The Marais

I think I spend more time in the Marais than anywhere else.  I have so many journal entries that include the sentence "I wandered around the Marais today..."  Mer and I cruised there after school and wandered.  We walked down Rue des Rosiers, which is home to great cheesecake, challah bread, and other treats.  We did a little window shopping and had coffee at Les Philosophes.

I can't believe that It is almost May!  I have been here since January!  It sounds like such a long time ago.  I have one more week of class and then 2 days of finals, and then I am done with my program!  I feel like I've done pretty well in Paris.  I've seen most everything at least once and I've gotten really comfortable here.  I'm rarely startled when people start speaking french to me, and I can usually respond intelligibly.  

Today I ate ketchup

Seriously.  It was a great day.

Mer and I went shopping near Montparnasse today and we had lunch at the french version of Red Robin.  They brought us ketchup to eat with our frites and it was amazing.  Its the longest I've ever gone without that magical substance.  It was probably the best plate of fries I have ever had.  Then we went to Starbucks.  Seriously, it was a great day.

I was a little sick this weekend.  I had a weird 24 bug where I just felt awful for a while and then magically got better.  It was random, but a good excuse to stay in bed for a while.  Mer and I went out for pho-like dinner last night and it was super tasty.  

Life is humming along.  We are looking forward to Mer's dad coming to town and the end of the program.  I'm especially excited for the month of traveling and our week in GREECE!  I'm kind of done with Paris.  Not that I don't still love it.  I know I'm so lucky to be here and I am in no way bitter (like some of the people on my program).  I have really come to love the city, but I am just ready to move on.  I'm very excited about the next chapter of this whole study-abroad thing.  Mer and I have booked all of our hostels and flights for our travels, and we are figuring out where to store our luggage while we gone.  Its crazy to start thinking about things like that, but we are getting very close to the end!

Paris in the Springtime

Paris in the Springtime really is all its cracked up to be.  It is amazing.  Everyday after school this week I have ended up sitting in some gorgeous garden or other and doing my homework in the sun.  Monday, it was the Jardin de Luxembourg, Tuesday it was outside Invalides, Wednesday it was the Musée Rhodin.  

The Musée Rhodin was gorgeous.  All the lilacs are blooming, so the whole garden smells amazing.  We had to go there for class (because we have a quiz on the museum) so Marcy, Ellen, and I went after school.  We get in free with our student cards and it was a gorgeous sunny day.  The museum consists of a nice old mansion and the park/gardens that it sits in.  There are sculptures all throughout the garden, so we just wandered through and looked at some great art.  We sat by the fountain, next to a bunch of lilacs, and watched these french children have a sword fight.  They were even wearing costumes.  It was really cute.  There are also some excellent lawn chairs in the grass there--I will definitely be returning to read here.  Ellen and I had a coffee at the café in the park and watched a small child pick a cigarette butt out of the trash and play with it--not cute.  No worries--his mother eventually persuaded him to leave it alone.  

Everything is pretty peachy here in Paris.  Today was the first day that I wore sandals to school--woohoo!  School continues to drag on.  I'm so ready for IES classes to be over but, alas, I have about 3 more weeks.  I think some of the professors are ready for it to be over with as well.  One of my professors started singing "we are the world" the other day while describing how Kant and Rousseau would go skipping through the park holding hands--it was a little weird, but probably the highlight of my day.   

I had lunch in Asia

A cool thing about Istanbul is that it is one city that spans 2 continents.  It is both an Asian city and a European one.  The Bosphorus Strait runs in between it from the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea.  We took a boat cruise up the entire thing to a small town on the Asian side.  We tried to pick a sunny day to go, but with our luck we chose the only cloudy and cold day.  We sat outside so that we could have a good view--which we did, but we froze our behinds off.  

We had lunch near the water and then hiked up to an old castle with a great view.  We climbed around and took pictures of the black sea.  Then we hiked back down, grabbed a sweet treat at a bakery and hopped back on the boat.   

It was really cool to see the city from the water.  There are all sorts of mansions on the water in really diverse styles.  There are some beautiful traditional ones with english gardens right next to modern ones with infinity pools.  There is also a stretch of mansions that Rick said look like those along the Mississippi.  Having never cruised the Mississippi, I will take his word for it.  Of course, there are others things like castles, fortresses, the president's home, and the sultan's modern palace.  

Our best friend Moses a.k.a. stuff we ate

Food in Turkey is TASTY.  It is greece meets the middle east and we ate a lot of it.  

