We are all worms in the graveyard of life

Or such is the theme suggested by this new and frightening addition to the Louvre:

He even has little hairs on his head. Terrifying.

Did you know you're allowed to take your art supplies into the Louvre and make copies of famous paintings?

This was taken a few weeks ago at La Duree, a chic "tea salon" near the Louvre. I went there with Lena and as you can see she purchased an $8 macaroon, but I contented myself with the overpriced hot chocolate. It blew my lunch budget for like two days but it was worth it to have my own little jug of what was essentially molten chocolate.

I had another awkward moment with my host family tonight, not that that will come as a surprise to anyone. You may recall, many posts in the past, when I told my host family about my love of Boursin cheese, and how they laughed at me because it is apparently a low-quality product in France. Well today I went to Monoprix with some friends, and I decided to buy some Boursin in a little tub. No one was at the apartment when I got home, so I wrote my name on it, put it in the fridge, and promptly fell asleep for an hour-long nap on my bed.

When I awoke dinner was ready, and upon entering the kitchen I spied my tub of Boursin sitting forlornly on the counter with my host parents in a confused debate as to its ownership.

"Did you buy it?"

"No, it's not mine. Maybe Louise bought it."

"Louise wouldn't buy that."

Then I had to explain, awkwardly, that it was mine ("I wrote my name on it... right there..") and my host mom looked at me with a pitying look reserved only for the most uncultured of Philistines.

"Well I guess we can put it in the drawer here, with the other... cheese."

Then as penance they made me try a bizarre jelly-like meat during dinner ("It's delicious, no? Eat it! It's good for the health!") that looked like a slice of brain tissue but luckily did not taste like it.

Other culinary adventures include last night when we had raw oysters for dinner, which was strange but surprisingly tasty. The shells were bigger than a fist and looked like weirdly deformed rocks, which you pry apart to expose the wiggly oyster innards. All I can say is that it's pretty fortunate that I'm not a picky eater, because we've had at least fifteen different meals that would have been decidedly unappetizing to a more conservative epicurean. But, as my host mom always says, "Il faut gouter!"

Des photos en Suisse

Happy days are here again! Lena uploaded her Switzerland pictures and now I can appropriate at will for you readers out there in blogland.

This is the underground archeological site I told you about at St. Pierre Cathedral in Geneva. I think in this picture I'm standing in a Roman baptistry.

The Allobrogian chieftain! He had no skull because some ancient persons dug it up, thinking it had mystical powers.

Breakfast and dishwashing at our Couchsurfer's apartment in Bern. Notice her little red fridge. Adorable.

Downtown Bern. That statue on the pole in the middle of the street is from the 1500s, and there are hundreds of different ones all over the city. They were put up before the streets had much traffic, so now the cars and trolleys have to weave around them. In the background is the Zytglogge, the medieval clock with the performing puppets.

It's comforting to know that no matter how far you get from home, there will always be a Body Shop nearby. Notice that this is also the last picture of me with my camera. :(

At the market in Bern there were lots of eggs because it was Easter weekend. The traditional egg-coloring method in Switzerland is to wrap onion skins around the eggs and secure them with a section of pantyhose, leaving some areas uncovered to form a design. Then they're boiled in water and the onion pigment transfers onto the egg as a beautiful reddish-brown tint.

I believe these eggs cost about $19 apiece. I did not buy any.

There was a playground in Bern. And we played on it.

On to the cheesemaking!

There were four of these giant vats in the Gruyere cheese factory, and each one holds enough milk to produce 12 rounds of cheese.

The cheesemaker does some quality control. You can see the lineup of round presses that turn the semi-solidified milk into cheese.

So much cheese! It's funny to think that the gruyere I buy in Ann Arbor at the imported cheese counter at Meijer probably came from this very room.

Outside the factory, we also got to watch this guy make gruyere the old-fashioned way-- in a copper kettle over a fire. The stringed instrument resting on the kettle is dragged through the milk to break up the solidifying mass.

Now for the shots you've all been waiting for...

The Swiss Alps!

And the Cutest Village on Earth Award goes to... Gruyere, Switzerland!

Now we shall skip ahead to Geneva, our last leg of the trip.

Here we have the St. Pierre Cathedral, adopted church of John Calvin and birthplace of Calvinism.

On display inside the church is the chair used by Calvin almost five hundred years ago.

And last but not least we have Lena in front of the Jet d'Eau in Lake Geneva. It's a city landmark and apparently the highest water fountain in the world.

So that was Switzerland. It makes me happy to have some pictures of it, even if the ones I took are gone. Good job, Lena. :)

Easter a la Suisse

Okay everyone: I am finally ready to talk about what happened in Switzerland. I know you're on the edge of your seats.

