My Favorite Experiences So Far

– seeing the Venus de Milo at the Louvre

– visiting Château Chenonceau, in the Loire Valley

– stumbling across views of the Eiffel Tower without seeking them out

My first sighting of the Eiffel Tower was my second week in Paris; from the top of Montmartre, I glimpsed the tower through the trees. Then a week later I caught a view of the tower from between two buildings in the 15e. Finally, 4 weeks in, I walked underneath the tower and took photos with it. But my favorite is still the sudden, surprise views I get of it sometimes: This week I turned around on my way to class for some reason and saw the Eiffel Tower across the Luxembourg Gardens — I’d been walking that route at least once a day but had never looked back before! A few days ago, I was walking along the Seine in the rain and saw the Eiffel Tower beautifully shrouded in fog. 

– going on the terrace of the Institut Arabe, and the hypostyle room

– seeing Frozen in French

La Reine des Neiges was amazing, even the 4th time — I don’t think I’ll ever tire of seeing it! I am proud to say that I now have all the lyrics to “Liberee, Delivree” memorized (that’s “Let it Go”), and I’m working on “Je vais feter ce renouveau” (“For the First Time in Forever”).  I really love the French versions of the songs — while some things are lost in translation, like the open door imagery (the French version of “Love is an Open Door” translates to “Love is a Gift”), other unique imagery is created (in “Do you want to build a snowman,” Anna sings that it’s like her sister has turned to ice). 

– walking through the Luxembourg Gardens

I hadn’t been doing this often enough, but now I’m taking more time to enjoy them when I have time between classes.

– couscous dinner at Chez Mamane

While looking for a restaurant in the 13e arrondisement, some other CUPA students and I found a place that serves nothing but cous cous. You order the meat you want, and it arrives accompanied by a gigantic platter of cous cous and bowl of vegetable stew to share. They also had some very intriguing Algerian wine that was unlike anything I had ever tasted before.

– 12-piece string orchestra in Châtelet metro

– Onéguine ballet

I haven’t seen that much ballet, and so this was a great experience. The piece is based on the story of Pushkin’s novel Eugène Onéguine, set to lesser-known music by Tchaikovsky, and choreographed by South African ballet dancer John Cranko.  It was absolutely beautiful.

– tea and fries at Turkish (?) place

This hole-in-the-wall restaurant is located near Sorbonne-Centre Clignancourt. Their menu is varied, so it’s hard to pin down whether they’re Turkish, Greek, or something else along those lines, but whatever their cuisine it’s cheap and delicious. I had the chicken cordon bleu sandwich both times I went. I guess the servers remembered me the second time, because despite ordering the sandwich instead of the menu they gave me a helping of their signature fries and offered me sweet honeyed mint tea, similar to the tea I drank at the Mosquée.

– walking through the courtyard of la Sorbonne

I never fail to be amazed by this! And because of my class schedule, I have the opportunity to see it at all times of day. 

– Julien

Julien is officially my favorite boulangerie. They’re right near CUPA, so I fell in love with them early and since a lot of my classes are still nearby, I go back several times a week. Their chocolat chaud is delicious, and I love their jambon-beurre sandwiches, but my favorite is days where they have their saumon-épinard quiche, which they serve hot. Their pastries are also wonderful!

– 2 encores by Lise de la Salle

– Mariage Frères tea

There is a wonderful crêpe place in Pittsburgh that imports Mariage Frères tea, which is where I was first introduced to it. After daydreaming of it for weeks, I finally went, and wow was it worth the steep price tag. I can’t say enough good things about it. The tea (I ordered Thé de Lune) was delicate enough to drink without milk, and the teapot contained a good 4 or 5 cups worth. The dessert was even more amazing — a Splendeur de Tibet which was a Marco Polo tea-infused crème brûlée topped with the first berries I’ve had since arriving in France. I went with my first new French friend and we sat there for a good two hours eating and talking. 

French Weekly, Week 5

Note: many of these words have further meanings; these are just the meanings of them that I learned at the time!

