Over fall break (which happened to coincide with my 20th birthday) two of my classmates, Leslie and Cibyl, decided to go to Mauritania. I've been wanting to go for a while, I'm not sure why exactly but when I started doing research on it it just sounded phenominal, and it was. We drank tea CONSTANTLY, everyone offered it to us for free in their homes, and the towns we visited were fantastic, crumbling, abandoned old caravan metropolises surrounded by sand dunes filled with camels and scarabs, and we ate a lot of couscous and pancakes (a local delicacy apparently...) and camel liver (which was chewy but the sauce was good.) I turned 20 in the living room of a random Mauritanian guy named Sidi who invited us over for mint tea during the heat of the afternoon in a town called Atar in the Sahara. Perfect!
About a week before break, once I recovered(ish) from my illness (which lasted about two weeks and caused me to lose the weight of two infants, but ended up not being a parasite, alxamdulilaay) we went to the embassy and purchased a very expensive stamp in our passports, and for the first time in my life I filled out an official document that had no English whatsoever on the entire sheet, only French and Arabic. We took a sept places taxi (Peugeot 504s that carry 7 passengers (relatively) comfortably in three rows of seats) from the Gare Routière in Dakar (which is, in reality, a huge parking lot crammed full of buses, cars, taxis, vans, minibuses, people, livestock, and vendors) to Saint Louis, the pre-colonial capital of European power in West Africa.
We were only there long enough to spend the night, but at breakfast on Friday we met a 47-year-old American man who happened to be traveling to Mauritania that same day, so we pooled our resources and made it all the way to Nouakchott with him (four is a perfect number for taxis). He’s a totally cool guy, he’s been teaching at a high school in the bush in Alaska (a full day’s journey by boat or snowmobile from the nearest town with a road connection) and Mauritania was the 120th country he’s visited. The taxi ride to the border town of Rosso-Senegal was pretty easy, though the border itself was fairly ridiculous.
Senegal and Mauritania are separated by the Senegal River, once a very important trade route for goods and slaves, and the center of Fouta Toro, one of the earliest and most important pre-colonial states to embrace popular Islam in what is now Senegal. There are only two official crossings, both ferries, and the one closer to the coast was the one we chose. As soon as the taxi stopped at the ferry terminal the burocracy started. Our passport information was recorded in a big book, and we were herded by some self-appointed guides into the boat. It left just after we got on, we were jammed between trucks and goats and a group of guys who ended up shouting at each other the whole time, five minutes of floating and we were in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
Customs was ridiculous, most of the time was spent in a small room with a nervous-looking fat arab man slowly entering our information into a computer while a bored guard took pictures of the room on his cell phone, and at one point the door burst open and a man lept into the room and started singing loudly to the fat man behind the desk. Then our information was entered into a few more books and our passports were scanned and we "declared" how much money we were bringing into the country. Finally we got a taxi and after three false starts finally made it out of Rosso-Mauritania. Our driver went very, very fast, and blared a tape he had picked up on the way out of town, with some Youssou and some rap and a bunch of really bad sappy French pop. The countryside changed almost immediately, and so did the people. 15 minutes ouside of Rosso-Senegal people live in grass huts on marshy, green earth, but 15 minutes outside of Rosso-Mauritania people live in skin tents on sand. We saw our first camel after about 25 minutes of driving, and within an hour we were passing sand dunes and seeing mirages.
We stopped about every 15 minutes for police checks, which were to continue for the rest of our trip. They were a huge pain in the butt, mostly because, since we're Americans, our passports have to be scrutinized, and at every post they had to record our information in a big book. Fortunately due to Ramadan and the heat many of the officers were too fatigued to do their job in the afternoons, so we only had to stop when we were travelling in the morning.
There's so much to say about the trip, but I have to go to class. I made two photo albums about the trip, and they have a lot of information in the captions, so check them out, it's better to see them anyway. the links are:
Volume one:
http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2231629&l=343c3&id=823921
Volume two:
http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2231655&l=a774d&id=823921
Ba Beneen yoon
mardi 16 octobre 2007
mercredi 26 septembre 2007
September
Salaamaalekum!
I realize it's been a very long time since I've posted here, and I don't have too much time to write now but I put up some new photos and many of them have fairly long descriptions. Hopefully I'll have more time to write tomorrow.
http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2225135&l=3496d&id=823921
jamm ak jamm!
I realize it's been a very long time since I've posted here, and I don't have too much time to write now but I put up some new photos and many of them have fairly long descriptions. Hopefully I'll have more time to write tomorrow.
http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2225135&l=3496d&id=823921
jamm ak jamm!
mardi 4 septembre 2007
Sénégal
Salaamaalekum!