Today's entry will be especially unique because it includes no pictures whatsoever. There is a good reason (well, a devastatingly sad reason) for this, which I'll come to later. You'll just have to use your powers of imagination to conjure up images of all that I saw during my little vaycay.

Day -1: Thursday

At 10 P.M. on Holy Thursday, Lena and I were sitting outside the Paris Gallieni Euroline and Metro station, waiting for our overnight bus to Geneva. After a mere two-hour delay, it arrived and we were off on a European adventure! Sleeping on the bus proved difficult, but it didn't seem long at all until we were pulling up to the Swiss border, the first blue lights of morning illuminating the sky. It was at the customs point that we met a guy named Matt, a Canadian college student studying in Paris, who had relinquished his seat at the back of the bus in order to get away from some woman who spoke neither French, German, English, or Italian and was thus having trouble communicating with the border guards. Since Switzerland is a neutral country, the customs process is pretty intense. We had to go through two sets of security-- the French exit customs and the Swiss entrance customs, and of the two the French customs were much more serious. Matt told us that this was because the French government has to be concerned about people fleeing France to take refuge in Switzerland, since the Swiss will not necessarily take action against fugitives from other countries.

Day 1: Friday

We arrived in Geneva at around 8 o'clock in the morning, and the first order of business was to find an ATM and take out some money. Switzerland uses Swiss francs, which are currently trading at roughly the same rate as U.S. dollars. Matt led us to the Geneva train station, where we figured we could find the ATM as well as buy a roundtrip ticket to Bern, our other destination of interest. We located the ATM and I inserted my debit card, selected my withdrawal amount, and entered my PIN code. I waited for my money, but none came. A blinking message popped up on the screen.

"Card retained?!" I shrieked, staring at it in horror. "What does that mean?"

I pressed every button in sight, but with no success. As if mocking my distress, the machine blinked a few more times and spat out a receipt. "Your card has been retained. Please present this receipt to your local bank. Thank you!"

"Lena," I said, in a panic. "That machine ate my card! It won't give it back!"

Lena, wide-eyed with fear, slipped her own card back into her wallet.

After some Frenglish communications with the woman at the ticket booth, we were told that the man capable of getting the card back would not be at work until noon. Faced with a morning in Geneva and only slightly sickened by distress, I followed Matt and Lena away from the ATM of Doom. We ate breakfast at a pastry store in the train station ("Bonjour! Which of these pastries is the most typically Swiss?") and then stepped out on the streets of Geneva. The day was cold and rainy, and being that it was also Good Friday, all the stores were closed. After several windy, wet minutes of wandering, we came upon the St. Pierre Cathedral. It's quite an impressive structure, the front facade an imposing row of Roman-revival columns. The grandeur befits its historical import, since it's also the church where John Calvin, founder of Calvinism, delivered his famous sermons.

We saw some people going down a little stairway at the side of the cathedral, and followed them just to get out of the rain. It turned out to be an underground archeological site where you could wander around and look at the foundations from the hundreds of years' worth of earlier churches and temples that existed on the site before St. Pierre was built. Parts of it were surprisingly well-preserved, like a mostly-intact entryway floor that still had the original Roman mosaic tiles. We spent over an hour walking around with our audio guides and making dorky art-history observations about the styles of columns we were encountering. When we got to the ancient tomb area I turned the corner and literally gasped-- there was a skeleton in the grave! The audioguide told me it was probably a Roman-era Allobrogian chieftain buried under the original altar. So that fulfilled my daily dose of creepy.

After the archeological site tour, Matt left us and hopped a train to Leichtenstein. Lena and I ducked into the nearby Museum of the Reformation, but it was ultimately unexciting and we left before long.

We decided to head back to the train station, and after a little while standing in line I finally got to talk with the elusive ATM problem-solver man, who extracted my debit card from its clutches and advised me not to try using it again. Now a few hours delayed from the original plan, we stayed in line and purchased two round-trip tickets to Switzerland's German-speaking capital city, Bern. Buying a ticket enables you to depart for your destination city at any time you want-- the trains leave twice an hour and allow for a lot of traveling flexibility. The first train we tried was cancelled due to "an accident involving a passenger," so we jumped on the next one and after about an hour or two of watching the gorgeous mountain scenery and gently-swirling snowstorms fly by, we were in Bern.

Bern presented something of a problem, since Lena speaks no German and all I can remember from my two years of German instruction in England is "My name is Sara," "I am eight years old" (slightly useless over a decade later), the word for "nothing," and how to count to twenty.

"Which way is... Laupenstrasse?" I said, staring blankly at the map on the station wall.

"I think it's that way... near Schlosesslistr."

