Culture & Studies

If I haven’t written in a while, it’s because I’m been completely busy. Well, that’s not true, but I’ve certainly been finding ways to occupy my time.

I have 5 CUPA spectacles in a 2 ½ week period, the last one of which is tonight. CUPA spectacles are pretty awesome; at the beginning of the semester, we pick four shows we want to go to out of a list of operas, plays, concerts, and dance shows. But we can also sign up on waitlists for the other shows, which resulted in me ending up with eight different tickets (as of this writing – who knows what the next month holds!). This past Monday was Die Zauberflöte, or the Magic Flute. It was… bizarre, in a word. I expected something very spectacularly operatic, but it was a very pared-down modern version. Instead of the Queen of the Night flying in in a big dress, you didn’t even realize it was her until she started trying to seduce Tamino. In this version, the opera’s Masonic themes were glaringly obvious, never more so than when all 67 singers, clothed in black and wearing opaque veils, stood in a giant circle and chanted as Tamino and Papageno descended into a tomb. And with all of the pomp and circumstance and flying stripped away, you also realize some of the sexism and racism in the opera that you’d never noticed before.

The following night was “Un chapeau de paille d’Italie” at la Commédie Française, which is the story of a man whose horse eats a woman’s hat on his wedding day, and he spends the whole play running around visiting different people to try and find an identical copy of her hat while avoiding letting his betrothed know about it. It was definitely amusing, made more so by the artistic decision to add an electric guitarist and a violinist to the cast and have a good third of the lines in the play be sung along to very modern music. This Monday was another show at la Commédie Française, although this time a tragedy: Andromaque. I will admit to falling asleep for morsels of it, but I also really enjoyed it. The actors were all pretty powerful, especially the actresses playing Andromaque and Hermione. Hermione was without doubt my favorite – I really liked the actress’ portrayal of her. I also liked the actress playing her handmaiden, Cléone; she had a really interesting voice and look, both of which reminded me of Audrey Tautou.

Tonight is “Le Faiseur,” a play by Balzac.

School has been fairly hard, especially last week. Monday was my first major assignment, an exposé for my “Drawings of the 18^th century” class. This is a 20-25 minute presentation on the artist we were assigned, inclusive of an artistic analysis of his work and career across one particular piece of his art. I was given Pieter Boel, and so spent all weekend finalizing my presentation on his ostrich sketches and paintings. I was nervous, and so worried about messing up grammar or forgetting important technical vocabulary that I ended up pretty much reading my entire presentation straight from the document I’d typed up, except for when I was pointing something out on my powerpoint. My presentation was also too short, but overall I’m pretty happy with how it went.

A Pieter Boel sketch of ostrich legs

 

Thursday night was my France of Louis XIV TD. I was expecting a slow class, since it was only expected to be 45 minutes long – but just the opposite! The student who was supposed to give the oral commentary sent our professor an e-mail right before class saying that they weren’t going to show up. So our professor dealt with it by having us write a commentary on the assigned text in the 45 minutes of classtime instead. I was so unprepared for this. The last commentary I wrote in French was on the French A1 IB exam, almost three years ago. In fact, I think that may have been the last commentary I wrote in any language. So to say I’m rusty is a bit of an understatement. Still, it probably went okay; I’m just going to have to wait to find out. Tomorrow is another written assignment for the same class, a dissertation-type piece, but while I’m not looking forward to it at least we’re expecting this one!

My demi-pointes for dance class!

 

My dance class is a lot of fun. I’m taking classical dance at the Centre de Danse du Marais, and I go there 2-3 times each week. I had my 8^th class yesterday (my 5^th of full classical dance – the others are Barre au Sol classes that work on classical dance exercises on the floor) and I feel like I’m definitely getting a lot better. My teacher even said so after class yesterday! Up until yesterday I was the newest student, but when two newer students joined I could finally see how much I have improved.

Tuesday was made even better by going out to a lovely lunch with another CUPA student after dance class and having a wonderful conversation completely in French.

