i'm back.

I spent the weekend horseback riding around the bay of Mont St. Michel. It was one of the most awesome things I've ever done, and also one of the most painful. By midday Saturday, my knees were in open revolt. I couldn't even tell you how many Advil I've taken today. Pictures will be forthcoming; I have a bunch of those. Also stories. Ask me about the one where we gallop madly along a gravel road through the gorgeous French countryside. And the one where a girl and her horse fall dramatically into a hole in the middle of a river in the middle of the bay area while a thunderstorm is coming up and you can practically hear the Jaws theme playing. Doom doom doom doom doom.

Nobody died, but it was rather a close thing. I'll tell you about it later.

barcelona photos

I have a lot of pictures. I'll get all my spring break stuff up eventually, I promise, but it's going to take a while. For starters, here's some Barcelona. Did you know they speak Catalan there? I didn't. They all speak Castellano too, but due to a history of separatist movements and a big dose of nationalism, speaking primarily Catalan is a big point of pride.

We stayed in a cheap hotel in the Gothic Quarter, near Las Ramblas and not far from the waterfront. Skye's friend Caitlin showed us around a bit and we ate a lot of falafel. I don't really have the energy to go into detail about all of this, so I'm just going to put up the pictures. Barcelona was fun, but we were there for the only four days of bad weather they've had all year.

Out the window of our hotel, looking down towards Las Ramblas:



The entrance to the market off Las Ramblas (fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, entire baby pigs in refrigerated cases, fresh fruit juice, candied pineapples, expensive chocolates, candy in the shape of a fried egg):



The market:



Skye and our fruit juices:



Because the weather was nasty and we couldn't go to the beach, we saw a looooot of Gaudi architecture. This is the interior of the Sagrada Familia, which is not yet completed. A cathedral Gaudi-style:



This is all Sagrada Familia and a view of Barcelona from the top of one of the towers.











Las Ramblas:



Facade of a Gaudi house, La Pedrera:



Roof of said Gaudi house (or properly, apartment building):



Interior courtyard:



And mosaic on a ceiling:



Facade of La Pedrera:



Tapas! Definitely one of the best things about Barcelona:



Parc Guell (Gaudi-designed); the iguana is very famous, apparently. I rather liked him.





A house in Parc Guell, where Gaudi lived for a while but which he did not design:



These tiles are all over Barcelona's streets; they're mockups of tiles Gaudi put in the children's bedroom of at least one apartment in La Pedrera.



The rest of this is Parc Guell and a view of Barcelona towards the Mediterranean.













The beach, overcast:



The waterfront:



The Gaudi house we didn't make it to, Casa Batllo -- we tried, but couldn't find it. I saw it out the window of the airport shuttle the day I was leaving, in a totally obvious location that we just completely missed.



So there! Barcelona. It was cool. But I definitely heard more English, German and Italian than Spanish. Also Catalan -- I am unclear as to why there are so many American students studying Spanish there, since it's definitely a secondary language. Even all the signs and menus are in Catalan.

rage

I really, really thought, given that I live in a ridiculously exclusive apartment building in a ridiculously exclusive arrondissement in a ridiculously exclusive city, I would have escaped the scourge of American college students playing their horrific dance music at horrific volumes at all hours.

Not so. Not so.

I really, really hate these people.

Also, hi! I'm back from Barcelona. It was fun. I have lots of pictures. You'll see them later.

edit: Sorry, that was really whiny. I plead exhaustion. Also foiled expectations.

a couple photos of the seine, and new shoes.

The weather here is gorgeous. The other day I went for a walk along the Seine; I had a lovely picture of the sun on the water, but I got so caught up in the frenzy of deleting over a hundred Loire photos from my camera that I accidently erased it. Oops.



I walked along the island that runs through the middle of the Seine for a fair distance. I was, in succession, surrounded by a mob of German tourists in backpacks, surrounded by a mob of French mothers pushing baby strollers, surrounded by a mob of Amerian tourists, and then, when I thought I was free of them, I walked right through a wedding-photo session. They were a very cute young couple, maybe 25, Asian, very sparkly in general; I couldn't figure out, though, why they were doing their wedding photos underneath a bridge. Later they drove by me in a giant black SUV piloted by two stern-looking old men. And then I ran up on the Statue of Liberty.



And crossed to the other side of the Seine and took a boat photo. Skye met a girl at one of her open mikes who lives on one of these boats; she apparently has stories about people coming to her parties, getting drunk, and falling in the Seine, which is probably the nastiest river to fall into, ever. At least it's not the Revolution and they're throwing corpses in it.



Printemps was perhap less successful than I'd have liked, but in addition to a headache I got these shoes. They are possibly the most ridiculous shoes I own. They're sold as "bath shoes," which probably just means that they're so shoddily made Printemps won't vouch for them holding up in anything but a shower. Oh well. Can we ignore how weird my feet look in this photo, and focus on how weird the shoes look in this photo?



Gosh they're bright. That's the imprint of my jeans in my leg from sitting on it funny, in case you're wondering why I look all wrinkly.

vassar-wesleyan theme song

The program director's kids. They are completely insane.

les vacances

I am officially on spring break. Easter break, actually; it strikes me as somewhat odd that France, being such a resolutely secular country, insists on calling this les vacances de Paques. Anyway, I have two weeks. From Tuesday to Saturday I'll be in Barcelona, and from Sunday to the next Saturday Mom will be here. I'm allowing myself to actually feel like I'm on break now, because I finished my European Union paper -- twelve pages in French in a subject that is totally new to me, no paper will ever be hard again. Actually I still have to do my footnotes etc, but today I'm celebrating. I.e., Skye and I are going shopping. There's this semi-legendary French department store called Printemps (fittingly, "spring") that we have to check out. Obviously.

The weather is ridiculous -- mid to high sixties and sunny all week. (Here. In Barcelona, it's supposed to rain, Tuesday through Friday. Oh well.) There are a bunch of museums I want to go to (Picasso museum, museum of medieval archaeology, the Orangerie, where Monet's waterlily paintings are), but I think they're all going to be closed Sunday and Monday because of Easter. How inconvenienced I am.

What I really want is a sugar crepe. I am addicted, and the crepe stand near my house has been closed for a week. These people are not allowed to take a vacation right now, I need crepes! Now if you'll excuse me. Perhaps there are some crepe stands over by Printemps.

enfin, bref.

A few remarks, in no particular order:

The faux-hawk appears to be the hairstyle of choice for young Asian men in Paris.

Today I saw a line of Sarkozy posters, maybe twenty of them, in which his face had been violently and specifically torn out of each one. (Nicholas Sarkozy, for those of you just joining us, is the right-wing candidate for French president.)

The FCC has ruled that using cell phones will (still) not be allowed on planes. Allow me to do a little jig of joy.

A man appeared to me on the subway today wearing a strand of parsley about his neck, possibly to ward off vegetarian vampires. Or carnivorous ones. I haven't worked this idea out fully.

panda sneeze

Eventually I will stop posting cute videos -- but not yet. Oh no, NOT YET.

on pronunciation

Hey Londonderry, New Hampshire:

You pronounce "les Invalides" "lay-zahn-vah-leed". There's a bit of slurring together between the words. I cannot figure out how to transcribe the A sound there, though. There's sort of an I in it too.

Sheesh, the weird ways people find this blog.