Dandiner = To waddle

Dégringoler = To tumble down, to fall from a great height (dégringolade = fall, tumble)

Étreindre = to embrace in your arms , to hug, to clasp (in some scenarios, can also mean “to choke” as in an oppressive feeling)

Épopée = epic poem, saga

Ébloui = dazzled (eblouir = to dazzle)

Se givrer =  to ice over (givre = frost, givrer = to frost, to ice over)

Gâché = scarred (gâcher = to waste, to botch, to ruin)

Esquiver = to dodge, to evade, to shirk

Cible = target, objective

Comble = attic/space under the roof, limit, crowning moment (this is a complicated word, with many further nuances and meanings!)

Échafaudage = scaffolding

Grignoter = to snack, to nibble (grignotage = snacks, whittling away, erosion)

Louange = praise, word of praise

Lionceaux =lion cub

I am always hearing people talk about réseaux. <<Réseau routier>>, <<réseau de connaissances>>, <<activer son réseau>>…  Réseau just means network. But I find it interesting how often this word comes up in such a wide variety of contexts.

Faire une queue de poisson: I saw this expression on a poster, but I haven’t been able to find a good explanation for what it means yet (help?). Everything I’ve read so far says that faire une queue de poisson means passing someone on the road and cutting back in front of their car too soon, but this definitely doesn’t fit the context of the library poster. Whereas a similar expression, finir en queue de poisson, means something that finishes suddenly, in a disappointing manner, without giving the expected results (short article describing both expressions, albeit in French; and this one).

Many of the words this week are from my first French poetry class — that’s right, I’m going to be writing poetry in French. A tout à l’heure!

First Week of Classes

I would like to start off by apologizing for the length of this post….
This week was my much-anticipated first week of classes at La Sorbonne, and it feels like it went by so quickly.

Monday started off with me realizing how different travaux dirigés (TDs) can be from the recitations I’ve been trying to equate them with. My TD teacher for “The Architecture of Royal France” was over 50 and was certainly a professor in his own right. Our TD is going to focus on 18th Century Drawings, which other than the time period doesn’t seem to have much to do with the cours magistral. In addition, it appears as if the entirety of the work for this class is a 20-minute oral presentation. There might be a final exam, but since I don’t have to take it, it seems rather irrelevant. Where is all the work?!

Although when my TD classroom looks like this…. who cares?

My second course on Monday was the option for the architectural history course, which is all about the History of Gardens and also seems to be unrelated to the TD, although its definitely interesting. My final course of the day was my second week of Soil Mechanics at UPMC. While I’ve already taken soil mechanics, this course approaches the material in a different way and I’m learning a lot of vocabulary from it. It’s also a master’s level course here, which I find a little strange.

Malesherbes at 8 am

Tuesday started off on a rough note – my first class was an 8 am literature course at La Sorbonne’s Malesherbes campus, which is 45 minutes away by metro. It was still dark when I emerged from the metro at 8, and the literature course was two hours of relatively interesting but not especially enlightening material delivered by a not-too-engaging professor.

It was also a day of a lot of travel – I then headed off to Sorbonne-Clignancourt for a geography course called “Urban spaces and dynamics,” which was unfortunately pretty interesting. I say unfortunately because Clignancourt’s about as far away from where I live as you can get while only using the metro system, and I’d been hoping to not have to go twice a week. I then traveled even more for my first course at La Sorbonne’s historic campus, another literature course.  This one was reputed to be with an excellent lecturer, Patrick Dandrey, but the course kind of surpassed me once he launched into a comedic analysis of a piece by Moliere that I haven’t read yet (although luckily I’d heard of it and knew the plot!)

Locations of my various universities

Wednesday was a lighter day, with only 2 courses at centers of La Sorbonne that are located within walking distance of each other. The first was a history course titled “The France of Louis XIV”. It started off with the professor launching straight into his lecture about “Louis XIV: Warrior King or King of War” and ended with him offering up an optional-seeming bibliography with no comments. Syllabus week definitely doesn’t exist here. Sometimes syllabus minute doesn’t even exist! I left a little confused, with no overview of the course, no idea of the work required, and a 2-page bibliography of history books so long it would take over a year to read them all.

The afternoon improved with my cours magistral for the architectural history course. It was very interesting, although I had the same problem as I’ve had in many of my other courses — they’re mostly third year courses, which means that its the students’ final semester of their degree, which means that most of the other students have a very high level of knowledge in this specialization. I, on the other hand, have almost no knowledge of the subject and therefore taking notes is extremely difficult. However, this class was better than most because at least I have a base in architectural history and so I was able to process the lecture instead of just madly trying and failing to write down everything the professor says while I try to catch up. After class, I approached another student to ask for note-taking advice and she offered to send me her lovely, typed-up notes. This also marked a turning point in my week of how upbeat and capable I felt.