Tagliatelle carbonara and white wine

 

I also went shopping on Friday because Yves Rocher was having a 50% off sale, so now I’m fully stocked up on a variety of very French skin products, which I’m excited to try out. After all the walking I did this weekend (an update on that coming up soon!), the foot scrub is definitely my current favorite.

À bientôt!

P.S. “Le Faiseur” was fantastic! I loved the play, the ABBA music they inserted, and the actors, but the set was my absolute favorite. It was a three-piece moving set, with doors and trapdoors and parts that flipped up to become doorways. The set also changed to various levels of steepness to reflect events in the play,  leaving the actors to loom over each other or slip down the inclines in different scenes.

The Beautiful Road to Rouen

Last week was my winter vacation at La Sorbonne, and so I booked last-minute train tickets and headed out to the train station first thing Wednesday morning, arriving in Rouen at 9am. The day started off dreary – rainy, cold, and I was feeling a little tired and unadventurous due to lack of sleep. I hung out in the tourist office for a while, going over maps and trying to figure out what I wanted to do (also avoiding the cold).

My trusty map, now a little worse for wear.

But soon enough I was on my feet, crossing the square to tour Rouen’s well-known cathedral, made famous by Monet’s series paintings. I suppose my expectations were too high, but it didn’t really impress me. It was cold inside, so big that it was empty-feeling, and filled with a lot of very white light. The facade so adored by Monet was also being cleaned, and so it was partially covered with white tarps.

But as soon as I exited the cathedral, everything changed. The sun was out, filling the plaza with warmth. I began to feel awake, excited, and ready to explore. I first stumbled across the church of Saint-Maclou, which in my opinion has an even more stunning exterior than the cathedral, and is even prettier because of its smaller size. I then wandered the streets for another hour, checking out lunch possibilities and wondering at the huge number of timber-framed houses, charming and painted in an amazing range of colors.

 

These buildings were no doubt my favorite part of Rouen. Initially I thought they were rare, occasional leftovers from the Middle Ages, but I soon discovered how wrong I was — apparently there are over 2000 half-timber houses in Rouen today. Then I thought I’d seen all possible types of houses, but even at the very end of my visit the city was still surprising me with new colors, new textures, and new architectures.

  

I was really excited about the place I’d chosen for lunch, but both the seafood and the white wine ended up being disappointing. After my very leisurely sunlit lunch I checked in at my hotel and relaxed there for a little bit before visiting the Gros-Horloge, which was probably the best part of my day.

It’s a clocktower, with beautiful twin clockfaces that tell not only the time of day but also the moon cycle and the day of the week. It has one of the most ancient clock mechanisms in France, installed in 1389. What’s also cool about the clock is that its mechanism isn’t behind the clock face; it’s actually located at the top of the clocktower, a good 4-5 stories higher and to the side. I climbed all the way to the top, where there’s a balcony that gives you a 360° view of the city. The sun was just starting to set, the view was amazing, the light was perfect…

   

From the city, you don’t even realize how huge the cathedral is until you take a step back, or rather up. Afterwards I returned to my hotel and sort of took a nap… I ended up trying to get dinner very late, and so the only restaurant that was still open was the same place I’d eaten lunch. Luckily, this time it was delicious. I had lamb in a jus de thym, tender and succulent and perfectly rosé, accompanied by a vin rouge de Bourgogne.

I didn’t leave the restaurant until 11:30, and then I spent the next hour wandering around the city center taking more photos. I ended up with a couple perfect cathedral night photos that I’m pretty proud of, because I had to be patient and inventive because I didn’t have a tripod; trying to hold completely still for 30 seconds is hard! And pressing your camera against a rock wall while leaning into a fence gives you a whole new appreciation for the meaning of awkward positioning. While I was taking this one photo on a side street, this young couple loaned out the window and asked what I was taking a photo of, which was amusing — I must have looked a little creepy, squatting in the street outside their house! I also stumbled across this one street that I’d just read about in an article over dinner — La Rue des Chanoines, a narrow road unchanged since the 15th century.

Photo of the cathedral spire taken from Rue des Chanoines

I slept in a bit the next morning, recovering from my evening escapades. Breakfast became a tea and pain aux amandes avec chocolat from Paul (which is a popular French bakery chain).