I've been in Dakar a little over two weeks now, and it's fantastic! The first week was spent mostly in orientation, which was interesting but there's not all that much to say about it. We stayed in a nice dorm just up the street from the school (the CIEE program is affiliated with Suffolk University's Dakar campus, which is a groovy blue and yellow building right next to the ocean in a neighborhood called Mermoz) and spent most of our free time just relaxing and getting to know the other Americans on the program and exploring the areas near school. The other students are from universities all over the country which is really fun, and most of them are pretty interesting and adventurous (as I guess they’d have to be to spend a semester in Senegal…)
After a week of that we moved into our host families. I am living in a neighborhood called Ouakam (pronounced “Wakaam”) that’s mostly residential and about a half hour bus ride north of downtown Dakar. It’s right next to the airport, about a fifteen minute walk from the ocean, and just below a hill topped by an awesome old lighthouse. There are 50 students in my program and 11 of them are living in Ouakam very close to me, the rest are mostly in Mermoz or another neighborhood closer to campus called Sacre Coeur III. I take the bus (called the "Dakar Dem Dikk") to school every day, which is usually crowded and hot, but fortunately Ouakam is the last stop on the line so I usually get a seat. If you’re interested in knowing EXACTLY where I’m living, go to google earth and type in these coordinates, the x should be exactly over my house:
14°43′47.57″N, 17°29′34.71″W
My family is great. I have a host brother named Pape who just turned 19 a couple of days ago and is really into soccer and who speaks super quietly so I usually can’t hear what he’s saying so I say “what?” and then he tries to say it in English but he’s still talking really quietly and his English isn’t very good anyway so I’m not sure what’s going on about half the time. Actually that’s been my experience in the host family in general, half the time I have no idea what’s happening. But it’s fun, and Pape’s really friendly and he’s taken me to a lot of cool beaches and places he and helps me out with my Wolof and I help him with English (by which I mean I teach him things like the distinction between “beach” and “bitch” and important words like “pimp”). He was asking me about New York the other day and was very surprised to learn that the streets there are not covered in sand. He asked where the sand was and I told him there just wasn’t any, except maybe in some of the parks and at the beach.
My host mother is also very nice and hard to understand, and spends most of the day cooking or sweeping or watching TV. Although she cooks for us she never eats with us, meals are always all-male events at our house. Usually the food comes out on one huge plate that sits on the floor, and we sit in a circle around it on 8-inch high stools and eat with spoons. It was a little awkward at first but I'm getting used to it. The food itself is good but not very varied, I’ve been eating a lot of rice and fish and potatoes and oil and I haven’t seen a green vegetable since I’ve been here. However the fruit is great, and mangos are in season and they’re delicious and cheap and I buy them a lot. For breakfast I eat bread, chocolate, and instant coffee with instant milk, which seems to be the standard breakfast in these parts.
I think I also have two (or maybe three?) other brothers, Ahmed and another Pape (but with a different last name, so I guess he’s not really a brother, but he lives in the house… like I said I don't know what's going on half the time) and another guy whose name I’ve never quite figured out. The dad lives 30km east of Dakar most of the time because he’s building a school for engineers there, though he’s been home for the past few days. He used to work in power supply and is the only family member who has ever left the country. He’s been to Paris twice and I asked him what he thought of it and he said it’s beautiful but French people are so racist that he never wants to go back. Also it seems that every guy in the neighborhood between the ages of 18 and 30 hangs out either in our living room or in the photo studio that is attached to our house.
The TV is ALWAYS on, which I think is part of the reason I have trouble understanding people because they’re always talking over (or, more accurately, under) the noise of whatever dubbed Mexican soap opera or American movie is playing. The TV gets more exciting at night when we either watch bad horror movies or the 99 names of God being recited or, my favorite, relaxing images of waterfalls and flowers with a narrator repeating “Alxamdulilaay” (“thanks be to God”) over and over in a slow, deep, dramatic voice. My family is Muslim (as is 95% of the country) and Ramadan starts in less than two weeks, I’m excited to see how things change then.
Speaking of Islam, I’m taking a class here on the history of Islam in Senegal. The professor is great, very dynamic and engaging, in great contrast to my French teacher who is pretty much the opposite. I’m also taking Wolof, a class on Senegalese culture and society, and a class on colonization and decolonization, with a focus on Senegambia. All of my classes are in French, except the colonization class. Wolof is really fun, and much easier than Arabic and I think easier than French too, despite how completely different it is from any of the languages I know.
I’m settling into life here, it’s very different and challenging but really fun. I’ve already had my wallet stolen, been attacked by mosquitoes and terrible allergies and many irregular bowel movements, but I’ve also heard some great live music, spent hours body-surfing in the warm Atlantic, and watched the sun set from the absolute western-most point of the African continent. It’s beautiful and hot and dirty and the power keeps going out and I love it.
Ba beneen yoon!
