1) I turned 21! And celebrated at least three times. And therefore did not have a lot of extra time to write a blog post that week.
2) I was in Ireland!
3) AlliSON was here!
So I'd better get started...
1) My birthday week was busy but fantastic. It started early with a visit from my long-time friend Laura, who's studying in Italy this semester. She came for the weekend of the 19th/20th, and I had a great time (re)discovering Paris with her. There are photos of our adventures on pages 3 and 4 of this album.
I treated myself to some beauty products (perfume, cosmetics...) and a trip to the hair salon, my first haircut since being here. The hairstylist was really friendly and although we had a few difficulties with communication, I am thoroughly satisfied with the haircut. The difficulties we had were mainly caused by those subtleties that hairstylists, etc. tend to use, as in: "Would you like me to put an after-rinse cream on your hair?" which really means, "Would you like to spend four additional euros on a good-smelling something with debatable effects for your hair?" Or, "Would you like a "natural drying" for your hair or a "brushing?" which actually implies "I will spend at least 30 minutes drying/curling/styling your hair (in my case) in exchange for ten additional euros". I opted out of the cream, but I went ahead and got my hair "brushed" at the end of the cut. She really earned that extra ten euros as she dried my hair layer by layer with a huge curling brush, applying hairspray after each section. By the time she was done, there were at least three clients waiting rather impatiently...
I celebrated Tuesday night at a pub I'd been wanting to try with a lot of my American friends, mostly from MICEFA. Click here to check out the pub, which is called the Frog and Princess and is one of a chain of "Frog" pubs in France. I tried the Ginger Twist beer and the Maison Blanche (White House) - not bad!
Thursday night my friends Zina, Sandra, and Stefania were nice enough to let me host a little birthday celebration at their place. We had a nice turnout and enjoyed snacks and wine/champagne (expensive but necessary) before heading to a club to dance the night away! I had a great time :)
Here's a link to the photo album with my birthday photos. The ones from the pub and Zina's place start on page 2. Tequila shots abound!
Unfortunately my birthday week coincided with some sad developments in my social life - my german friend Anja AND my italian friend Stefania left Paris that weekend to head back to their respective countries. That and the fact that I recently bought my plane ticket home (for June 17th!) sort of makes me feel like my Parisian séjour is already drawing to a close. I had wanted to stay in Paris until the end of July, but financially that is not a smart decision. In any case I am officially on the downhill side of my year abroad, a truly bittersweet thought with too many implications for me to get into right now...
Anyway! The cherry on top of my birthday week was that I finally made it to a show at the Opéra Garnier! Anja gave me tickets that she wasn't going to use for L'Atelier du chant, literally the "workshop of the song", which is the Opéra Nationale de Paris's equivalent of the Houston Grand Opera Studio (you can click that). Basically they choose young singers who are in between grad school and a stable career to come work with their coaches, pianists, etc. and to perform in the company's productions that season. My senior year of high school, I participated in a program called the Houston Grand Opera High School Voice Studio, which is modeled off of the "real" studio but serves high school seniors to prepare them for their university auditions. As much as I love opera, I also love "recitals" (where only arias or scenes from operas are performed - so you get the real "jewels" from several larger works), and this one, like all of them, definitely brought back good memories. AND it was in the Opera Garnier! You can click here for photos - go to the 5th page :)
2) And the Saturday after my birthday I left for Ireland!
I visited Ennis (the Shannon), Galway, and the Aran Islands with four other American girls from the MICEFA. We got into Ennis late Saturday night and spent Sunday morning exploring it before heading to Galway in the afternoon. I thought Ennis was so charming, and then I realized it's probably just a typical little Irish town that would get boring after much more than a day. I guess it's a good thing we left before that happened! Galway is considerably bigger and is apparently a bit of a university town. It's also a port/coast town so we had a good time walking by the water. We went to the biggest of the Aran Islands on Monday, about a 1.5 hour journey each way from Galway by bus and ferry. The travel time was worth it, though, as we got to spend almost the entire day biking around the island. We stopped for lunch by an old lighthouse and guardpost before heading on to visit a HUGE (huge) "Celtic fort", which to my memory is the oldest one remaining, or something like that. We took pictures standing on the edge of the cliffs and basked in the sun of that beautiful day. I would say that's the farthest I've felt from the "city mindset" in, well, a while.