We had a lot of kababs and lavash (like pita bread).  We also had turkish pide, which is also called turkish pizza.  It is a big piece of bread with cheese and other fun stuff on top--so pretty much a pizza.  We had famous meatballs (who knew they were famous until we read Rick Steves?) which were scrumptious.  

Other turkish stuff we ate was simite, which is pretty much a soft bagel.  They sell them on the street and they are a ring of bread dipped in grape seed oil and covered in sesame seeds before being baked.  We had some great dried fruit from the spice market.  We drank turkish coffee, which wasn't awful.  It is really strong and a little grainy because they leave the grounds in, but they usually gave you a piece of turkish delight on the side!  Turkish delight is just a cube of gelatin that has nuts in it and is then covered in powdered sugar.  We also drank salep, which is a warm white drink made from the ground root of an orchid and served with cinnamon on top.  

We ate a lot of hummus and yogurt sauce with cucumbers (turkish style, not tzatziki). 

My all-time two favorite turkish food experiences were:

Turkish ravioli--little tiny handmade dough pockets with meat in them and then covered in a warm and creamy yogurt sauce.  They were so good!  I would also like to mention that at the same restaurant we had an amazing stuffed eggplant for a starter.

Çay--also known as tea.  Tea in Paris is ridiculously expensive because there is some crazy high tax on it, so we don't get it very often.  In turkey tea is about 50 cents.  They give you free tea with almost every meal and it comes in a very stylish tulip shaped glass.  The best kind of tea is apple.  Seriously, it was amazing!  

I have poison for your mother in law a.k.a. stuff we did in turkey

Istanbul is a great tourist city because all the sights are really close to each other.  We stayed about a block away from two of the biggest--the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sofia.  The Hagia Sofia is a former mosque that is now a museum.  The place is huge!  It was built before the duomo in Florence and the dome here is just as big.  It was being restored so we couldn't see much of it, but apparently it is 20 stories tall.  The Blue Mosque is at the other end of a park from the Hagia Sofia and it is a functional mosque.  It is so named because the tile covering the walls is blue.  I expected it to be a lot more blue than it actually was--like I expected the tiles to be totally blue, instead of pretty tiles that just happened to have blue in them.  Anywho.  We visited two smaller mosques which I thought were way cooler than the big ones.  The tile was amazing in both of them--and it was way bluer than that of the blue mosque.  We also went to the New Mosque of the Mother Sultan, which was cool, and the Mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent--which was closed for restoration (bummer!).  

You have to remove your shoes when you go into the mosques and it is so funny because at the bigger mosques they provide you with plastic bags in which to carry your shoes while inside.  The smaller mosques just have wooden shelves to leave your shoes and collect when you leave.  As a woman, I had to cover my head as well when I entered the mosque and, as Rick Steves said, "dress modestly".  They provided extra scarves and wraps for those that were dressed inappropriately or came unprepared.

We also visited the Topkapi Palace, which was the home of the sultan for many many years.  They had collections of jewels and swords and armor and all sorts of things.  The gardens were also totally in bloom, so there were tulips everywhere!  There was a room of religious relics as well, but most of them looked really fake.  For instance, they claimed to have Moses' staff (which looked like it was made of plastic) and a piece of the crucifix (sure....).  We paid extra to visit the Harem, which was worth it.  It was interesting because it was decorated in the baroque and rococo style because it was all the rage in Istanbul back then.  It proved an interesting contrast to the rest of the palace.  I took about 100 pictures of tile because all of it was gorgeous.  There was a lot of mother of pearl inlay on everything and great views of the city.

We also hit up some museums--Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Archaeological Museum, and others.  

We went to the Grand Bazaar, which is pretty much Pike Place Market on crack and 18 thousand times the size.  The shop keepers heckle you as you walk by so you pretty much can't stop moving or you get swallowed up!  We wandered most of it and had a turkish coffee in the middle of the bazaar.  We hit up the book market as well, which was a fun mix of old and new and english and arabic and turkish and french.  The Spice Market was another stop.  It was so cool to see piles of spices and dried fruit.  This is where one of the shopkeepers tried to get us in his store by telling us he had poison for our mother in law.  He broke our serious paris faces, we couldn't stop laughing after that.

SB '09---Istanbul

I'm going to have to break this Istanbul entry up in a few bits so that I can do it justice.

The trip was amazing!  Mer and I left Paris in the afternoon and got to Istanbul in the middle of the night.  Our hostel had an airport pick-up service so we went straight to bed about an hour after our arrival.  We had our free breakfast on the roof-top terrace that we were happy to find out had gorgeous views of the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia, and the Bosphorus strait.  

