Super quick fast update

Hey everyone who's reading this. This isn't really a post, just a hey here's what's up placeholder until I can get a read entry written.

That may take a little while.

Anywho, got back to France Jan 3, and have been significantly busier than expected since, mostly because my children keep getting sick. The 5 year old had the flu when I arrived, so I was home with him one day last week and one day this week, and then I had all three kids both last Wednesday and today. And today the 10 year old started feeling ill ... and of course it turns out she's got the flu as well. She'll be staying home tomorrow, and probably Friday as well. La vie!

So yeah, what with them sick (and the mom was sick last week) and me being so tired it hurts (and kind of *cough*justifiably!*cough* nervous that I'll be the next one with the flu), I have failed to make time to update my super fabulous blog.

But at least now you all know I'm alive and - currently - flu-free, so cross your fingers for me, and I shall update soon. Ish.

Thoughts on living abroad

So sue me, I had a hard time coming up with a creative title for this. I went for obvious - at least no one is confused as to what this is about.

This post sort of grew out of my last one. Generally I write about things I've been doing, new experiences, things like that. But as I was writing the belated Thanksgiving post, I started thinking about homesickness. And as a disclaimer, I swear this isn't going to be super depressing, mostly because I don't really get homesick.

Ok, that's not completely exactly fully true, but mostly so. I tend to be fairly mellow about adjusting to new situations and locales, and usually figure there's no point in wishing for some place/thing not currently available. I might as well enjoy what I've got, instead. And I pretty much do. There are benefits to being a terribly practical person.

This is not to say, lest ye be offended, oh reader, that I never miss anything. Not being homesick does not equal not wanting some things related to home. Mostly I miss people. While I am willing to accept the necessity of being a long way from family and friends, that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to be closer. But places and things ... these I find I can live without. Although cheap and easily available Dr. Pepper - and doriotos, cheap or otherwise - would be fabulous.

Most of this I found out in college, when I was (for a couple years, at any rate) a long way from most of my immediate family. But I had Grinky and lots of aunts and uncles and cousins nearby, not to mention my useless older brother (for the first 9 mo or so, anyway), and of course I soon made some very good friends. Being here is the first time I've really been on my own, and I wasn't sure if I'd handle the situation the same way.

So far I have. I do miss family and friends, and can't wait to see people at Christmas, but I haven't had that hard of a time adjusting, which is what I was hoping for (and sort of expecting).

What I've found that I did not expect is that rather than missing specific places, favorite restaurants, stores, or foods (except the aforementioned Dr. Pepper, nectar of the Gods, and doritos, whose awesomeness is beyond mere words) what I actually miss is the sense of familiarity and security that having these things around gives. I love Target (no, I really really love that store) but when I'm in a French grocery/general stuff store, I don't miss Target itself - the French store has everything I need. But I DO miss knowing exactly how the check-out lines work, and knowing the general vicinity in which one will find q-tips.

They say that when you move somewhere where you don't know the language, the first few months are fatiguing because you have to work so much harder just to function at a basic level in society. My French is good enough that this hasn't been much of a problem (although finding contact solution without knowing the word for contacts was a bit of a struggle!). But even in Western Europe, where the culture is similar in very many ways to the US, I've found it harder than I expected to figure out some of the details of daily life - like how one gets the attention of the waiter.

It's the sense of familiarity that, when I'm feeling nostalgic, I miss most. Until they're gone, one doesn't realize how much security comes from an understanding of social cues. It gets better the longer I'm here, because of course I'm learning more of how things work and what's expected in French society, but when I try and buy phone credit from a tabac for the first time, rather than the electronics store I'd been going to, or when I buy a baguette from a different boulangerie, it takes a little adjustment all over again.

It's not a bad thing, really, but it is something I didn't really expect, that's taken some adjusting. It does give a lot of perspective on how much we take for granted an intimate knowledge of our own culture, though!

