snow!

YAY!! IT SNOWED!! so yeah im a loser but im from georgia so just let me be excited. it actually was a huge pain in the @$$ because the buses werent running this morning and i had to WALK to Yzeure for class..took me like an hour..needless to say i was late and SOAKED when i got there thanks to the cars going by sloshing dirty wet snow all over me...anyway heres about 3 billion unnecessary pictures that i took today. enjoy

SNOW SNOW SNOW NEIGE NIEVA SCHNEE!

New Year's in Paris

So yeah....this is almost a month late...but hey, as they say, better late than never right? So anyway, I'm not gonna complain too much but I won't sugarcoat it either...New Year's in Paris was pretty disappointing. Basically the city of Paris did NOTHING for New Year's. No Fireworks, no countdown, no music or concert or anything. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Rien. I paid more for my hotel and train tickets for nothing. All those years back home watching the Eiffel Tower explode on TV for the 31st and the one time I'm there..yeah. So me and Sandie were there in front of the eiffel tower with a few hundred thousand other people...11:55...waiting... midnight....ummmm happy new year. People started getting agitated around 12:10. Everyone started filing out angry and disappointed. Good thing we got out quick I heard there was some low-level rioting on the Champ de Mars after we left. So off to the champs elysées to find somewhere to party. Yeah...either 30 euros or so entry or just flat out refusal. Ok so maybe we're aiming too high. of course the champs elysées is where some of the most chic clubs in the world are found. Not to mention the fact that there were 400,000 people on the champs elysées, drunk nasty people everywhere, and you literally couldn't step without touching broken glass...Fights everywhere. Not at all the party spirit. People were either sad or pissed off. So we head to another quarter St. Germain-des-prés. at this point we just wanted to find a nice quiet bar to have a drink and mainly just to get off our feet. We´d been walking all day... but no most bars were closed because they didn't want to have to deal with the drunk obnoxious new year's crowd. So back to the hotel to sleep. Blah. Also the museums were closed the 31st and the 1st, and then the 2nd (tuesday) was the normal closing day for all the museums (other than orsay) ANYWAY the rest of the trip went well except for the horrid weather. (cold and rainy). Day two was Musée d'Orsay which is mostly impressionism and other art (mostly French) from 1848 to 1914. I love this museum. Impressionism is one of the only forms of art that i "get." lol. that night we went up the Arc de Triomphe. Day 3 was getting up super early to go to the eiffel tower to beat the crowds. Worked well, we were in the first group up. We went to the first and second levels by stairs then to the sommet in elevator. After that, we went over to the latin quarter to lunch on a kebab, then to the Musée national du Moyen Âge de Cluny which is the Museum of the Middle Ages...Wow so firefox just crashed and i lost half the post...lets see...where was i. I appreciate that...So I love this museum because i love middle age culture. There are also some Roman baths from the Roman Empire days. After that it was deep deep down into the Earth to the catacombs! I don't know if you've ever seen pictures but I had and I knew what to expect but apparently Sandie didn't know what to expect...she wigged out. She was expecting some walls with a couple of skulls embedded here and there. Not 5 kilometres of walls MADE out of the skeletons of millions of parisiens. Basically during the late 18th century, paris was really running short on space so they took the bodies that were already improperly buried in mass graves and put them deep under the earth. The tour is only a part of whats really down there but even then, it took 45 minutes to walk through a 2km section open to tourists. really amazing stuff. That night we went to l'Hôtel de Ville to see a free exhibit of the French photographer Robert Doisneau. He took all his pictures in black and white and only in Paris between the 30's and the 80's (I think. not sure about when he stopped) a lot of them a pretty well known such as The Kiss by l'Hôtel de ville. pretty cool since the exhibit was in the hotel de ville. Just look up Doisneau on google images. there's tons. The last day we just did some shopping in Les Halls which is the big commercial quarter of Paris. You could spend months in there! Anyway in the end we caught up pretty good I believe considering it was kinda lame at first. Here are my photos for those who haven't yet seen them:

Paris I; Le Jour de l'an

Paris II; Musée d'Orsay, Arc de Triomphe, La Tour Eiffel

Paris III; Bateau-Bus, Musée du Moyen Âge, Catacombs, Doisneau

peace out talk to ya soon!