am when I get to actually post this.

Aside from lack of Internet the past two days have been fairly slow. Yesterday I hung out around the apartment most of the day, then went to the Louvre for about an hour and a half with Alix. We only checked out the top floor but we'll have plenty of time to go back to see the rest.

On the way back we made a pit-stop at the Franklin D. Roosevelt metro stop. I finally found Fraisoos! I'd been looking for Fraisoos and Pom Pooms (strawberry and Apple flavored candies) since I arrived but wasn't having very good luck. I saw some the night before in a vending machine at another metro stop, but it wouldn't let me buy them! I finally got a pack of Fraisoos though, and they were delicious, despite being a bit stale.



Today I slept in and hung around the apartment for a bit. Then I headed out and walked around for a few hours. I hung around the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower for a few minutes, but they were really busy so I just set off aimlessly.





I walked for quite a while in a fairly empty part of the 7e arrondissement which was filled with a bunch of foreign embassies. After a while it started getting a bit boring because there wasn't much of interest to see so I wandered my way to a metro and went back to the apartment to make dinner.

I just had a bowl of pasta with some fairly terrible Monoprix (a french supermarché) tomato sauce. Then I immediately ran back out to see a movie in the 10e. I saw In the Valley of Elah, which I had been wanting to see for a while. Tommy Lee Jones was good, but with a few exceptions the rest of the acting was abysmal. Plus it kept coming back to some unbelievably trite 'footage from Iraq.' I guess it wasn't a complete waste because it was only 4€.

I have some videos and stuff from the day to show but I need to edit them so I'll post them at a later date. Also check out some panoramas from today! Also, I'm at my second McDonalds of the night posting this haha.


le Trocadéro


le Tour Eiffel

Montmarte & le Sacré-Coeur

The past few days have been fairly interesting. Unfortunately, the cold has been making me not want to do much, but that hasn't really stopped me I suppose. Yesterday we got our test results and chose classes. I'm in the intermediate level and I'm taking 3 seminars as of now, although I may drop one because I'll only get real credit for 2 of them. I'm taking Architecture of Paris in French, which should be interesting. We won't always be meeting in a classroom. Instead, part of the time will be spent on field trips to various buildings and monuments around the city.

Last night I used my first meal voucher. We were stupid and let ourselves get suckered into a restaurant where an entrée, plât and dessert were only €10 on top of that to entice us they offered us each a free glass of wine. You could probably guess that none of it was very good. I'm sure it was on par with the terrible places EFF Tours took us. My onion soup smelled bad and had hunks of burnt bread in it. The steak (yeah steak as part of a 10€ meal) was edible but not good. It was pretty rubbery and crappy. Finally, I had ice cream for dessert. It was a like single serving slice of neapolitan, but it was freezer burned and dried out. Now we know.

Also last night, we went for a beer close to that restaurant, in the Latin Quarter. The place was called Shywawa and was pretty cool. Also, I tried a beer called Delirium Tremens (pictured below), which will amuse at least Amanda. It was pretty good.



Today the four of us went to Montmarte for the day. We visited the Sacré-Coeur and walked around a bunch. We saw basically the same things I saw two years ago but it was still fun. These things include, the Sacré-Coeur, le Chat Noir, le Moulin Rouge, and all the other million sex shops in the area. Easily the largest of them is the Sexodrom. It sticks out like a sore thumb on the street. It's this huge black and red neon building amongst normal stone Parisian buildings. We also discovered Tati a department store kind of place that has everything from clothes, housewares, shoes, bridal stuff, and jewelry at pitifully low prices.




For dinner we used another meal voucher but this time the place was a lot nicer. Le Petit Poucet I believe it was called. I got another steak, but this time with shallots and it was way better. It was a bit more than the other place, but it was easily worth the extra 3€.

I think I'm spending the weekend in the city might check out a museum or see a movie or something. However, next week Tuesday through Thursday I'm heading the Belgium for a few days to see Brussels and Chimay.