A somewhat belated Thanksgiving

Yes, I know that Thanksgiving was Thursday, but I'm a little slow on the draw. Besides, it took me a while to figure out exactly what I wanted to do for this post.

This was my first Thanksgiving without any of my family here. It was ... weird. I confess, though, that if I have to be without family, I'd really rather be here than somewhere in the US but lacking the ability to get home. No one here was celebrating Thanksgiving, so it was easier to forget what I was missing. And thanks to Skype, I did get to talk to the majority of my immediate family (plus Grinky!) which is always wonderful.

So in the spirit of Thanksgiving, here are things I'm thankful for:

1. The family I'm with here. They know it's harder to be in a foreign country at holidays, so they made me a "Thanksgiving dinner" over the weekend: turkey, potatoes, and corn (all foods I'd mentioned as being traditional). They've been wonderful.

2. The internet. And my computer. Darling macbook, if my poetry wasn't as the screeching of nails on a chalkboard to the ears of the unfortunate hearer/reader, I would write sonnets to you. After all, I am a long way from family, friends and familiarity (though alliteration hasn't forsaken me) and it's so so so nice to be able to keep up with people through facebook, email, skype and, of course, this blog.

3. Heat. The heat in the house went out last Monday night and was out on Tuesday, but is back. And y'all, and I am thankful. Because it snowed last night and now the temp is hovering around 28 - so a continued lack of heat would not be pleasant.

4. My actual family. Hmmm, somehow I feel like they should be higher on the list. Sorry actual family! But they've been so supportive of me being here, and of helping me mail things and sort out stateside stuff that it's hard to take care of from here, and hey, they're flying me back for Christmas! Besides, I kind of like them. Except my older brother, of course.

5. Friends. This is probably you, the person currently reading this. Know that I am so, so thankful for you, and I miss you!

Happy (late) Thanksgiving!

The Louvre

Since I last wrote I have, as you may have surmised from the title of this post, been to the Louvre. I feel like I should have more to say about it, given how I much I enthused in my post about the Musée d'Orsay, but I have to admit, I liked the Musée d'Orsay better.

Don't get me wrong, the Louvre is amazingly impressive. Another au pair and I went together - oh wait, we actually went before my last posting. Oops. Anyway, we went on the 5th, because pretty much all the museums in Paris are free on the first Sunday of the month. I love being here, but sometimes being an au pair is like being in college again, ie I have no money.

Now you may be thinking, Oh my, Susanna, you went to the world's most visited art museum, the one that houses one of the most famous paintings in the world, on a day when everyone and their brother-in-law was going to be there? On an average day there are 12,000 visitors, and many more on a day like that! What were you thinking?

This is a valid question. Mostly we were thinking, "Score! Free museum!" but I should also remind you that the Louvre is 652,300 square feet. That is very, very large. And as an aside, thank you google, for helpfully providing information about the size of the museum and average numbers of visitors. So yes, there were thousands of people there but, frankly, if you weren't in the section with the Mona Lisa or some of the Greek antiquities, it wasn't that crowded. We were in this massive line to get in, but it moved at practically a walking place - you just can't fill the building up.

Which leads me to why I like it less than the Musée d'Orsay. The Louvre is unbelievably, ridiculously, overwhelmingly impressive. We visited several exhibits (Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Near East, and Dutch and Flemish paintings. We visited, maybe, 1/4 of the museum. We were there about 5 hours. The place never ends. In the Dutch and Flemish collection there are rooms upon rooms of paintings, each wall covered in them, and you keep walking through them, in awe of the beauty and artistry and history until you can't even take it in anymore. And then there's the architecture and decoration of the building itself. After all, it was palace before it was a museum and the rooms, and the view of Paris from some of the windows, are breathtaking. But the weight of all that history and beauty and the sheer size of the place is a little suffocating.