"...Okay."

We'd been given directions by our Couchsurfer in Bern, and her house ended up only being a fifteen-minute walk from the station. Unfortunately on the way there the monsoon gods decided it would be the perfect opportunity to toy with some fatigued mortals, and we arrived at our host's door looking like a pair of drowned rats huddling uselessly under flimsy umbrellas. Luckily Sabine, the woman who hosted us, ended up being the kindest woman in Switzerland. She ushered us inside and immediately presented us with hot tea, Easter cake, and pairs of her own slippers. We met her fourteen-year-old son Yannis, who murmured a self-conscious "hello" as Lena and I wished him "Guten Tag!" in what was undoubtedly the least German accent on the planet. After some tea and conversation with Sabine, we stashed our bags upstairs and waited for dinner. Feeding your guests is by no means a requirement for couchsurfing hosts, but most of them do it anyway out of hospitality. Sabine made us a delicious and traditional dinner called raclette, which Lena and I loved because it involved lots of melted cheese. Basically the dish consists of potatoes, mushrooms, asparagas, olives, and whatever other side dishes you want to include, but the main attraction is the thick slices of various kinds of cheese which you load into little trays and then insert them into a tabletop machine called a raclette maker. It looks like a double-decker pancake griddle and it has heated coils that melt the cheese; when it's sufficiently gooey you remove the tray and use a little paddle to scrape the melty goodness onto your potatoes and other fixings. It was a lot of fun and tasted amazing, and Lena and I both declared a desire to purchase raclette makers for use in the States. The other cool part about dinner was the fact that we had three different languages going on at one time. Yannis had a friend from school over, and the friend spoke French and German but very little English. Yannis spoke German and a fair amount of English, but not much French. Sabine is quatrilingual or something so that wasn't a problem for her. In the effort for everyone to understand everyone else, French, German, and English flew around the table in the most amazing and complimentary way I've ever seen, with everyone clarifying for the others in whatever language was most convenient. I looked at the smile on Lena's face and knew she was thinking the same thing I was-- I've never had dinner like this before. After everyone was stuffed with potatoes and melted cheese, Lena and I did the dishes and retired to our room to sleep.

Day 2: Saturday

We woke up on Holy Saturday to find Bern bathed in golden rays of sunshine. Sabine set out a delicious breakfast of custardy yogurt, muesli, bread and cheese, then helped us look over our maps and plan out our day. We read somewhere that there was an outdoor market in the town center on Saturdays, so we gathered up some stuff and headed out. The market turned out to be huge-- dozens and dozens of vendors selling everything from food and flowers to clothes and jewelry. I got some of my Christmas shopping done and we bought some fresh pesto gnocchi from a pasta cart to give to Sabine as a thank-you gift. After our adventures at the market we visited the Old Town of Bern, which we quickly pronounced the best city in Switzerland. Whereas Geneva had been vast and stark, Bern had the atmosphere of a modernized medieval village-- which in fact it was. We saw the Zytglogge, an impressive clock tower in the middle of Old Town that features little puppets that pop out and perform a musical skit every hour. The clock is even more impressive considering that all the mechanisms for the puppet performance were built in the mid 1500s and are still working! We also saw the Munster cathedral, which is no longer a functional church but still featured some amazing Gothic-style architecture. Our last real stop of the day was to the Bern bear pit, which is literally a big hole where a few real live bears live. According to Sabine, the history of Bern involves a town founder who decides that he'll go out hunting and the first animal he shoots will lend its name to the town. He bags a bear, and the town becomes "bern." Before you get sad about the bears being forced to live in a little concrete hole with a bunch of tourists gazing in at them, though, you should know that they're being moved to a new habitat next year where they'll have a lot more space to roam around and live happy bear lives.

After thinking some more about our travel plans, we decided that it would be a worthwhile excursion to stay in Bern another night and leave for Geneva the following morning, stopping on the way to visit the mountain village of Gruyere, where they make Gruyere cheese. Sabine was having guests over that night, though, so she wasn't able to host us. We got on Couchsurfing.com and found another candidate who was willing to take us-- a 24-year-old woman named Kaja, her boyfriend Christian, and their giant white shepherd dog Coona. We gathered up our stuff, presented the farewell gnocchi to Sabine, and trekked along the river to Kaja's apartment. Once again the couchsurfing experience exceeded our expectations-- we presented a bag of fresh caramels to Kaja and Christian, who were incredibly friendly and fed us a delicious meal of beef and mushroom in a cream sauce served over potato pancakes. It was really interesting to talk to them because Kaja is German and Christian is Swiss, and they were eager to learn about Americans' views of Europe. They seemed shocked to discover that most Americans revere Europe as a chic and cultural vacation destination, and seemed downright confused when Lena and I told them that most fairy tales are understood to take place in Europe ("Does it say that? Couldn't they be anywhere, really?" "Well, we don't really have castles and stuff in America").

