Summer

Bonjour tout le monde!! I’ve finally set up the blog! What an exciting online adventure. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to make it more exciting, but for now I’m overwhelmed with how much there is to talk about. I can start by saying I’m sitting in a McDonalds across the Boulevard St. Michel from the Jardin du Luxembourg, and that I’ve been here so long my computer’s running out of battery. I’ll try to summarize my summer so far, I’m sure it will be long but hopefully future entries will grow shorter.

My year away from New York started off with a fantastic train ride back to the bay. I stopped in Cleveland for two days to visit my friend Mackensey who had been abroad last semester (it was great to see her, and Cleveland has some neat old industrial architecture, but I don’t feel too much of a pull to go back). I had a three hour layover in Chicago, which I’d never been to before so I ran around taking pictures, and then I got on the California Zephyr bound for Emeryville, and stayed on it for two days. The trip was really fantastic, one of the best travel experiences I’ve ever had. Staying on the ground you get a much better appreciation of the size of the continent, and how much there is between the coasts. And not having to pay much attention to where you’re going or how to get there gives you so much time to meet people from all over the country, and the people who ride trains are a whole different type, so they were all weird and wonderful. I sat next to a 65-year-old trucker from San Francisco whose truck had broken down in Connecticut, and talked to a master guitar maker from Minnesota, and an 84 year old woman who used to have a one-woman show as “the bag lady” entertaining people at a roadside diner in a small town in Iowa. There was a girl who’s about to move to Brazil to study martial arts, a guy going to visit his brother at school to be a masseur in Salt Lake City, a retired Juvenile Hall administrator, and I learned how to hunt a bear with a bow and arrow from the man in the cafe car. The country was beautiful and the train was slow, it was a pace and a perspective I’m really not used to.

After a short two weeks at home I set out for Switzerland, to stay with family friends, Suzanne and her kids Hannah and Fatim. Suzanne was out of town for the first two weeks so I hung out a lot with Hannah and Fatim, and another mutual friend came over and we went to Milan for a weekend. Milan was beautiful, and the gelato was wonderful. We saw an opera (Lady Macbeth of Mtinsk by Shostakovich) at La Scala, but it was physically impossible to see the stage from our seats, so we ended up standing in the back most of the time.

A friend of mine from NYU has been in Spain for six months, and over the summer she worked at the flamenco museum in Seville, so while I was in Geneva I flew to Iberia for a week to visit her. I spent enough time in Madrid to visit the Prado and the Reina Sofia museums (The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch was definitely the highlight) and then had a few hours in Cordoba to check out the fantastic mosque there. The mosques in Spain are neat because after the Reconquista the Spanish just added things or modified things to make them into churches, and in the case of the mosque in Cordoba they just sliced a square out of the center and stuck a cathedral in, which is pretty awkward and silly but fun. The Alhambra in Granada was gorgeous too, and Seville is a really great city. The museum that my friend worked in was awesome, a multimedia experience with videos and music and we saw a short flamenco performance by one of the best flamenco dancers in Spain. The museum was founded by a very famous dancer named Christina Hoyos, who was in a number of important flamenco movies, and she was there in the audience, so basically I was surrounded by flamenco royalty (though it’s a good thing I had my friend there to point them out). On my last day in Spain we went to an old roman town way down south to swim and eat seafood and be surrounded by naked Spaniards and look at Africa, which we could just barely see across the Straight of Gibraltar.

The big surprise of that trip though was a little one-day excursion we took to Portugal. We took a bus overnight from Seville to Lisbon, got in as the sun was rising and stayed up until 2am exploring the town. It’s an absolutely gorgeous city, still a little rough around the edges and thus off the tourist radar, but so much fun. It reminded me a lot of San Francisco: it’s on the westernmost part of the continent, between a bay and the ocean, on a number of hills, and there’s a big orange suspension bridge, and cable cars, and it’s been destroyed a few times by earthquakes… but it’s also about 2500 years older. Many of the buildings are covered in painted tiles, and narrow roads wind up hills that are so steep there are a number of funiculars and in one case a giant neo-gothic elevator to help you get from the new(ish) downtown to the neighborhood where our hostel was. We stayed in a great hostel up on a hill looking over the bay, in a young, hipster area called Bairro Alto that fills up at night with people partying in the streets.

On the last day of June I took the train from Geneva to Paris, and moved into the Maison des Lycéenes, a beautiful building in the 5th within sight of the dome of the Pantheon. It’s a spectacular location, and NYUParis pretty much takes over the building over the summer. We’re just a block away from Rue Moufetard, a cute medieval street filled with restaurants and shops, and within walking distance from the Paris Mosque, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pantheon, and only 15 minutes from Notre Dame.

I took two classes in Paris, “Spoken Contemporary French” and “French Culture and French Cinema,” both classes conducted in French, and both very good. We watched a number of fairly obscure films in my cinema class, and I got some recommendations in addition to the ones we saw in class that were also wonderful (I highly recommend “Le Mépris” (“Contempt”), “La Haine” (“Hate”), and, of course, “Jules et Jim”). The other class focused more on phonetics and pronunciation, which was very helpful and fun. It’s amazing how in French, even though the way it’s spelled is sometimes really strange, there are fixed rules for pronunciation that French follows a lot better than English does. Both of my teachers were French, and really fun, and the NYU classroom building is a beautiful old brick mansion in the 16th that’s inside a city block, so you have to walk through another building to get to it. Our subway commute was about 35 minutes but we went above ground for a lot of that time, and right before our stop the train crossed the river right next to the Eiffel Tower, so every morning I got a gorgeous view of the city.

Classes only went until 12:30 every day so we had lots of time to explore the city. I tried a lot of great food and wine and visited many museums (NYU prints all of our ID cards with art history listed as our major, so we got into almost every museum and monument for free). There was an outdoor film festival going on so we saw some old movies outside, and one of my best friends from high school, Annick, happened to be living just down the street so we saw each other a lot too. Our program offered a lot of walking tours of the city in French and in English, so I learned a lot about the history of Paris too, and the different neighborhoods, and I made it into every Arrondissement at least once, most of them multiple times. My favorites, conveniently, are the multiples of five: the 5th, 10th, 15th, and 20th… cool how that happened.

So I’m out of battery again, and I should go out into the sun. Apparently I can link to facebook photo albums here, so my train trip album is:

http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2191161&l=d32f4&id=823921

And my first month in Europe (before France) is:

http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2208906&l=faf6f&id=823921

A bientôt

Nicholas