I think if I was going to be in Paris for a long amount of time (and really, I would need a couple years for this) I would go on the first Sunday of each month, just for a couple hours, and visit only one exhibit, taking my time. I know I'm here about a year, but there are other museums I want to go to, so that isn't feasible now; I have to visit more than one exhibit each time I go.

I do plan to go back, though. I want to see the African art, as well as the Napoleon rooms, and I'd really like to see the French art as well. For now, here are a couple pictures I took. I only took a few because I quickly realized that if I kept going I'd never be able to stop, but you can see a few things:

My friend is there for a size comparison. I was so excited to see these, because we'd studied them in art history. Which reminds me: I HAVE SEEN HAMMURABI'S CODE. Just saying.

This was another favorite thing. The random person in the corner is for scale. This is the top (the top 1/5, maybe) of a column from the palace of one the Persian kings. There were 36 columns in his throne room, each topped by one of these. That's some serious impressive, people.

And these are views from one of windows. Not too good, as pictures go, but I loved being able to look out at Paris. If you look very, very closely at the first you can see La Defense and the Arc de Triomphe. The second features, obviously, the Eiffel Tower, but very sneakily also has the Grand Palais. Probably no one can see it, but I swear it was clearer when you were actually looking at it, not trying to photograph it through a window.

Other favorite things I saw that I did not photograph: the statue of Cupid and Psyche, paintings by Vermeer and Jan Steen, the huge room lined with absolutely massive Rubens that illustrate the life of Queen Marie de Médicis, and, of course, Hammurabi's Code. Also, lots of truly beautiful gold jewelry (and I got to see some rings like the one I patterned the Egyptian ring in my honors project on!). But while I loved some of the art I got to see, the Musée d'Orsay reigns supreme in my art museum affections. Sorry Louvre!

Vacation and all that jazz

So it’s been rather a while since I’ve posted, but I can’t actually apologize for that. First, because I said I wasn’t going to any more, and second, because I’m not actually sorry.

This is because I’ve only had internet access for half the days out of the past two weeks and during the days I did have internet access, I was studying for the GMAT. La vie! But the GMAT is done now and my internet access is back, so voilà, an update!

The reason I have been sans internet is, well, ok, there are two reasons. Actually, after I took the GMAT Friday the internet was down at the house, but the week before I was on vacation with the family and thus, no internet. And since the last week has been pretty GMAT-centric, and therefore both boring and arduous, I’m going to go back a couple weeks and talk about vacation instead. The second reason is that once I got back from vacation it was super sketchy (and is still kind of so) and it kept (keeps) being on for an hour or two and lulling me into a false sense of security and then traitorously disappearing.

Anyway, vacation. The dad had to work, but the mom and the three kids and I went to Île de Ré, an island of the western coast of France where the maternal grandparents have a house. It was lovely – the house, the island, the extended family, all of it. The mom's older brothers were there, the married one accompanied by his wife and three sons (the youngest is 14 mo).

Mind, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Two of the cousins are twin 5 year-old boys. You may remember that the youngest of my kids is also a 5 year-old boy. Good kids, all, but let me tell you, 3 x (five year old boy) does NOT equal 3 children. The increase in energy and noise levels with each additional boy is kind of exponential … it’s like dealing with 9 normal children.

Here are some other, equally scientific facts that I learned from the boys:

1. The amount of sand contained in one pocket after an hour at the beach = 2 x (volume of said pocket)

2. The amount of sand contained in the shoes of three boys after an hour at the beach does not have an equation because it defies expectation, logic, the laws of mathematics, the laws of physics and possibly the law of gravity.

3. It is only possible for you, the babysitter, to be in one place at a time. When you are with 6 kids, however, it is possible for them, collectively, to be in 15 different places at any given moment, at least 4 of which involve some activity they are not allowed to do.

Looking back at what I’ve already written, I’m afraid I’m making it sound like I spent the entire week running around desperately, frazzled and at my wit’s end as the children apparated around the island. This was not the case. Mostly it was a great week, and it was nice to be away from the routine of normal life - and what a place to be for that! The island is beautiful, after all. Evidence below.

