the continued adventures

Readers crave more! Well, my mom does, anyway. I'm not terribly excited about my New York journal -- no photos, pointless ramblings, and links to quizzes and other cultural dead ends -- but per request I'm posting the link. Not necessarily representative of my actual life.

one last quack

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Originally uploaded by sallymanhattan.

I'm not sure if this is going to be my last entry from Paris; I'm still here for one more night after this one, but it's hard to say how much of a writing-mood I'll be in.

It seems like I should have at least dug around a little in my extensive collection of photos from around Paris for at least something featuring a monument, or something pretty. Maybe I still will, for that matter. But for the time being, why not just some ducks. I took this picture earlier today, actually; I was sitting by one of the ponds in the Bois de Boulogne and fed a Wasa-cracker to this family of ducks. It's been quite warm here lately, so it wasn't a bad deal at all to escape my stuffy room and sit under a shady tree by the pond. On the way there, I made my first and probably last purchase from one of the open-air food markets, and bought a small bag of cherries to eat by the pond. My original plan was to rent a bike, but that didn't end up happening, since I couldn't find the bike-rental place that supposedly exists near me.

Tomorrow, I've set aside the whole day for getting myself organized. I have no good idea for just how long that will take, even though I've moved myself out of dorm rooms in the past. I keep alternating between being totally relaxed about the whole thing and feeling like I've got all the time in the world to pack up, and then suddenly panicking about something random ("I've got to clean out the fridge!") and worrying that I won't have enough time to get everything done.

I guess in the same vein of ambivalence, I keep alternating between being upset that I have to leave Paris and then suddenly being impatient to be back in the states already. The past week or so, everyone else here has been discussing various things that they'll miss or won't miss; I'm sure when it comes down to trivial list items like cheap wine or early store closings, the two sides are about even for me. But I don't know, an interesting thing that happens when you start adding up cultural quirks, positive or negative, is that you get this sense of place, and you can almost visualize what it is that you've been at the periphery of, as a witness, I guess, for the time spent here. I don't consider myself by any means Parisian, but I like to think that I wouldn't be confused with a tourist; I've gotten to the point where I can watch exchanges between tourists and locals, and know what both parties are probably thinking to themselves, but I only feel slightly more affinity with the French side of those encounters, and usually that even depends on the situation.

I guess it's best that I'm headed to New York after this; the culture may be a completely different one there overall, but I'm looking forward to being extrememly awkward as a result of reverse-culture-shock, and having no one notice at all. You don't need much sense of national identity, I don't think, to make a home in New York.

With that, à bientôt, Paris.

she was probably eating ice cream

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Originally uploaded by sallymanhattan.

Today was my farewell visit to the Louvre, and was supposed to be my last crepe as well, except that my favorite crepe-man wasn't in his usual spot today. It's been hot the past two days here -- around 24 degrees centigrade, whatever that might convert to -- so maybe the crepe-business isn't really all that booming at midday. Understandable enough.

I went on my tour of my favorite wing of the Louvre, the Greek and Roman sculptures (but mostly Greek), and went through a temporary exhibition that I really liked on "La France Romane", which was a collection of art from the Middle Ages, including a lot of manuscripts, which I always enjoy.

Venus de Milo, above, was surrounded by tourists almost as much as the Mona Lisa is; I took a few other photos of her facing the crowd of fellow photographers. The amount of American tourists hasn't really dropped off since March, when I first noticed an increase. Before going into the Louvre, I was sitting outside of a cafe nearby (Le Fumoir!) perking myself up with some coffee, and it was funny to watch people hesitate in front of the cafe, consider the prices, and then, more often than not, seek out something less obvious than the cafe directly behind the Louvre. I wanted to say to some of them, Just come inside, you're just going to tire yourself out if you keep walking, and this place is perfectly fine. But I'm no guidebook.

The possibility of trying to come back to France to do research for a senior thesis is a strong one, though I'm clearly lacking a lot of direction in that regard at present. But seeing the exhibit today at the Louvre -- even though it's only a temporary one -- illuminated something that I already knew but had never really thought about, which is that France is probably among the best places in the world to do research on Romanesque art. It's also not a bad place to look at Greek art, for that matter, since French along with British empires pretty much took anything good out of Greece, as far as I can tell based on their respective museum collections.

