Sarah Senter's Crash Guide to Paris 101 (or, An American in Paris Part 2)

Eiffel Tower

I mean, come on. You're potentially in Paris for only one day - why wouldn't you climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower? I mean, it's only one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world! 

670 stairs later I was beginning to have second thoughts. Steps are not my strong suit - I am a traditionally built lady, and do not normally find myself scaling massive flights of stairs to the tops of towers, but let me tell you - the view made every single step worth it. It was a cold, cloudy day, but we could still see a long ways into the distance, and the view of the city was absolutely phenomenal. It was a totally surreal experience, standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and being able to look down on the entirety of Paris and pick out all of the famous buildings and structures, and one that I would recommend to anyone. The Eiffel Tower is also beautiful at night, as we had seen the night before--they light up the entire structure, and every hour on the hour, the lights start to sparkle and glimmer, and it's truly spectacular.

Notre-Dame Cathedral


Like I've said before, I love cathedrals. I think they're absolutely stunning and awe-inspiring, and let me tell you - none that I have seen are more stunning or awe-inspiring than the cathedral of Notre-Dame. (The fact that The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is one of my favorite Disney movies is irrelevant...heh.) The amount of exquisite detail in the stonework and gargoyles and chimera is astonishing, and the stained glass and Gothic architecture are positively beautiful, and you get an immediate sense of it's 850+ year history as soon as you see it and walk through its massive doors.

Inside, the cathedral was dimly lit by chandeliers and all of the candles from the surrounding chapels, and they had a path roped off for tourists to walk around the perimeter of the cathedral. Since it was Sunday, there was also a mass going on in Notre-Dame as we were walking around, and this made it even more eerily beautiful. The central nave of of the cathedral was packed with people attending the mass, and the organ music and the Latin chanting of the priests went on the whole time we were there, and they made the whole experience very atmospheric. They even had the swinging incense holder, which sent smoke up into the vast expanse of space above the alter in front of the exquisite rose windows - absolutely beautiful.

Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop


Across the Seine from the Ile-de-Cite where Notre-Dame and the Palais de Justice are, is an English-language bookshop called Shakespeare & Co, which was founded in the 1920s, and apparently was frequented by all of the American and British ex-patriates living in Paris during the interwar years, like Enrest Hemingway, Gertrude, Stein, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and more. It's a tiny little shop with two floors, crammed with books in every single possible place, as well as reading rooms, tiny writing rooms with notebooks and typewriters for visitors to leave messages for later visitors, beds for people to sleep on (including beginning writers), and a piano for anyone to play. It reminded me of a much, much more compact, and much much older-feeling version of Ed McKay's - I figured I should buy something, just to say that I had, and I ended up getting a collection of selected poems by Dylan Thomas. Score.

The Louvre


Ahhh, the Big Mama of all art museums. I can't really talk about all that we saw in the Louvre without going on and on and on, but suffice to say...1) It's absolutely gorgeous. 2) It's absolutely MASSIVE. 3) It was SO bizarre seeing all of these amazing paintings and sculptures that you see in textbooks and online for years and years in person. Examples: The Mona Lisa (oh yes, we saw the Mona Lisa), Liberty Leading the People (the Viva la Vida painting, guys), Napoleon crowning Josephine in Notre-Dame, the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, a slew of awesome Egyptian artifacts, and so so so so much more. Expect pictures.

Montmartre and Sacre-Coeur

The 19th-century haven of bohemian artists, painters, and writers is just as charmingly boho and vibrant today, and we walked through the Artists' Square and several little side streets that were all lit up with Christmas lights - c'est magnifique. There was even an accordion busker - it's legit guys.

Sacre-Coeur is another cathedral, albeit one that was built in the early 1900s, but it was nonetheless just as beautiful as Notre-Dame. It's a huge, domed white-stone building sitting at the very top of the hill of Montmartre, and it holds some of the largest and most ornate wall and ceiling mosaics in the world. The bells were ringing as we were walking around the basilica - which I think is modeled on St. Peter's in Rome? - which made it even more epically amazing. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside the cathedral, but I did get some lovely nighttime pictures of the outside of Sacre-Coeur, and the view of Paris from the hill.