This breakfast with this view.

My first stop of the day was at the Abbée de St. Ouen. The space was tall and open and filled with lovely stained glass windows.

I wandered some more (there was definitely a wandering theme to this visit!) until I found a bakery selling avocado-salmon sandwiches. After lunch, I spent two hours at the Musée des Beaux Arts, which was enough time to see it in its entirety. I even got lost once and ended up in security corridor. A kind security guard showed me the way back to the exhibits, but along the way I saw a room full of sculptures not on display!

My favorite room was one that was full of impressionist paintings. It was very peaceful, being surrounded by Monets and Sibleys and Fréchons. There was also an incredibly detailed wood painting which as I photographed I got closer and closer to, trying to capture the detail, every instant expecting to press my camera up against glass… until suddenly I was looking at it from an inch away, and I realized the reason it was so clear is that there wasn’t any glass.

It was pouring down rain when I left, but this was different from yesterday’s rain; lighter, beautiful, more uplifting (or maybe it was just my perspective that had changed). As I arrived in the Place du Vieux Marché, the light transformed the rain into a sunshower, golden droplets misting down to bathe everything in a golden glow. It’s completely true, what they say about the lights in Rouen, how it’s the most beautiful in the world.

Rainshine!

L’Eglise Jeanne d’Arc was modern, but beautiful. I really loved its shape, like an upturned boat or a great fish rising out of the ground. After seeing the church I spent my last hour visiting a few different chocolatiers, buying small selections at each, finally buying those mini chocolate beignets I’d had my eye on the whole time, still feeling amazed every time I saw a new timber house…

I love Rouen. It was very tempting to just stay and catch  a later train back to Paris, but I headed back to the train station for my 4:00 train anyway. It wasn’t until I was on the train home that I realized that this was my second ever completely solo trip, where I’d planned everything from the transportation to the hotel room to the itinerary completely alone. Just as there’s something magical about sharing a special place with another person, there’s also something completely magical about having that place all to yourself to discover.

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!

Orientation

At this point, I have been through too many Orientations to count (not really). You’d think it might have lost a little bit of its lustre by now, but I still think every day of Orientation is the most exciting thing. Whereas over the weekend I could barely drag myself out of bed, these past three days I have practically bounded out the door. I showed up 15 minutes early on the first day, although those of you who know me will probably find that difficult to believe.

This orientation experience, unlike the previous three, is actually a three-week long process composed mostly of classes. Yes, there are social activities and yes, there are city explorations and yes, there are lots of new friends. But this is an academic orientation above all. I have 10 hours of class on the methodology of the French University, which is both an incredibly fascinating cultural introduction to the French and probably the most useful orientation lecture I’ve ever had. I also have 16 hours of French language instruction and 4 hours of French conversation workshop. And in between all of this, I have classes on how to select courses, immigration information sessions, university tours, and course selection meetings.

As for the food…. Yesterday, I discovered a new crêpe and panini stand with some other CUPA students. I bought a soft ham, tomato, and mozzarella baguette panini and a bunch of us ate together while wandering the Jardin de Luxembourg.

Then in the afternoon I purchased my first French crêpe from a stand on Boulevard du Montparnasse and ate it while wandering the sunny street. Buttery, sugary, and crisped to perfection.

Today wasn’t quite as pleasant outdoors; it was drizzling and so me and two other girls ended up in an indoor crêpe restaurant, ordering the prix fixe (fixed price) menu. Luckily I was very hungry, because it was a lot of food! The meal started off with a savory galette (pictured below) which was so huge I could barely finish it despite my hunger, and was followed by a sweet dark chocolate crêpe.

Even more impressive, the three of us spoke completely in French for the entire hour that it took us to eat! Yes, we’re all pretty much fluent in the language, but I still consider it an accomplishment. While meeting completely new people, it is all too easy to morph back into using English outside the CUPA offices because we don’t have the rapidity of language necessary to get to know each other as quickly as we would like. When you know that you could express yourself better in a different language and be understood better, it’s very difficult to have the willpower to keep speaking French.