Kaja also told us a lot of things we didn't know about Germany and its self-image, like the fact that it's only recently become acceptable to be proud of being German. When she was growing up, professing a pride in your nationality was too tied up with memories of Hitler and the war, and people would assume you had some sort of racist agenda if you didn't act ashamed of your nationality. Kaja said that German schools place a lot of emphasis on explaining to their students the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi party, and a newly-emerging attitude of distance from those actions is finally allowing the country to take on a new identity as a German people. It was at this point that I realized how glad I was that Lena and I decided to couchsurf during this trip. Where else can you have these kinds of candid conversations with people whose life experiences are so entirely different from your own? They asked us how we were enjoying Bern, and when we mentioned how much we liked our dinner the night before and how sad we were that we wouldn't be able to buy a raclette maker before the stores reopened in Switzerland, Kaja offered to sell us her own. "We hardly ever use it," she said, taking it off a shelf in the kitchen. "And we can buy a new one anytime." I parted with twenty Swiss francs and am now the proud owner of said appliance, so if anyone wants to sample a sinfully cheesy dinner sometime, let me know.

Day 3: Easter Sunday

Early on Easter Sunday we awoke, said our thank-yous and goodbyes to our hosts, and set off for the train station. A slight glitch in the plans arose when I realized I had lost my round-trip train ticket from Geneva to Bern, which meant that I had to buy a whole new one instead of cashing it in for a refund. After that snafoo we caught a train and series of buses to Gruyere, which is situated in the Alps and may very well be the cutest village on the planet. We bought tickets for the factory and watched the milk swirl around in giant copper vats, destined to become delicious guyere cheese. An informational poster on the wall told us that two-thirds of all gruyere is sold in Switzerland, with the remaining one-third divvied up among Europe and North America. I think they need to make more, because the other continents are being seriously deprived. By a sheer stroke of luck we also happened to be there on the last day of the year that the old artisan cheesemakers were doing an outdoor demonstration of old-fashioned cheesemaking, which involves cooking the milk over a fire in a giant copper kettle. We got to taste the cheese at each stage of completion-- as whey and curds (which were surprisingly rich and delicious), as fresh spongy cheese being pressed into the wooden mold, and as the finished cheese at 6, 8, and 10 months, which get progressively tangier as they age. Stuffed with cheese, we then ascended a winding mountain trail to the village proper of Gruyere, where the restaurants and tourist shops were all open for business. We ate some traditional fondue and did a little shopping, picking up a box of meringues for our next couchsurfer host in Geneva. After the shopping we came back down the mountain and meandered over to the bus station (after I slipped on some ice and faceplanted in the middle of the street right in the path of an oncoming car, that is. It's a comfort to know that in even the most scenic and foreign of locales, I am still as clumsy and pathetic as I am back home). It was then that disaster struck.

"Lena," I said, rooting through my purse in an increasing panic. "Do you have my camera?"

"No... don't you?"

We retraced our steps all through the village, asking every shopkeeper and hotel clerk if someone had returned a lost camera, but to no avail. It was gone. Lena mentioned that she had seen two really suspicious men in one of the stores we had last been in, trailing close behind her at every turn. With dismay I realized that my camera had been in my coat pocket for the last few minutes before I noticed it was gone, and would've been all too easy to take without my noticing. Our bus arrived then, so there was nothing more to be done. As we pulled away from Gruyere I looked out the window at the thick and sudden snowstorm that had hit the town a few hours earlier, the majestic Alps now faint against the darkened sky, and hoped that stealing a camera on Easter Sunday earns you a one-way ticket to hell. I cried to myself on the train to Geneva, thinking of all the pictures I had lost and despairing at the thought of buying a new camera. Lena, sensing my mood, said nothing.

Day 4: Monday

Our last Swiss couchsurfer was a 30-something single woman named Anne, and while she was friendly enough she didn't have the same energy and charisma as our couchsurfers in Bern. She told us we were welcome to anything in the fridge, gave us permission to use her computer, and left us to eat and shower while she went out to visit some friends. We called a few museums to see what was open on Easter Monday, but very little was. We wandered around Geneva for a few hours and saw some key landmarks like Old Town, the inside of the St. Pierre Cathedral, and the Jet d'Eau, a giant water-spewing fountain in Lake Geneva. Then it got really cold and we decided that there wasn't much left to do, so we trudged back to Anne's apartment and spent the afternoon doing homework and watching tv. For dinner Anne made us fondue with potatoes, which was delicious, and then we packed up our stuff and walked back to the bus station to catch an overnight ride back to Paris. At the station we were surprised to see none other than Matt, our friend from the first day.

