photoelyse

now a bit about general life in the last month or so. i've felt quite busy because of all my travelling. pack, unpack, pack, unpack, go to train station, go to airport, spend lots of money, sleep in hostels. but its all been worth it. i've been making plenty of time for friends, going out with liz for wine after my last class gets out at 5 on tuesdays or thursdays, going to pub notre dame on wednesdays nights and drinking too much wine, walking to and from school with stefanie, getting various sandwiches or baguettes for lunch with cristin and brian. its weird to think that in 10 days, i may not see these people again. definitly not in the way we hang out now. i love my host family more and more every day. ... read more

first off all, sorry i suck at updating this. I went to China for fall break to visit joseph. We had a great time in Beijing. We visited Tiennemans Square (largest public square in the world), Summer Palace (the hangout for the emperors), the great wall, the forbidden city, the llama temple (lots of buddhas there), the hai-ho district (for a romantic boat ride on the lake). I ate lots of chinese food, got used to the chopsticks pretty quickly, and enjoyed peking duck and lots of tea. The food wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting, i was pleasantly surprised. i had a great week, minus the massive sinus infection on the plane ride to moscow (also had a great time trying to buy nasal decongestant from russians...not.) and the 16-ish hours of travel. ... read more

30 SEPT 2006 Cristin, liz and I went to the annual international fair in Marseilles this Saturday. We got in for free because our friend’s host mom had given her a bunch of tickets already. It was huge, and there were tons of people. There was a whole building full of crafts etc. from other countries, mostly African countries like Egypt and Morocco. There was also a whole building of furniture, and a whole building of art decorations. There was plenty of food there, from other parts of Europe and Africa. We all got a sort of pizza-on-baguette type of thing. We walked around the whole fair for a long time, looking at all the crafts and art pieces and food. Everything was expensive, of course, so we didn’t buy anything except for our lunch and ... read more

18 SEPT 2006 So it was a nice Monday afternoon, and cristin and I were taking the bus home from art class. We wanted to stop at Monoprix to do some quick shopping, so we stayed on the bus (instead of getting off at our usual stops), assuming that the bus would return to the Rotonde, where we could easily walk to Monoprix. We made this assumption because we get on the bus to go to art class at the rotonde…therefore, it should return back there at the end of the route, right? Wrong. We quickly realized that the bus was heading away from the rotonde and towards the outskirts of the town. But, I still insisted that the bus would eventually turn around and go back to the rotonde. We were heading up the hills ... read more

quite a day today. my photography class was soooo cool. my ancient professor brough in one of his own cameras--built in the 1940s or 50s in europe, made out of brazilian rosewood. still fully functional. its old school, its like two wooden slates, one end with the lens and the other with a sheet of glass that serves as a viewfinder. in between the two is an accordion-like thing, and you can stretch the camera out (aka zoom) and tilt it (to help focus it). its one of those where you need to put a thick black cloth over your head and the back of the camera in order to be able to see anything in the viewfinder (to keep the spill light out). he took a group picture of us, using a 4 x 5 ... read more

bonjour tout le monde! the last few days have been pretty great. classes started tuesday. my schedule is pretty good. my earliest class is at 10:30. i have photography and a 3 hour painting and drawing class on monday, 3 classes in french on tuesday, wednesday is the same as monday, then i have two classes in french on thursday, and one class in french friday. i'm done at noon on friday too. i can understand the french professors really well, i'm pretty surprised at how well i can understand french. too bad i still can hardly speak at all. in my first art class we made like 20 sketches of the live nude model in various positions...nothing short of awkward. and then my literature professor, who is also my civ professor, spent like 10 minutes ... read more