joanne dans la ville de l'amour

it was my last day of photography class =**( but what a way to end it – we sipped wine as we critiqued our own works (we each had 6-9 final prints) while hally critiqued it at the same time. let me tell you, we all did so amazing and the photos were AWESOME. we forgot to take a snapshot of it before we took them down the wall; we had arranged it in whatever sequence we wanted, so it looked like a wall at a small gallery. then we dialogued about what makes good b&w photos and how we all incredibly achieved it within a span of a 4 short weeks… eventually, though, we went off on a HUGE tangent towards the last hour of class and just talked about politics – feminism, international policy, the marijuana debate… without a doubt, the most interesting conversation i’ve ever had with a professor.

anyway, hally demands that we no longer take snapshots (unless we choose to use the snap shot aesthetic, which is an entirely different thing…). we know too much now about photography as an art, and i agree with her. while i will still carry around a point & shoot for those snapshots of moments i don’t wanna forget and post on facebook, i’ll reserve my rolls of film and chemicals of development for moments that i wanna capture in the art form that i now have technical knowledge in. (!!!)

so now, me and the roommates are supposed to go out on the town tonight, but i’m SO exhausted from the day, from preparing my final prints for class; walking all over the place; riding on the gross, overcrowded metro… i just wanna sleep! haha… but tonight will be one of the last nights i spend with my roommates, so i’ll stay awake just for them =) at least, i’ll try to…

so there’s a huge hole in my paris blog, but i’ll make up for it, i promise. complete with a few pictures, too!

anyway, i’m starting to really miss home. 2 of my roommates are flying back home on saturday and the other is only staying until the 3rd of august. i’m staying until the 11th… =*( i’m really gonna miss them!! we’ve done absolutely everything together since day 1, and they’re so fun to be with and to talk to. we all had similar goals with respect to paris, so it was really easy to figure out what to do and what to save for a later paris trip…

anyway, i really wanna go home, but i’m trying to stay optimistic – after all, who wouldn’t mind being stuck in paris? then again, i’d rather share it with someone i love. i have a friend who’s staying until the end of august, at least, but she’ll still be taking classes and such. that means that i’ll still have a chunk of alone time. i mean, i still have a bunch of things to do on my uber tourist list, so i’m hoping the time will just pass by so quickly that i won’t notice that i’m staying another week and a half after all my roommates are gone.

in conclusion, i miss home: i started a list of why i miss it so much, but it’s way too long. so i’ll leave you with a picture of my dogs. they’re definitely on my top 5 of things i miss, with all these dogs on the paris streets constantly reminding me of them.

marlayna, angela and i discovered the cutest store on our way to the seine after class. called librairie pinault, they sell jewelry, trinkets, collectibles, and watches mostly at steep prices. but the watches are so irresistible! they are each unique to the hobby they depicted, like what angela bought – a pair of scissors as the minute and hour hand, and a needle as the seconds hand. we were both fascinated by all the watches, that we stayed for at least 45 minutes admiring them.

i normally don’t spend a lot on jewelry in general, but angela convinced me that watches are good investments. they last long and are obviously very useful… so i splurged and got one too, of piano keys.

the tour de france on rue de rivoli! i couldn’t stay long and so didn’t catch a single biker. i did catch, however, the trucks and the awesome fans

i left early for the paris jazz festival, one of my favorite things to do in the city. and parc floral where it was hosted is SOO beautiful, what a great place to listen to some good jazz music

i watched sandra nkake – what an amazing performer! she has the range and vocal distinctness of sarah vaughn and the stage presence of q-tip via jazz reggae fest.

after wandering aimlessly once her set was over, i serendipitously intercepted sandra leaving the stage. a small crowd of her friends and fans were saying hello and taking pictures with her but i was too bashful to ask for either a picture or cd =T

right across the parc floral is château de vincennes, the 2nd largest castle in paris next to the louvre. my feet were too tired and my mind too overwhelmed with monuments to actually walk on the grounds. i settled for a picture instead

ladan and i were abandoned at the apt by angela and marlayna, who’d both travelled elsewhere for the weekend (angela with her relatives a few hours from paris and marlayan in barcelona). today, then, was my day for souvenir shopping. i didn’t get everything i neded, but i went back to the best souvenir shop in paris, in my and marlayna’s opinions: la vaissellerie – they have a few throughout the city, though the one on rue saint antoine is my personal favorite. as for their souvenirs, it’s a good mixture of uber touristy souvenirs and souvenirs that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional – mostly kitchenware and accessories. well, who doesn’t use their kitchen??

