Easter Weekend

Friday after class, Patrick, Chris, and I decided that we better reserve our seats for all of the trains we'll be taking next week during Spring Break. We ended up having to go to two different train stations and we probably couldn't have picked a worse day to go. Paris has a very high Christian population and almost all schools/businesses are closed Easter Monday, making Good Friday a huge travel day. We eventually got all of our reservations taken care of and headed home.

Paris skyline with the enormous Tour Montparnasse

My host family left for la campagne on Friday evening to spend Easter weekend with the extended family, which left me toute seule at the apartment for a few days. I didn't mind the peace and quiet since I have a huge paper due this upcoming week. My task is to pick any object (artwork, statue, random bench... literally anything) in the city of Paris and write a research paper about how it influences the city aesthetically, historically, and socially. Yeah, it's even less fun than it sounds. For my object, I chose Tour Montparnasse, the only skyscraper in central Paris. Parisians absolutely hate this tower because it "ruins" the skyline. Many famous landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and Louvre Pyramids were both hated shortly after their construction, but were later accepted and embraced by the city. Tour Montparnasse has been around for 40 years and people still hate it, so I've decided to write about why it hasn't withstood the test of time. Six pages of unending fun. Worse yet, my professor knows that I can read French, so she said she'll expect me to have lots of research due to my access to both English and French sources. I've spent far too much time these past few days milling through French scholarly articles with my French-English pocket dictionary in hand. Is it too late to play the "Je ne parle pas francais" card?

Beaches of Nice, France with Alps in the background

The only thing powering me through this paper is the fact that I leave for Switzerland, Austria, and Czech in five days and immediately after I get back from that vacation, my family small army will be here. Another thing I'm super excited about is the fact that a bunch of classmates and I just booked a long weekend in May in the French Riviera. We rented an apartment that's in the heart of Nice, just a 10 minute walk from the dazzling beaches (no, Dad, they're not nude beaches. Don't bother making a cheesy joke about it). The lady who we rented the apartment from informed us that the weekend we'll be there is also the weekend of the Grand Prix and Cannes Film Festival. We honestly couldn't have picked a better time to go! Here's a link of the apartment we rented.

My monthly Métro pass got stolen on Thursday (either from a dishonest bag check at a museum or out of my pocket), so I've been having to buy individual passes or jump the turnstile, just like the Parisian hooligans do. It's a really expensive / annoying inconvenience, but I guess I'm just glad nothing else got stolen. C'est la vie

Alright, I should probably stop paying so much attention to this blog post. My research paper is starting to get jealous. À bientôt!

Affectueusement,

Katie