"Matt! How are you? Last time I saw you you were getting on a train to Leichtenstein!"

It's kind of hilarious that I have opportunities to say things like that.

Matt did apparently wind up in Leichtenstein, which he crossed on foot in just over two hours. We also met his friend Caitlin, another Canadian college student studying in Paris this semester. The bus ride back was uneventful, and Lena and I were relieved when 7 A.M. rolled around and we disembarked in familiar surroundings.

"Paris, je t'aime!" said Lena, throwing her arms out in an attempt to embrace the whole city at once.
"I'm so glad to be back," I agreed, hoisting my bags onto my aching shoulder.

Tired, sluggish, and laden with suitcases, we boarded the Metro and lurched away from the bus station, headed once again toward the streets and people we knew. The ground was damp and the skies gray, but it was warmer than Switzerland. Once in the apartment, I tiptoed down the hall and set my bags in my room. I noticed something on my desk-- a chocolate figurine from my host family accompanied by a little note wishing me "bonnes Paques." True to the constant weirdness of my life here, the chocolate was in the shape of Donald Duck riding a moped, which has arguably no relation to the Easter season, and upon closer inspection he also turned out to be filled with smaller chocolates in the shape of seashells and fish. I ate a seashell and climbed into bed. It felt so good to be home.

Flashbacks to St. Denis

A few days ago I promised you a tour of St. Denis (pronounced "san denee") but then never got around to it due to the fact that I was about to board a night bus to Switzerland. You know how it goes.

I'm now back in Paris and, due to some worrisome complications with the pictures from that trip (you'll hear all about that mess in the next post...) I now have adequate time to catch you all up. Let us begin.

You may notice that the facade of St. Denis is oddly asymmetrical. The left tower was lost after it was struck by lightning in the 1830s and some moron architect tried to repair it with a stone that was too heavy and collapsed the whole thing.

Here's the view of the altar. St. Denis, like many other Parisian churches, was built on the foundations of much earlier structures. Legend has it that Christ himself consecrated the church, which is a nice idea but pretty logistically impossible considering that the earliest remnants of the structure are from the 400s AD.

Behind us is the altar. Although a building (probably a cult that worshipped St. Denis) existed on this site as early as the 400s, the earliest foundations of the present church date to the 770s AD.

The view of the church entrance and narthex. Most of the observable architecture in St. Denis today is the work of a guy named Suger, who undertook a massive remodeling of the church in the late 1100s and early 1200s, transforming it into a Gothic icon.

St. Denis is the first church to use the popular rose window design. The slightly later Notre Dame and other churches will readily adopt it in following years.

All but three of France's kings since 496 AD are buried in St. Denis. This tomb alongside the altar is Dagobert I's, who reigned in the early 600s.

Usually you can pay an entrance fee to wander around the royal tombs, but, as is typical in France, the workers were on strike. Why is this sign in English?

We had to content ourselves by admiring the tombs from afar. None of them actually contain royal remnants, however, because St. Denis was totally sacked during the French Revolution and all the bodies were removed and thrown into a mass grave, including the body of St. Denis himself, which had been buried under the altar. The theme of revolutionaries destroying historical monuments will crop up again and again in the history of Paris's buildings.

This relief on the exterior of the church shows St. Denis holding his decapitated head. The colorful story of his martyrdom involves him coming over from Italy to convert the Gauls to Christianity, but he ends up getting his head chopped off. Ever the dedicated preacher, he marches along for miles carrying his head in his hands, and the spot where he finally collapses is the site of the St. Denis church.

A view from the side exterior, with the back of the rose window.

Church Week will continue with pictures of Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle on Thursday. Be there or be eternally damned.

Switzerland: snow globe of the world

Hello all! Can't talk long, partly because I'm using a Swiss keyboard and the letters are in different places on the keys (the z is in the y place, for example... verz annozing) and also because I don't want to hog the living room computer. Just wanted to let you all know that I made it alive, despite a two-hour delayed bus, an ATM that literally ate my debit card and necessitated a stayover in Geneva while I waited for the guy who could open the machine, and a train to Bern that was cancelled due to "an accident involving a passenger" ("suicide attempt, probably" said our Couchsurfing mom in Bern). Must go now- she's serving us schapps and Irish cream. Tomorrow's agenda includes visiting the Old Town of Bern, then catching an Easter day train to Gruyere, where they have an actual Swiss cheese factory! Two words for those of you who took science with Mr. Heslip: Cheesemaker video.

I'm never leaving Switzerland.