Istanbul overall was a great city.  The old part (where we stayed) was super touristy and full of great sights.  The new town (across the bosphorus) was super modern and european.  The city is very walkable and the public transportation system is really easy to figure out.  It was cool to be in a city where there was a mosque in every neighborhood instead of a church.  I also got used to hearing the call to prayer blasted throughout the city 5 times a day.  The first few mornings I woke up when they call the first one just after sunrise, but by the end of the week I slept right through it.  

The people are so friendly there.  We had a joke that we made a new best friend everyday.  The first lunch we had our waiter was named Moses and he really wanted to talk to us about Lost.  He also told us he really wanted to visit New Jersey and Utah "to do the ski".  We also met some turkish teenagers who wanted to practice their english with us and they were really excited to go to Wisconsin some day.  We even had a waiter tell another waiter that we were his "best friends".  A 15 year old waiter also fell in love with Meredith and made her a flower out of a napkin.  He looked crushed when we asked for the check.  

All in all, Istanbul comes highly recommended from yours truly. 

This one time...

This one time I was really bad at blogging.

Also, this one time, I went to Lisbon! The first weekend in April I met two of my friends from Whitman for a weekend in Lisboa.  Lisbon is a really cool city that is right on the water and consists on two huge hills and the little valley between them.  We stayed in the Bairro Alto, which is one of the giant hills.  There are four options to get yourself up the hills: tram, bus, elevator in some cases, or to climb.  We did a lot of climbing because climbing comes free and because it is good for our health (we kept reminding ourselves).  A lot of streets are not even streets, they are just stairs....that go on forever.  Our hostel was at the top of some crazy set of stairs and it was the cutest place ever.  The walls were all really brightly painted and the furniture was all ikea-chic.  The view was great (see picture) and the staff was really nice.

Our first day we wandered around the neighborhood we were staying in and then went to Indian food for dinner.  It was AMAZING.  and SO CHEAP.  We had a great bottle of Portuguese white wine and explored the world of indian dessert food.  The next day we did an epic walk across the whole city.  We went to a giant flea market and had sandwiches for lunch.  Then we walked all the way up to the castle (on top of the other giant hill) and took a million pictures.  There was a man playing guitar in the middle of it and you could hear it from all over the hill.  We sat in the sun and rested before the climb back to the hostel.

We met my friend Grace and her friend Katie for dinner down the street.  We went for drinks before and found a happy hour where they had beer for one euro!  The Whitman crew had picked the restaurant out earlier solely on the criteria that they had guacamole.  We had their mediocre guac, some great bruschetta, and I had the most amazing octopus ever!  We finished the meal with fresh strawberries drizzled in warm chocolate.  

Next day we went to the beach!  We took the train along the coast to a little town called Cascais (cashcash).  It has about two streets and two beaches.  We sat around and read books all day--life is tough.  That night us Whitman girls took ourselves to a fun dinner.  The place was really cute, but was so pretentious!  The food was fine, but not amazing.  The waitresses looked at us like we were crazy every time we asked a question, but by the end of the night we had won them over because we each had a three course meal and we had wine.  Oh well, it was great people watching.

I found out that I really take for granted the fact that people can't smoke inside anymore in Paris.  It was awful to come home smelling like cigarettes every night.  The cool thing about Lisbon, though, is that all the streets are so small and all the bars are so small that people just get their drink and stand on the street.  You can look down a street and it just looks like a block party.  It was a very fun atmosphere.

All in all, I gave Portugal two thumbs up, very nice people and very nice sights.  Portuguese, however, still remains a mystery to me.

Spring?

Well, I think spring may have arrived.  Today Mer and I decided that we need to start doing more things with our time.  So, after class we went to St Chapelle and looked at all the lovely stained glass in the sunshine.  That place is just absolutely amazing and is totally worth the 5 euros to get in.  After that we went to place du dauphin, which is a park on the very tip of Ile de la cite.  We sat down by the river in the sun.  We did homework for a few hours while soaking up some rays--we were seriously lacking in vitamin d.  Then we walked to Ile St Louis and Mer got gelato and I got Berthillon sorbet.  We stopped by the Abbey bookshop on our way home and I bought some english books to read this weekend while in Portugal.  

Life is pretty sweet.  Everything is blooming, so when I am not sneezing because of all the pollen, I am really enjoying the view!