Anyway, those are thoughts that would be better solidified with the help of someone at NYU, I guess. I finished my walk around central Paris with some ice cream (Haagen Dazs, which, yes, is made in New Jersey), and then went on my probably-last trip to Carrefour for some dino cookies and a bottle of wine, both of which are coming back to the states with me.

final rites

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Originally uploaded by sallymanhattan.

Inexplicably tired today, I wasn't able to get much of a start on what I intended to be a week full of Paris-sightseeing. I might just have to make a sightseeing to-do list, on top of the packing list and general-errandry-lists. Less than a week to go, for me; the first wave of departures was this weekend.

Speaking of those departed, here's a springlike shot from the Pere Lachaise cemetery, which I'd never been to despite hearing great things about this parklike place. It's sort of towards the eastern edge of the city, a long trek from my house (as are most places in Paris that I enjoy, when it comes down to it). I think most people seek out the celebrity graves -- Proust and Balzac and Wilde were a few that I saw, and we somehow managed to walk past Morrison without seeing it. I got creeped out by the crematorium (definitely up there on my list of scary basements, despite it's polished look).

Someone commented that, in terms of weather and day-length, things are pretty much the same as they were when we first got here in September. I think this feeling is now compounded by the fact that people are leaving; whereas I didn't know anyone here in the first place, and did a lot of my first wanderings on my own, now I'm doing things alone because a lot of the people I would normally call for company have already left.

I guess it's been a year. Mosquitoes are starting to seek me out like they did at the start of September; this time I'm at least armed with bug spray that I got for Morocco, though it smells almost too floral to be effective. I'm starting to work out my actual working-hours with my internship in New York, where I'll be in two weeks. That whole other-life, resurfacing.

some rocks

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Originally uploaded by sallymanhattan.

This is probably one of my favorites from the Morocco trip; I was so impressed by the Cascades d'Ouzoud that I took about thirty photos just like this one while there. Strange how photogenic rocks and water can be.

The Cascades d'Ouzoud are about three hours' bus ride to the east of Marrakech; this was a really pretty, somewhat mountainous area. We meant to just go for the day and head back to Marrakech by night, but decided to stay the night here once we started walking around the waterfall and the little village of Ouzoud.

Continuing this theme of looking at aesthetically-pleasing pictures, it's about time to study for the art history final this week; although I guess I'd be more likely to put most modern art under the category of "challenging" or even "frustrating".

This reminds me, I keep meaning to visit the Louvre one more time before I leave Paris (in just two weeks!). Lots of places, actually, that need to be visited.

tangents

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Originally uploaded by sallymanhattan.

From Marrakech, a photo that is currently doubling as a sort of study-break for me as I'm in the NYU library working on a paper. I'm so close to being done with the written components of my classes this semester, but obviously still have to actually finish everything.

Quand même. It already seems a long time ago that I was wandering around the red Marrakech walls pictured above. No matter what direction you set off in, it seems like you're always running into a wall in Marrakech. I don't mean that to sound like a poetically negative sort of thing; it's just an element of the city's layout, I guess, and actually kind of cool.

A series of random things I just noticed that make me like the place I'm at right now: I have in front of me my new favorite Reverdy poem (La fuite du temps), I'm wasting time by posting photos from Morocco, and somewhere in the periphery of the library is a dicussion on female archetypes. It's sort of an understated, emblematic study-abroad moment.

breathe deeply

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Originally uploaded by sallymanhattan.

In the midst of paper-writing-week (to be followed by the equally joyous final-exam-week), another Morocco photo. This one is from the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech, a small but lovely garden in the Ville Nouvelle. Lovely as it is, there's an entrance fee involved, which means that the place is probably only visited by tourists. In fact, even though this picture doesn't show it, the garden was packed with French tourists when we were there; it otherwise would have been a restful place, except that we had a hard time finding anywhere to sit down.

Anyway, I didn't exactly find inner peace while there among the French tourists, but maybe the peaceful photo will provide a moment of zen for those of us looking forward to a series of long nights at the computer.