My first attempts at note-taking.

Thursday almost started off the same way as Tuesday, but when I was still in bed at 7 am I had a conversation with myself and decided that it wasn’t realistic to expect myself to go to an 8 am class at Malesherbes twice a week. This was also a great way to eliminate a course from my list, something that I’m having trouble doing so far. So I slept in and just went to my TDs for Urban Spaces and Louis XIV.

These TDs were also quite different: Urban Spaces was much more similar to the recitation style I’m familiar with, although the material covered seems to be very separate from the material covered in the main lecture. Louis XIV finally explained the work for the class, and provided an outline — although it’s a TD outline, not a cours magistral outline. The second half of the TD was spent preparing a commentary outline in a group and then presenting them, which was surprisingly enjoyable, especially since I met two French students in the process.

The lovely Sorbonne Historique

Friday was long. Only two classes, but the first was a 3-hour literature TD and the second was my 4-hour Geotechnical Engineering course, so it really added up! The TD was fun and made me reconsider whether I wanted to drop the literature course. I have a computer account at UPMC now, so Geotechnical was a lot more enjoyable because I had my own computer to work on and didn’t have to share.

In retrospective, the worst thing about this week has been the callus and taut tendon I’m developing in my right hand. I’ve done about 20 hours of fast-paced writing this week, resulting in 33.5 pages of notes (record so far for one class: 7 pages for a 2-hour class), and my hand is definitely feeling it. How to take notes in these classes definitely confuses me. Some students take 10 pages of the most detailed notes possible in a Word document. Some only jot down vague outlines of notes in a Google doc. Some write absolutely every word that comes out of the professor’s mouth at lightning speed in narrow handwriting. Some neatly and thoughtfully print out a sentence every minute or so. Hopefully it’ll get better next week when I start taking some of my notes on a laptop!

French Weekly, Week 4

Note: many of these words have further meanings; these are just the meanings of them that I learned at the time!

Raccommodage = mending (can also be verbified: raccommodager = to mend)

Reliure = book cover, binding
Aire de jeu = playground
Grimoire= book of magic spells

A word I constantly want to use is “block,” as in, “walk two blocks then turn left”. But the French don’t really have a simple word for this. The closest compromises I’ve found are “paté de maisons,” or saying “it’s two roads from here”.

Engineering Vocabulary:
Béton = concrete
Poutre = beam
Chargé = loaded
Tassement = settlement
Contrainte = stress (ex: la contrainte normale = normal stress)
Traction = tension
Cisaillement = shearing

Course Schedule, Draft 6

Course selection in French universities has been a very strange process for me. I’m used to thumbing through the online course catalog the instant it’s released, having several courses I need to take for my major fill most of my credit allotment, choosing 1-2 extra courses, and using an app to help me craft a final schedule. This semester, I consulted 5 different course catalogs, along with professor evaluations for each (although most of my potential professors didn’t appear in the list of evaluations). Luckily all of my courses has posted hours already (yes, that’s lucky in the French university system!), so I painstakingly drew out schedules by hand and experienced a tiny pang of sadness every time two courses I really wanted to take conflicted. I turned in several different drafts of my list of courses to CUPA, attempting to winnow it each time but usually failing miserably.

I resorted to using my best friend, Microsoft Excel, to help me with my final selection. After much deliberation, my course schedule ended up looking pretty much like my schedule does every semester: overfull, with classes in a variety of subjects, and organized in such a way that I’d need a time turner to handle it. Luckily for me, while classes at the Sorbonne begin tomorrow, classes at Paris 8 – Saint Denis don’t start until February 10th and so I have the opportunity to try out a bunch of classes this week, and then if I don’t like them, try out even more at Paris 8 next week. The highlighted courses are my first choices for courses to attend.

In reality, a few of my classes have already started — I’ve attended 3 courses at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and I’m planning on staying in one (or maybe two) of them — but courses at La Sorbonne begin tomorrow, and since that’s where the bulk of my courses will likely end up being held, this week is going to be very busy for me.

I’ll be back with more updates soon!