P.S. I finally got picture from Paris online, here's the link:
http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2213734&l=13269&id=823921
I've been in Dakar a little over two weeks now, and it's fantastic! The first week was spent mostly in orientation, which was interesting but there's not all that much to say about it. We stayed in a nice dorm just up the street from the school (the CIEE program is affiliated with Suffolk University's Dakar campus, which is a groovy blue and yellow building right next to the ocean in a neighborhood called Mermoz) and spent most of our free time just relaxing and getting to know the other Americans on the program and exploring the areas near school. The other students are from universities all over the country which is really fun, and most of them are pretty interesting and adventurous (as I guess they’d have to be to spend a semester in Senegal…)
After a week of that we moved into our host families. I am living in a neighborhood called Ouakam (pronounced “Wakaam”) that’s mostly residential and about a half hour bus ride north of downtown Dakar. It’s right next to the airport, about a fifteen minute walk from the ocean, and just below a hill topped by an awesome old lighthouse. There are 50 students in my program and 11 of them are living in Ouakam very close to me, the rest are mostly in Mermoz or another neighborhood closer to campus called Sacre Coeur III. I take the bus (called the "Dakar Dem Dikk") to school every day, which is usually crowded and hot, but fortunately Ouakam is the last stop on the line so I usually get a seat. If you’re interested in knowing EXACTLY where I’m living, go to google earth and type in these coordinates, the x should be exactly over my house:
14°43′47.57″N, 17°29′34.71″W
My family is great. I have a host brother named Pape who just turned 19 a couple of days ago and is really into soccer and who speaks super quietly so I usually can’t hear what he’s saying so I say “what?” and then he tries to say it in English but he’s still talking really quietly and his English isn’t very good anyway so I’m not sure what’s going on about half the time. Actually that’s been my experience in the host family in general, half the time I have no idea what’s happening. But it’s fun, and Pape’s really friendly and he’s taken me to a lot of cool beaches and places he and helps me out with my Wolof and I help him with English (by which I mean I teach him things like the distinction between “beach” and “bitch” and important words like “pimp”). He was asking me about New York the other day and was very surprised to learn that the streets there are not covered in sand. He asked where the sand was and I told him there just wasn’t any, except maybe in some of the parks and at the beach.
My host mother is also very nice and hard to understand, and spends most of the day cooking or sweeping or watching TV. Although she cooks for us she never eats with us, meals are always all-male events at our house. Usually the food comes out on one huge plate that sits on the floor, and we sit in a circle around it on 8-inch high stools and eat with spoons. It was a little awkward at first but I'm getting used to it. The food itself is good but not very varied, I’ve been eating a lot of rice and fish and potatoes and oil and I haven’t seen a green vegetable since I’ve been here. However the fruit is great, and mangos are in season and they’re delicious and cheap and I buy them a lot. For breakfast I eat bread, chocolate, and instant coffee with instant milk, which seems to be the standard breakfast in these parts.
I think I also have two (or maybe three?) other brothers, Ahmed and another Pape (but with a different last name, so I guess he’s not really a brother, but he lives in the house… like I said I don't know what's going on half the time) and another guy whose name I’ve never quite figured out. The dad lives 30km east of Dakar most of the time because he’s building a school for engineers there, though he’s been home for the past few days. He used to work in power supply and is the only family member who has ever left the country. He’s been to Paris twice and I asked him what he thought of it and he said it’s beautiful but French people are so racist that he never wants to go back. Also it seems that every guy in the neighborhood between the ages of 18 and 30 hangs out either in our living room or in the photo studio that is attached to our house.
The TV is ALWAYS on, which I think is part of the reason I have trouble understanding people because they’re always talking over (or, more accurately, under) the noise of whatever dubbed Mexican soap opera or American movie is playing. The TV gets more exciting at night when we either watch bad horror movies or the 99 names of God being recited or, my favorite, relaxing images of waterfalls and flowers with a narrator repeating “Alxamdulilaay” (“thanks be to God”) over and over in a slow, deep, dramatic voice. My family is Muslim (as is 95% of the country) and Ramadan starts in less than two weeks, I’m excited to see how things change then.
Speaking of Islam, I’m taking a class here on the history of Islam in Senegal. The professor is great, very dynamic and engaging, in great contrast to my French teacher who is pretty much the opposite. I’m also taking Wolof, a class on Senegalese culture and society, and a class on colonization and decolonization, with a focus on Senegambia. All of my classes are in French, except the colonization class. Wolof is really fun, and much easier than Arabic and I think easier than French too, despite how completely different it is from any of the languages I know.
I’m settling into life here, it’s very different and challenging but really fun. I’ve already had my wallet stolen, been attacked by mosquitoes and terrible allergies and many irregular bowel movements, but I’ve also heard some great live music, spent hours body-surfing in the warm Atlantic, and watched the sun set from the absolute western-most point of the African continent. It’s beautiful and hot and dirty and the power keeps going out and I love it.
Ba beneen yoon!
P.S. I finally got picture from Paris online, here's the link:
http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2213734&l=13269&id=823921
samedi 18 août 2007
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
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
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