Also Included in Sarah Senter's Crash Course Guide to Paris 101

• Walkbys of So Many More Parisian Landmarks (ie the Musee d'Orsay, L'Academie, Place de la Concorde, Tuileries Garden, the Moulin Rouge, the Pantheon, the Sorbonne, the Hotel de Ville, and so many many more.)
• Delicious food: Onion and cheese soup, hot wine and hot chocolate, crepe au chocolat e chantilly (Nutella and whipped cream - HELL YES), all ordered in broken French by MOI.
• Reenactments by Sarah and myself of various moments from a Hunchback of Notre-Dame inspired Whose Line is it Anyway? sketch in front of several Paris landmarks. Video evidence will surface, but content yourself with the original video, so you can compare later. :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YkR5byDw2w

An American in Paris

So after a hair-raising disaster of canceled flights and trains, terrible weather, and an emergency bus ride to Glasgow, I finally (finally!) made it to PARIS, FRANCE to meet Sarah and Jacob!!!!!!! We had been planning this since the beginning of the semester, so it was ABOUT DAMN TIME. I got into Paris proper around 9:00 Saturday night, and I tell you - I have never been happier to see anyone in my life than I was to see those guys.  I was so happy to be in PARIS (it must always be referred to in capital letters) that I immediately forgot all of the travel hell that it had taken to get me there.

Anyhoos, since I wasn't able to get there until Saturday night, that left me with really only one full day in Paris before Jacob and I were supposed to fly back to Prague on Monday morning. This was unfortunate, but not to be helped, so Operation: Take Full Advantage of the Time You Have in Paris was instigated in full effect. Time was not wasted. Within ten minutes of getting off the bus from the Beauvais airport (and snarfing down the delicious pain-au-chocolat Sarah brought for me), we were walking around the streets of Paris, which let me tell you are absolutely gorgeous, most especially at nighttime. We would be walking along a beautiful stone bridge over the Seine, the streetlights would be reflecting in the water, I would look up....and see a world-famous Parisian landmark like, say, I dunno, THE EIFFEL TOWER or NOTRE DAME or THE LOUVRE. You know. Nbd. Actually BFD.

So after a nighttime wander through Paris, a delicious (and marvelously inexpensive) dinner at a wonderfully atmospheric cafe in Saint-Michel, and a soujourn up the Champs-Elysees through the Parisian Christmas markets to the Arc de Triomphe, we split up and Jacob and I went back to our hostel in Montmartre to prepare for the intsense, crash course of Paris that was in store for us on Sunday.

See the next post for Sarah Senter's Crash Guide to Paris 101, since this post would have been obscenely long had I included it..

Also, pictures are to come once I get back to Edinburgh - I forgot to bring the cord that connects my camera to a laptop, so they have to stay on my camera until next week. Apologies, but they'll be worth the wait! Until then, enjoy these videos of one of my favorite movies - rest assured that this is what actually happened. Gershwin and hordes of French children and all.

An American in Paris, Example 1

An American in Paris, Example 2

An American in Paris, Example 3

Computer troubles = Bane of my existence.

Hello all!

Apologies for the long silence on my end, but November has been a super busy month, what with shows closing, papers to be written, presentations to be created, people coming and visiting and having subsequent adventures, etc. etc. etc....And now, to top it all off, my Wake laptop - good old pain in the ass ThinkPad laptop - is truly on its last legs, and is refusing to connect to the Internet. It has been somewhat virusy and finnicky since I got to Scotland, but now it's just being more of a nuisance than a help, so I'm being forced to use the computers in the residence hall lab and the library. Man, luckily I am getting a new one in January - if I didn't have to return this one to Wake Forest, I would gleefully take a baseball bat to it.

This means I'm not entirely sure how reliable (or frequent) my internet access will be, but I am going to do my best to keep in touch with everyone, and keep trying to post things on this blog. The next four weeks (only four! Gah! It's gone by so fast!) are going to be filled with really exciting things and adventures to be had, and so I'm going to try my best and keep up to date with blogging about them! As for the past few weeks, there will hopefully be some retroactive blog posts detailing those adventures, such as Amadeus, Remembrance Day, and Sarah coming to visit Edinburgh and the wonderful things we did then!

