The Frenchman

Oh where to start. I guess I can say that I am still caught with the Paris fever.

Alright well again I will start from the beginning.

Wednesday we wake up and eat breakfast and hop on a train to Brussels. When we reach Brussels we get on a train to Paris (can't remember the exact stop) it takes about 1:20 min. So I fall asleep, and when I wake up I am hearing the horns and whistles of the Paris train station (Paris north I believe). So we get off and get our GO pass:

The GO pass is a pass that is good for 2,4, or 6 days and you can ride all trains, metro's and buses. I think it was about 40 euro but it paid off.

So we got that and headed off to the hostel. Dropped our baggage off and then headed. Our first stop was Jean Nouvel's Arab Institute, which is known for it's transparency but also for it's light filtering devices. We took a walk over to Notre Dame and hung out there for a little bit.

After doing that we started walking over to the Louvre. Walked around the main lobby and then went and got some dinner. It was kind of a slow day so not really much happened. Just experiencing the life of Paris and just getting adjusted to stuff.


So we woke up Thursday at the hostel and ate breakfast.
We got on a train and headed out to the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier. It is a modernist building that does all this cool architecture stuff that I don't really want to explain (5 points of architecture). But it was a really great villa to go to. So we spent about 4 hours there and headed back into town. Once we got back to Paris we went to check out another modern building and then a new contemporary building by Jean Nouvel. It is pretty sweet, called Institute de Quai Brawnly. Again maybe too much to explain so I will just leave it to Wikipedia.

After that we broke up for dinner and we asked a local where a good restaurant was. Well she took us walking for about 15 minutes and came up to this small little restaurant. Well we went in and sat down and overheard the lady say that the restaurant had one star from Michelin. Michelin is like the food evaluating company in Paris. A restaurant can get up to 3 stars. If a restaurant can even get 1 star then it is already a top dog. so I was excited to hear that. So we ate a lot of good food for about 3 hours.



After eating we headed to the Pompideau center and hung out there for a big taking pictures and then headed home to bed.

When we woke up the next morning we headed to another Jean Nouvel building called Cartier Foundation. It was yet another sweet building. We then headed downtown to the business district and went to the Arc de la Defense. We hung out there for a bit taking an amazing amount of photos and continued to walk around the enitre business area. We sat and ate and then took the metro to the Arc de Triumph.

We went up to the top....

I forgot to mention that we also got a 4 day museum pass and there is a huge list of places that we can get into with this pass, including the Arc de Triumph and Versailles.

So we hung out at top and looked around at all the boulevards. So after that we went down and walked down the Champs enjoying life and looking at people (hrmm creepy). So we kept walking down and ended up at this large fountain and our teacher says to us, "there is a museum right over there with Monet's lillies and other French Impressionist work. So I hauled ass over to the museum (I got a thing for Impressionism) and spent about 30 minutes there until I was pulled away. We continued to walk and our destination was the Louvre.

At this point the teachers decided they would go to the Pompideau (Kandinsky exhibit) and the rest of us went to the Louvre.

David (a fellow student) were slower than the rest of the group so when we got to the Louvre it was just us. So we started touring and looking at all the great art. Wow we got to the Mona Lisa and it was the most amazing moment of my life. Okay not really and I might get in trouble for this but I was not too impressed with it.

Anyways so we finished looking at the art and wentback to the lobby and met up with some guys. We all were hungry and we headed out of the Louvre and got about 300 steps and had to sit down because our feet were tired. I had a great picture of myself laying down with the Eiffel tower in the background (you can fill the rest in) but it got lost somewhere so I don't have it anymore.

Anyways we rested for a while and hoofed it to the tower and waited in line. It was 9.90 Euro's to go to the top (it wouldn't have really mattered) and so we all bought tickets and hopped on the elevator to go to the top.

We reached the second level and there was a pretty long line to get to the top. So we waited for another 30 minutes in that line. So we finally reached the top and started enjoying the views of Paris. One of the guys (Mike) ran into a girl who had the same idea as him and they started kissing on the top. It was pretty hilarious (later it was, I will explain). So we hung out up there till they made us leave. So we went down and started
walking towards the metro when we walked into one of our professor's who was on the Paris study abroad trip. The time was about 12:45. He told us that it would be wrong of us to go home right now because at 1:00 the Parisian's light up the Eiffel Tower. So we headed back to the tower and set on some steps and waited.....and waited.....and waited. And it lit up......and it sparkled....okay it was kind of cool but I was tired.

So we went back and rode the metro home and got to the hostel like 15 minutes after it shut down. So we had to flag the guard down and he let us in. He turned out to be a very angry Frenchman with a lot of testosterone and was angry. But we didn't care.

So we woke up the next morning (Friday) and headed to the Biblioteque National (which I did a lot of research on) so I had a lot of fun going through. We kept walking around and saw a really neat bridge (I believe it was called Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir) but it is a cool bridge. Then we went and saw a Frank Gehery Building and it wasn't a total waste of my time but close.

Lunch Break

Well we walked around Paris and checked out some more stuff. (Since you are my family I am going to be honest with you, I can't remember what exactly happened the rest of the day. That just means it wasn't important)

Blur

Okay we woke up Saturday and headed out checkin out some sweet architecture. But we all had our minds focused on something else (us as students had decided to change the schedule and take a trip to Versailles). So the morning was a blur until we hopped on the train to go to Versailles. As we reached it everyone was really excited and we walked up in there.

I was talking earlier about that girl on the tower, well we ran into her again and we all had a laugh about that.

Thank goodness for the Museum pass, so we skipped all the lines and headed into the Museum. Checked that out and then headed to the gardens. I think we spent about 4 hours there and I took a nice little nap on the grass. So we really enjoyed Versailles.

We walked back to the train station (getting a bite to eat on the way of course) and headed back to Paris. Well my teacher and I are both really into Kandinsky so we took a trip over to the Pompideau and went to the exhibit. Well she knows everything about Kandinsky so she explained it all to me (interesting is that he did work in Moscow so some of the titles were in Russian) so I did a little translation (no idea how) but it worked out. So we finished there and went to get some food and ate some steak tar tar. Which I have to say was really really good, and I am craving some right now. So we finished there and went to bed.


Okay so sunday we woke up (our train left at 4:55) so we went to this newely developed promenade that was a mix between a park and a running path, but it went through the city. It was really cool. So we spent a lot of time there and headed back to the hostel, grabbed our gear and went to the train station. We headed back to Leuven and got there at 6:30. And the hostel forgot to make dinner for us so we hit the town and found a restaurant who for 15 euros served unlimited ribs. So that was just great.

We finished up with some ice cream and came home and crashed hard.

These past two days of studio have been horrible. Our teacher is in a bad mood because he is a socially akward jerk and I think is pissed off because we had so much fun on the Paris trip. Anways we are all looking forward to studio tommorow.

By the way we played soccer tonight and I somehow pulled off this sweet Ronaldo move with the ball. Can't explain it but it was sweet I beat 2 defenders.

Anyways we have homework so I need to go do that.