Antiquity, Renaissance, and the 3rd grade art fair

Allow me to recount the first ten minutes of my morning today in the form of a one-act play.

Act One

Scene: a small but comfortable apartment in the heart of urban Paris. Camera pans down the hallway and around the corner into the bedroom of our heroine, who is sleeping soundly beneath a charmingly tattered quilt. The tranquility of the early-morning tableau is broken by the obnoxious ring of an alarm clock, in whose direction the heroine grapples groggily, knocking it onto the floor in the process. Sighing, she swings her feet over the side of the bed and, with prodigious effort, lumbers toward the closet.

A few minutes later, now dressed, the heroine stares bleakly at her morning emails and absentmindedly runs a brush over and over the same section of hair.

Voiceover: I hated Wednesday mornings because they represented all that was wrong with the world. There was first the struggle to wake up, to heed the jarring cry of the clock so diabolically opposed to my night owl preferences. Then, once awake, there was the additional, anticipatory fatigue of the six near-straight hours of class that stretched out before me like miles of unrelenting ocean, and I a faltering swimmer with gazed fixed on the distant shore. And then, just as I was rubbing my eyes for the last time and preparing to make peace with the morning, there was always the inevitable thought, the crushing final blow that lent a definitively oppressive weight to my slow and shuffling steps: we're only halfway through the week.

Heroine rises from chair and makes her way into the kitchen. On the way she mumbles incoherently to herself.

Sara: Toast... don't want no stinking toast, every day with the toast... toaster doesn't even work anymore, doesn't keep the bread down... not even toast then, just bread...

Upon entering the kitchen, the heroine views a miraculous sight that causes her to stop dead in her tracks and emit what can only be described as a squeak of joy.

Sara: OMG CEREAL!

I hope you enjoyed that little vignette. I don't think I've ever been so happy to see a box of Muesli in my life. But, in keeping with the mysteries of food a la my host family, one key ingredient seemed to be missing from the coveted breakfast equation. Where was the milk?

I searched high and low, but there was no milk on the table, in the fridge, or the pantry (milk isn't always refrigerated here). It was then that I noticed the carton of unsweetened yogurt that had been set out near my cereal bowl. Was I supposed to mix it? I decided it was an acceptable course of action, but when my host mom came bustling into the room a few minutes later I tried to shield the contents of the bowl from her view, just in case I was supposed to eat the elements separately. You really just never know.

Today was Susan's class, so we once again made the trek to the Louvre and spent the afternoon viewing famous works of art, most of which have been composed according to the strict Epic Painting checklist utilized by most 17th-19th century artists:

-Exposed breast(s) (min. 1, max. 3) = Check

-Unrealistic theatrical poses = Check

-Political/historical allegory and/or metaphor = Check

-Toga (min. 2) = Check

-Greco-Roman god(dess) (min. 1) = Check

-Putti/cherubim (preferable), OR chubby human babies (min 5) = Check

-Inexplicably bland expressions, esp. in scenes of warfare (all) = Check

It was my day to lead discussion, so if you have any questions about David's The Intervention of the Sabine Women, I am now an expert. Also I got to wear the guest lecturer badge that Susan always wears when she's leading discussion in the Louvre, which was fun because passersby looked at me like I must be a knowledgeable museum tour guide. Little did they know I was merely reading from my hastily-scribbled notes and throwing in colorful comparisons to romance-novel cover art.

Whenever I charge into battle to stop my fellow Romans from killing my Sabine families, I always bring armloads of babies and leave them writhing at my feet.

"Romance-novel cover art?" I hear you wonder aloud. "Where'd you get that from?"

To which I would reply, let us take a closer look at this personage on the left:

What exactly are you suggesting there, Mr. Big Sheath Man? If you don't believe me, also consider the following:

A savage hope indeed. Now maybe a giant rowing staff is just a giant rowing staff, but I think I know what Freud would have to say about these two works of art.

Speaking of art, we saw some more of it today-- specifically of the famous variety. The considerate people at the Louvre put it in places of prominence so that impatient visitors can do a whirlwind tour of the good stuff without having to get sidetracked by too much other culture.

The area around the Mona Lisa is roped off in a giant arc so that no one can get too close to her. In person it's hard to understand why she's so famous-- the painting is small and relatively unimpressive. We don't get it.

Then we've got Winged Victory, everyone's favorite headless Grecian:

And last but not least we followed some intriguing signs for the Children's Art Exhibition, which turned out to be exactly what it said it was-- a gallery of art made by kids ages 4 and up!

Molly's laughing at this kid because his picture description said he wanted to be a bus driver.

In this imaginative scene the world is populated by seagoing giraffes, cats, and panda bears.