Love until the next blog post

There was a star danced, and under that was I born.

So yesterday was my 21st birthday.

Yeah, it's weird.

To be honest though, turning 21 in a country where I've been able to drink legally for the past three years made it a little bit more low-key than if I had been in the States, where I'm sure all of my friends would have abducted me and made certain that I made very poor life decisions for the rest of the night. :-) However, this does not mean that my birthday was dull, not by any means! I had a really lovely day, and I had a lot of fun and spent the day with some really wonderful people, so I think that this birthday could be classified as a success!

Also, I'd say that my birthday haul was pretty respectable: I got a lovely card from Poppa and Joyce, and a really cute one from Lydia; I had a fantastic long Skype call with Mom, and a great email from Uncle Alan (both of whom have the same birthday - twins!) and so many of my friends and family wished me a happy birthday via Facebook - it's always wonderful to go through all of the wishes, especially when people write/record really hilarious things (*cough*TreEaston*cough*). A bunch of the girls in the residence hall and I also got together and had a nice little party that consisted of junk food (including about 8 or so Mars Bars that they got me instead of a cake, which was fantastic), alcoholic beverages, and a very amusing viewing of the Disney version of "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" (SO GREAT.) Couldn't have asked for a better way to spend my birthday.

However, the best thing I got for my birthday this year.....were these:

Flowers from Quill.

Totally made my day. My room smells wonderful now. :-)


UPDATE:   AND, to make my birthday/day-after-birthday even BETTER, The Decemberists' newest album has a name, a track list, and a release date. I AM SO EXCITED YOU HAVE NO IDEA. http://www.zmemusic.com/feature/news/new-decemberists-album-announced-the-king-is-dead-512536/

Speas and Eichhorn Do Edinburgh, Part Two

Concluding the tale of two Americans gallivanting about Edinburgh for the weekend.

Anyhoos.

So, at the end of last week's installment, I had collected Jacob from the airport, we had visited the Queen (well, sorta), and eaten our weight in delicious Chinese noodles. So great.

Anyhoos, the next day was spent wandering up and down the Royal Mile, including visits to Edinburgh Castle, St. Giles' Cathedral, and various touristy shops. But the main part of the day was spent hiking Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano in the middle of Holyrood Park, right behind the residence halls where I live. I hadn't made the climb before, and since it's pretty  much something you have to do at some point while in Edinburgh, I figured it would be a great thing to include in Jacob's Edinburgh experience.

Arthur's Seat. Also, I didn't take this picture - I got it from Google. There is no snow on the ground here, thankfully.

Anyhoos...so as you can see, there is a very nice, relatively easy way to climb up the mountain, starting with the footpath that goes off to the left from the top of the road in this picture. That path curves up to the right around the mountain with a very  nice stone staircase that has been placed into the side of the mountain. This makes it pretty simple to climb up to the top, and lets you get up there without losing too much breath.

Yeah. Jacob and I missed that path.

In my defense, I had never made the climb before. But we kept going around to the right, and ended up heaving ourselves up the much, much steeper slope with not much path to speak of -- more like footholds cut into the hill. There was a bit of scrambling up a tiny rock wall portion of the mountain, but we got to the top with little problems.

I was really excited.

So was Jacob.

The view was indeed amazing.

 As you can see, the view made the unexpectedly-arduous trek totally worth it.

So then came the time when we needed to descend - for we had other misadventures to attend to. Since we'd missed the easy way up, we both agreed that we would take it on the way down. As we prepared to descend, we realized that there was a flaw in this plan: we hadn't taken the staircase up. So we didn't know where the staircase began. Crap.

So we started climbing down the middle of the mountain, hoping to intersect with the easy path at some point. Well - we didn't. We ended up climbing down A NEARLY VERTICAL INCLINE OF ALMOST SHEER ROCK. WE WERE LEGITIMATELY ROCK-CLIMBING DOWN AN EXTINCT VOLCANO.

It was pretty awesome. A little scary. But awesome. There were a few times when the rocks under our feet got a little shaky, and we slipped and fell/slid on our asses (by "our" I mean "mine," as I am a traditionally-built lady and weigh significantly more than Jacob McLankyFace). BUT WE WERE VICTORIOUS.