The houses are almost all like this – white, with the green doors and shutters. We were in one town and I got to visit two more, which is where the pictures of the harbors come from. Picturesque, non? And I tried all kinds of seafood: oysters (not a fan, I have say), mussels, shrimp, prawns and goodness knows what else. And while I didn’t love everything, I’m glad I had the chance to try it all.

So yes, I did spend a week with a fair number of children. But hey, I have cousins so that wasn't really anything new. And I did have the chance to explore a really lovely part of France that has a very distinctive culture and ... decor? style? Not sure what the correct word would be there. Regardless, it was very relaxing and I think I'll be going back at Easter!

Dear Art Nouveau furniture: Why yes, I would like to be a part of your awesome, thanks.

Oh Musée d'Orsay ... I went into you expecting to be thrilled by your display of impressionist art, to have my eyes astounded by Renoir and Degas and Monet, to be fascinated by the adaptation of train station into museum. And just as I expected, I was thrilled, astounded and fascinated.

BUT a new joy also entered my life: art nouveau furniture. A void in my life that I didn't even know existed has been filled!

And ok, yes, I may be letting my inner need for melodrama get away from me a bit there, but really, it's hard to express how much I loved the museum and especially the (wait for it!) art nouveau furniture.

The museum is, simply put, beautiful. It was built around 1900, I think (NB - yes, it was built between 1898 and 1900, as confirmed by wikipedia) as a train station, and it has a huge vaulted ceiling running down the middle of the building, with smaller side, well, aisles, for lack of a better word. The flowered recessed coffers covering the main vault are a little much for my taste, but in between them the vault is made of slightly clouded glass, and the overall effect is of a huge, open, airy space. They're doing some work in one part of the museum at the moment, so some things are a bit rearranged, but I actually liked having the sculpture down the middle aisle. It seemed a bit haphazard at times, but I enjoyed the effect.

Most of the Monets are, sadly, at an exhibition at the Grand Palais right now (thought it's not that sad because if all goes according to plan that's where I'll be on Saturday) so I didn't see many of them. But I did see some gorgeous Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh paintings, not to mention tons of other incredible impressionist, pos- impressionist and symbolist work. Sorry if I'm boring anyone here, but I loved getting to see stuff that I'd only ever seen in tiny textbook reproductions, and I'm still kind of hugely excited.

Okay, I lied, I'm not sorry at all if I'm boring any one - impressionism rocks. So I'm going to keep talking about art. And furniture. Oh, but first! I almost forgot. One of the exhibits was about the Paris Opera House, so they'd done little miniatures of the buildings that were cut away so that you could see what they looked like inside. And set into the floors under (presumably) very thick glass was a model of the Opera as seen from above, including the streets and buildings around it, so you could actually walk over it and look down at the models from above. Super cool, or, as the children would say, hyper-cool (pronounced "eeper-cool").

But my favorite part of the museum was not whay I was expecting because I didn't actually know it would be there: the art nouveau furniture.

Y'all. It's gorgeous. It's all about naturalism and flowing lines and elegance. I loved it. I have, for everyone's benefit and my personal enjoyment, included pictures that I did not take, but that I found through google images. Hopefully this only breaks one or two copyright laws, and not a lot.

That's actually in the museum, although I didn't take the pic (apparently Hervé Levandowski did, but I couldn't because lesser mortals are not allowed to take photographs in the museum). Anyway, I love it. Below are more examples. Feast your eyes.

It is, I suppose, possible that some of you did not want to look at this many pictures of art nouveau beds and would not otherwise have done so. It's okay, you may express your thanks for my broadening of your horizons by sending chocolate.

Also, as I was writing this post I ended up feeling like: 1. It was sort of getting away from the original intent, whatever that was, and 2. It neither had a point nor was particularly enlightening as to my daily life and activities.