The author of this piece expressed a wish to visit the U.S. to see the Native Americans, depicted here in cohabitation with the buffalo and what appear to be members of the Ku Klux Klan (upper right).

This was titled something like "In the Future," which apparently will be the stage for mass Telletubby-alien invasions.

So there you have it: the best of the best at the Louvre. Tomorrow I'll be taking you to a really old church (except for the parts that have been totally redone) that is rumored to have been consecrated by Christ himself (even though he'd been dead for 700 years). You won't want to miss it.

Bibliothèque Forney and Campbell's sauce of soup

I did my homework in a medieval castle today. How about you? Sorry, couldn't resist.

After class today Molly and Lena and I decided to go on an expedition to the Marais to find the Bibliothèque Forney, which apparently has a large collection of art-history related stuff that may prove useful to us when final project time rolls around. After a brief confusion at a wonky little intersection off Rue de Rivoli we stumbled across this building:

"This structure looks significant," I mused, gazing up at the turrets.

"I'm sure Paul would have something to say about it," Molly agreed. Then we rounded the corner and saw the "Bibliothèque Forney" sign.

"Oh. We're here."

I had to lie on the ground to get all of the tower in this shot, which Molly apparently thought was hilarious because she took an undoubtedly embarrassing picture of me doing so. I have yet to see it but I'll post it for your MDRing pleasure at a later date. When I got home I Googled the building and found out that it was commissioned by a French archbishop and dates back to 1475.

If you thought I was kidding about having a love affair with staircases, I wasn't. This one goes up one of the towers inside the library. There was some sort of intriguing fenced-off area at the top but, alas, it was locked.

This is the room we studied in. As we entered I made a joke about the reptile door handles ("Hey look guys, it's the Slytherin common room") only to discover in my later Googling that the guy who commissioned the building was named Salazar! There be magic in the Marais.

News on the Switzerland front: we have Couchsurfers in Geneva AND Bern! The woman in Bern emailed me back last night and said she and her fourteen-year-old son are happy to have us. They're even going to be home all day Friday when we get in and she said we can come over and drop off our bags before seeing the city. I love the correspondences we've been having because she's delightfully ESL ("I guess, you'd like to put your luggage here, before you discover the city, isn't it? And maybe fresh up a bit from the long trip, I guess. Normally I don't sleep that late in the morning, so I guess, i'll be up, when you arrive. Maybe not very awake yet... ;-) Please don't hurry too much to take the train in Geneva... I am not sad if you arrive after 9. One thing you should know: the shops in the city are closed on Friday, so this day is more for walking around in the nature or so.")

I am glad she is not sad! And I love walking around in the nature!

I totally can't make fun though because I had another really Frenglish conversation with my host dad tonight at dinner. I asked him if there was a traditional Easter dish in France, and he told me that they eat a cut of lamb that was symbolic of something-- I didn't entirely catch that part but I figured it probably had the same connotations of Christ-as-shepherd/Lamb of God/Spring-Babies-New Life that Easter lamb imagery does in the States. He asked if we eat a certain meal in America, and I said that my family usually has ham. Then for some reason I also tried to explain the tradition in some households of eating cold meats and eggs because cooking on the day of Easter is forbidden. It came out something like, "Also, there is a tradition of some, where one eats the cold sausages prepared in advanced because to do the cooking on Easter is banned." Nice. Then, to my delight, he mentioned the "the giant bell that sprinkles the eggs" for French children on Easter day (for a full appreciation of this subject, see Dave Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day).

"In the United States we have a rabbit who brings the chocolate to the children," I said, "and puts it in a..." I realized I didn't know the word for basket, but there was one on the table. "This!"

"A bread basket?" said Christophe.

"No...without the bread."

Apparently the bell thing originated because the church bells don't chime from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, and then they ring out again for the first time at noon while mom and dad hide the eggs. Then as the kids frolic gaily through the yard the parents feign surprise and say, "Oh, it must've been the bell!" It sounded a little ridiculous, but Christophe was probably thinking the same thing about giant rabbits breaking into people's homes and leaving Cadbury cream eggs in the bread basket.

The awkwardness continued after I noticed a container of French-fried onions on the table (the crunchy kind that I eat as chips back home... so bad, but sooo good) and sprinkled some on my green beans. It was the only logical pairing based on the food we were eating, but Christophe gave me a quizzical look and I felt obliged to defend myself by explaining the Thanksgiving tradition of the green-bean casserole.

"It is a traditional dish for the Day of Grace. One makes it with green beans, with the onions on top, and a sauce of soup."

"A sauce of soup?"

"Yes. It has cream and mushrooms. It is named Campbell's."

"Campbell's sauce of soup."

"One buys it in a can. It is not a very good soup."