On Tuesday we caught a train to Dublin, where I separated from the rest of the group to hang out with my friend Vicky, who I've known since high school. Vicky is studying in Dublin this semester and she was awesome enough to let me stay with her, even after she left for Malta (!) on Wednesday afternoon. I had a fantastic time catching up with her and exploring "her" Dublin. After she left on Wednesday, I spent the evening cuddled up with an Irish coffee and James Joyce's The Dubliners, which I figured would be a good way to read Joyce, especially considering I've heard Ulysses declared "unreadable" more than a few times. I find that going to an author's birthplace/homeland can be a real motivation to read him/her; obviously Joyce is famous outside Ireland, but after sooo many Joyce references in Dublin I felt obliged to buy a book for the plane. I felt similarly about Milan Kundera after leaving the Czech republic. I spent thursday afternoon wandering museums and the city in general before catching my late-afternoon plane. I particularly enjoyed the rooms dedicated to Jack B. Yeats (W.B.'s brother) in the National Gallery:
That Grand Conversation was Under the Rose
Of course, Picasso was there too:
Still Life with a Mandolin and Guitar
I liked this piece by Paul Signac:
Woman on the Terrace (it's actually his wife)
...and some others for which I probably should have made note of the artists and not simply the title. One of them was called Stella in a Flowered Hat - I agree with this guy, it's a pretty good name for a painting.
Another highlight of my museum hopping was definitely the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Dublin City Gallery. After Bacon died, his surviving family offered his tiny London studio to the Tate Gallery. The idea was to construct an exact replica, using the original materials when possible, of his studio (as he left it) in the museum. The Tate didn't refuse but didn't really agree either, and after months/years of delays, said family decided the Dublin City Gallery, in the city of Bacon's birth, might be a more gracious host for the exhibition. I didn't know much about Bacon before going but I really enjoyed discovering his work, his life, his personality in this way. They had a great interview playing at the start of the exhibit which demonstrated how wacky but interesting he really was. The studio was tiny and a complete mess, but he chose to keep it even when he had the funds to do otherwise. He was allergic, but that didn't prevent him from allowing layers of dust to settle over everything in the room. I wouldn't say I'm a huge fan of Bacon's actual oeuvre, but learning about the artist through the extensive exhibit definitely helped me understand him. The analysis of his work and the stages it went through would thrill most people who know something about creating visual art. Click here to learn more about Bacon.
François explores Ennis
Here he is in Merrion Square Park (Dublin)
He's pretty stoic, which on the upside means I'll never have to endure his endless banter (he may have to put up with mine, however) - and above all, a very faithful (and portable) traveling companion!
3) I got back to Paris on Thursday the 4th and had a day to catch up on everything before my friend Allison arrived on the 6th! Allison and I have known each other since the very first day of high school, where we were both voice majors. We were supernumerary ninjas together in Houston Grand Opera's Spring 2005 production of Turandot (Puccini), and we also both participated in the above-mentioned HGO High School Voice Studio. She's now a voice major at SMU, and came to visit me for her Spring Break :)
She charmed Laurence and co. with a tin of Texas Pecans, and she gave me a very good excuse to return to tourist mode in my beloved (temporary) city. We hit up the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and the Arc de Triomphe on day 1, followed by 4 museums the following day, which luckily for us was the first Sunday of the month, meaning they were all free. Unfortunately she was on her own during much of the week, as I had class and work as usual, but I got the impression that she had a good time anyway. She said her Tuesday trip to Versailles was a definite highlight. Other than that, I organized lots of soirées with friends, and we ended the week with an oh-so-romantic dinner at Gallopin, which had been recommended to her by a family friend.
Our adventures merit their own album, so here it is.
Oof! I'll leave you with that. It's a Monday morning and I'm back to the grind, the "study" part in "study abroad". Congratulations if you've made it this far in the post, and thank you, as always, for your love/support/readership. I'll be seeing you (in June!)!
Infinite x's and o's,
Alina :)
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