I have decided to leave it as it is, though, because my weekends in Paris - and going to museums like the Musee d'Orsay (and seriously, if you don't know what the building looks like, you need to google it) are one of the reasons (second to French) that I'm here. So there you go! You now have your fill of early 20th century French art for the day!

Transportation strikes

This is the new entry for one of the following life lists: "Things I Like" or "Things I Don't Like." Guess which one it's for.

(Psst ... if you guessed that "transportation strikes" goes on "Things I Like" then you should reconsider your answer. Just a hint)

So yeah, there is in fact a large transportation strike going on here at the moment. They're protesting the proposal to raise the retirement age to 62, and there's been pretty wide-spread participation. According to the mom here, who works in the French education system, it's been causing unrest in schools, too, since some of the teachers in public schools are striking and there have been student demonstrations at several high schools, some of which got violent.

My experience with the strike, though, is pretty much limited to yesterday. Or early this morning, if you want to be all technical and accurate. I went to into Paris in the early afternoon to visit the Musée d'Orsay (more on that later, for now, two words: So. Awesome.) and then met up with some other au pairs in the evening. I knew they were planning to stay quite late, but I'm not exactly a night owl, so I decided to catch the 11:23 train from Gare Saint Lazare back to Villennes sur Seine, the itsy-bitsy town a few km from us (no idea why they have a train station and we don't) where I'd left the car.

Yeah, well, because of the strike the online info about train times was wrong and the only train running to Villennes last night was what is normally the last train of the night, the 1:03. I had been told to avoid the last train and the first metro runs because they're super sketchy, so I wasn't about to take it by myself. Villennes, where I get off, is an adorable town of a few thousand, and perfectly safe. Some of other stops on the train are less sleepy and reassuring. Like Poissy which, while fine in the daytime, has been characterized by one of the other girls as "that town where all the criminals live." That is not strictly true, since lots of nice people live there as well, but it is a little creepy to be in the Poissy Gare Sud late at night. Fortunately for me, one of the other girls decided she didn't feel like staying out last night either, so we caught the 1:03 together and everything was fine.

Well, fine in the sense that we got to Villennes and back home without any trouble, not fine in the sense of getting home when I wanted to or in the sense of not having to take the sketchy train or in the sense of not having to sit around Saint Lazare much longer than I planned. Not fine in those ways, but fine in the I-was-totally-safe way.

Actually, because of the strike lots of other people were, just like us, forced to take the 1:03 rather than an earlier train, so I felt more secure than I otherwise would've on a train that late. But that twisted benefit of the strike did not, at all, outweigh the serious inconvenience of having to wait nearly 2 hours longer than I expected to have to wait. At all.

And I know that's sort of the point of strikes like this, to make the public sit up and pay attention to the cause, but I cannot tell a lie: mostly I just thought, "Ok, yeah, they want to raise the retirement age 2 years, but doesn't everywhere else in Europe except Russia have a higher retirement age than 62 already? And seriously, it's cold in this station. So start working again so that I can catch a normal train. Thanks."

This is perhaps not the kindest or best approach to addressing what may be legitimate grievances. But it was cold at Saint Lazare, so my sympathy was kind of (very) limited.

I hope they can get the strike issues worked out though, because while it doesn't really bother me during the week (we have to drive to our French classes anyway because even when they aren't on strike the buses don't run at times that work for us), lots of other girls in my French class need public transportation to get to and from class and aren't able to get - or have to come really early/leave really late because only every second bus is running (there's still some transportation available, it's just limited).

Okay, but my next entry will be about the Musée d'Orsay! I wanted to do one entry for both, so that I could end on a happy note, but this kind of got away from me and is super long, so ... yeah, it'll have to wait. Next time: art! windows! awesome furniture! impressionism! picture taken illegally inside museum! Yeah, you know you're super excited.