Now I'm kind of craving green bean casserole. Mmm.

Tilo may look adorable, but he is, as Tennyson would say, "red in tooth and claw." Look it up.

Un examen

Okay I have a confession to make.

I bought a chocolate chicken in a bag.

I couldn't help it, Franprix is stocked with all this Easter candy and I've been craving chocolate for days, and it was a chicken in a bag! How can you say no to that? And the nest of chocolate eggs = adorable. I have since devoured the chicken but the basket and the eggs are still safe... for now. I also fully intend to purchase a chocolate fish and/or one of those giant rabbits with the serial killer eyes. Mmm.

While we're on the subject of chocolate let me also show you what my host family put out as part of my Sunday breakfast yesterday morning:

OMG tiny delicious pastries! It was almost too cute to eat. Almost. There were three of them but two had already met their ends before I thought to record one for posterity.

That was the good food-related news. The bad news was that last night I experienced a dinner tragicomedy. Since we had our first art history exam today, I decided to skip the hassle of going out for lunch yesterday to give myself more time to study, figuring that I'd be fine if I ate my breakfast toast late and munched on the rice cakes in my room until dinnertime. By the time 7:30 rolled around I was slightly famished, and when my dad announced dinner was ready I was in the kitchen practically before the sentence was finished. Imagine my horror when the lid of a large stewing pot was removed to reveal.... broth. Approximately a gallon of water simmered gently before me, intermingling with spices, bay leaves, and a few whole onions and carrots clearly intended for flavoring rather than consumption. "I had a big lunch," said Christophe, cheerily, "so I'm not really hungry. But feel free to take as much of the bouillon as you like."

I slurped the flavored water in silence, not sure whether to laugh or cry. When Christophe excused himself at 8 o'clock to watch the results of the French elections on TV, I removed a carrot and onion with the hurried fear of a petty thief. Shoving them nearly whole into my mouth, I hoped that Louise would not choose this moment to make one of her ill-timed entrances and explain to me in puzzled French that I was not supposed to eat the stewing vegetables. I noticed some cheese behind the empty bread basket and took that as well, sectioning off as much as I deemed polite ("What happened to that new chunk of Gruyere?" "I think Sara ATE IT in one sitting last night!"). Then I cleared the table and slumped back to my room, feeling like a character from Les Miserables. "Broth!" I chuckled to myself, pulling my fourth rice cake of the day from its package. Hopefully tonight's dinner will prove more substantial.

Today we had an exam and it didn't go very well. Saturday study time was consumed by our field trip to Fontainebleau, and despite the fact that I spent all day Sunday taking notes it was hard for me to remember the titles, dates, and artists (who, as a rule, have no fewer than three names apiece-- Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Jacques-Louis David, Anne Vallayer-Coster, Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Le Brun) for the dozens of paintings and sculptures we've studied so far. Let's hope Susan is a permissive grader.

In much more uplifting news, I'm going to Switzerland for Easter! Lena and I and possibly Evelyn are going to catch a bus out of Paris this Thursday night for four fun-filled days in Geneva and Bern, the capital. The even cooler part is how cheaply we're managing to do it-- the round-trip bus is only 68 euros (approx $100) and the train to Bern will be about the same, but our accommodations will be FREE due to the genius of a travel networking website called Couchsurfing. The basic idea is that you create a profile with information and pictures about yourself and your travel experience or ambitions, and you can search other people's profiles from all over the world. Then if there's somewhere you want to go, you can look up other Couchsurfers in that area and send inquiries asking to "surf their couch" for the dates of your stay. If everyone is in mutual agreement about the details of the visit, you meet up with them at your destination and voila, free lodging in the living room!

The idea is that when you are not traveling you will also offer up your couch to potential travelers, but it's not a requirement in order to join the site. It's also not as unsafe as it sounds, since you can narrow your search results to people in a certain age group, people of a certain gender, people with profile pictures only, etc. And there's a vouching system that lets you see how many other Couchsurfers the person knows in the real world as well as testimonials written by and about them. Plus if you get there and the person turns out to be a sketchball you can just leave and find a hostel. I've been messaging Couchsurfers in Geneva, thinking I'd have pretty limited success since it'll be Easter weekend and all, but one woman actually wrote back and said she'd be happy to have us! She's a middle-aged tri-lingual employee of a bank in Geneva, and her testimonials from previous guests all say that she showed them around town and fed them traditional Swiss fondue for dinner. I want fondue! I told Diane that I expect this to be a whole new breed of small-scale adventuring, and I'm psyched about the money-saving potential as well.

Mountains of homework await me so I suppose I'll end there, but keep reading later this week for some tours of old churches and the recounting of my Switzerland tales after the holiday!