at this point, i became trigger lazy so there won’t be very many pictures for a few posts – if not more. sorry!! i’m happy this was true, though, because my days were largely uneventful anyway, besides school and my increasing workload, with the month of classes coming close to its end. if i can, i’ll just borrow some pictures off my friends’ facebooks hehe…

anyway, i went to a mexican restaurant with some friends and friends of friends from the another study abroad program to start off the night. i forgot to document the restaurant, but it’s near the bastille right along the seine. GOOD food, and though at first sight very expensive, it’s worth the 25 euros for generous portions – appetizer, main course, and dessert. my good friend desiree basically let me have her whole meal – she didn’t eat much of it.

after, we met friends of friends of friends at a bar in the montmarte area. we stopped by a market to get something to drink and on the way out, an obviously intoxicated middle-aged man asked us if we were prostitutes. yeahh, montmarte is paris’s red light district.

me and a girl i’d met that night – with whom i had such good conversation but just can’t remember her name for the life of me (i’m so sorry if you read this) – were afraid of missing the metro, so we left the large crowd of young american folks uber excited to be legally drinking before their 21st birthday.

and finally, it was a good thing i didn’t bring my camera because a wasted guy flashed everybody at the station. he flashed us for a good five minutes as he laughed and sang and danced in a circle. while very hilarious to hear, it tortured me having to wait to use my whole field of vision again.

falafel night! without having tried another falafel place, i can hardly call L’As du Fallafel the best falafel place in paris, but apparently lenny krevitz recommends it. my taste buds and my tummy were very pleased, in any case.

photo cred: anila zaidi… i didn’t take a picture of my own, i forgot to =T

i’m not even gonna try recalling what i did since the 13th… so sorry, no pictures for now. the week’s been such a blur with classes getting down to the last few classes and trying to cram a bunch of touristy things in between. being a student in paris does not mean it’s a vacation… at least, not for me and my roommate marlayna, with our long photography labs… we tried to remember what we did monday (it was just 2 days ago!) and it took us at least 15 minutes to think about it; somehow paris has gotten our sense of time all messed up.

and it’s not a bad thing at all. it’s just hard to be both student and tourist at the same time with such a weird schedule: 9am-12pm, french; 4:30pm-9pm, photography lecture + darkroom… what am i supposed to do with the 12-4:30pm gap?? i don’t have enough time to do much, with all the traveling i have to do if me and the roommates decide to do anything. but if we do, we have to keep it close to campus. and we can’t do something too touristy, or we’d be waiting in lines all day, cutting it close to my lecture…

anyway, the conclusion to all this is, i realize that i have to make a few sacrifices. i might not be able to do everything on my touristy to-do-in-paris list, but that just means i’m gonna have to come back =) wanna come with?

after a full night of rest at the cutest hotel ever and a superb continental breakfast (beats EVERY american hotel i’ve ever stayed at, for sure), we visited deauville/treauville – a beach resort town where the american festival is famously held.

their casino is on the right. they wouldn’t let my roommate in to use the restroom, though she is of age if the gambling age in france is 18. =T

my favorite part of the resort town, since it tickled my classic film fancy…

then back on the bus to Château de Breuil Calvados… a beautiful piece of land, so green and lush like much of the surrounding landscape.

this is their aging room; the smell was strong but sweet

then on to the calvados and pommeau (a weaker version of it) tasting! i preferred calvados, though my tummy was more tolerant of pommeau

the last item on our itinerary was the Caen Peace Memorial dedicated to D-Day. beautiful museum, i definitely recommend if you’re ever in that part of town. no other documents D-Day and WWII in general so thoroughly in one site.. we were fortunate enough to use the audio guides; though disorganized, in my opinion, they were still very informative for the history-challenged like myself.

normandy (a 3-4 hour bus ride from paris) is such an amazing place – it’s the definition of the French countryside. and it’s so green and lunch; so quiet and quaint. no billboards, no neon signs, no high rises, no crazy drivers/pedestrians…

the sites we visited were good but the Bayeaux tapestry museum was a random one in relation to the rest of the itinerary which consisted mostly of WWII historical sites. it’s pretty cool that the tapestry museum preserves such an old piece of art history, but my favorite part of the museum:

then we went to pointe du hoc, a wwii memorial among the stretch of beaches of dday. it’s still surreal, when i think about it, that bombs damages this beautiful peace of land in this past century.