Yeah. We climbed that. THAT'S RIGHT.

Needless to say - the next time I climbed Arthur's Seat, I made sure to find the EASY way up.

Speas and Eichhorn Do Edinburgh, Part One

Eureka! A blog post!

I know, I know, I know. I've been neglecting my blog. But I'll make it up to you, Blog, I promise. I'll buy you some nice HTML codes to make it up to you.

Anyhoos, this past weekend was very exciting, because Jacob came from Prague to visit! He's the first person from Wake that I've seen this semester, and we had a really wonderful time wandering around Edinburgh and seeing all of the sites. I've been having random bouts of slight homesickness recently, and hanging out with someone from home was really great and reassuring - plus, after a month and a half of functioning in Czech, I'll bet that an English-speaking country was a nice break for Jacob.

So on Friday afternoon I met Jacob at the airport, and we bused back into the city for lunch with no problems. This was very comforting, because airports make me really nervous - I'm always terrified that some crazy, random happenstance will pop up out of nowhere, like a passport or security problem, or the plane had to land somewhere else or something, and everything will derail. Luckily this did not happen, and we got into Edinburgh without a worry.

So after we had lunch at my favorite baguette shop on Nicolson Street, we dropped off our stuff at my room, and we went to visit the Palace of Holyroodhouse, a gorgeous building that I have walked past but not actually gone in. The Palace is Queen Elizabeth II's (and other members of the royal family's) official residence whenever they are in Scotland, although it's arguably more famous as the main home of Mary Queen of Scots. We couldn't take pictures inside, but it was absolutely beautiful - it had dozens of impressive tapestries and paintings and original (17th-century) plasterwork ceilings, as well as an entire exhibit (with jewels and heirlooms) on the Stuarts, from Mary's immediate ancestors to the 18th-century Jacobites.

The Palace of Holyrood House. Where the Queen lives, yo.

Yakob! They gave us cool audio guide tour things. We were really excited.

 The personal chambers of Mary Queen of Scots were also preserved, including the tiny dining room where Mary's second husband Lord Darnley (who was an asshole of the first degree, by the way) and his posse killed her personal secretary David Rizzio. They broke into the Queen's apartments, dragged Rizzio from behind her while they held her at gunpoint, stabbed him 56 times, and left his body on the floor. The Queen was seven months pregnant, and they still have a plaque on the wall showing where Darnley & Co. left Rizzio's body after they killed him. It was eerie. My inner history nerd almost had an aneurysm.

After a lovely tour of the Palace (and after Jacob had to drag me away from all of the pretty pretty [and creepy] history), we wandered around the adjacent Holyrood Abbey and the Palace Gardens. Absolutely stunning.

The ruins of Holyrood Abbey.

Holyrood Abbey with Arthur's Seat in the background. He will feature heavily in the sequel to this post.

We topped this day off with a trip to Red Box, which is a build-your-own-meal kind of Chinese restaurant, where they serve your food in big paper boxes and give you a pair of chopsticks and let you fend for yourself. Quite possibly THE BEST CHINESE I HAVE EVER HAD IN MY LIFE.

SERIOUSLY.

I may or may not have reached nirvana.

My heart's in the Highlands...

“My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,

My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer -

A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go.”

Robert Burns, when he wasn’t busy getting his face slapped all over Scottish money or putting the moves on some unsuspecting Highland lass, actually wrote some pretty cool and beautiful poetry—including the above verse. Sentimentality and pastoral images aside (oh those crazy Romantics), it’s a pretty accurate statement: the Highlands are absolutely AMAZING.

I spent the past two weekends in the Highlands - last weekend in Insch, Aberdeenshire, and this past weekend about 100-some miles west in Inverness - and I absolutely loved every minute. Because I'm so behind on blog posts, I'm not going to try and write retroactive blog posts about the weekends; instead, I'm going to link everyone to my photo albums from both weekends, and everyone should be able to see them.

Also - I will get better about posting. I promise.


INSCH HOMESTAY: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=559220&id=820825600&l=d793ca4911

IFSA-BUTLER TRIP TO INVERNESS: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=560114&id=820825600&l=1112721521

 Also, if these links don't work, let me know. We'll figure something out.