Okay so today was kind of a bunch of days stuffed into one and the title was just to get your attention (although it did happen today). First the day started in Montparnasse (mont-par-nass) which is the 14th arrondisement and the cultural center of the world in the 1920's (those of you who have seen Midnight in Paris understand). We started in a cafe called Le Couple (coo-pl-uh) which is a huge cafe with artwork all over it done by the great artists of the 1920's. This is where Hemingway and Picasso and Kiki de Montparnasse drank cafes and talked.
My favorite tombs were the ones like this where there was a woman mourning. I loved the idea of there constantly being somebody at your tomb and these statues were beautiful.
This is the grave of the famous American photographer Man Ray who I learned a great deal about in class because he famously photographed his once love interest Kiki de Montparnasse who was the subject of one of my reports in class. His grave is one of the more famous in the graveyard with the inscription "unconcerned but not indifferent" which I thought was a weird choice of final inscription but then again I'm not as artistic as he was.
This was the grave of a famous French singer. You can tell which graves are newer or more famous by how well decorated they are and the really famous ones have lipstick marks all over them.
This building here was Pablo Picasso's very own studio where a lot of his most famous art was painted. This was his first studio in Montparnasse after leaving Montmartre.
This hotel once housed DuChamps, Kisling, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara (founder of dadaism), Louis Aragon (founder of surrealism) and Kiki de Montparnasse. This hotel is also just two doors down from These large studios and Picasso's own studio. This one street in Montparnasse contained such an immense amount of artistic talent it's surreal (that's a stupid joke).
After touring Montparnasse we went in search of some crepes since the best crepes are in Montparnasse. This is because crepes come from Bretogne (bre-tone) and the train from Bretogne used to only stop in Montparnasse. Anyway, at this restaurant I noticed a man sketching furiously on a tiny sketchpad and when he had finished he passed out a few little pieces of paper and we noticed that he had sketched those of us (unfortunately not me) that were in his line of vision. Below is a sketch of one of the girls in our program. This man continued to show us pictures of his paintings and explain how he had traveled Europe learning to paint all different things. It was such a neat experience.
We walked through Montparnasse all the way back to the Luxembourg Gardens where we explored different areas while we passed through.
Once we had exited the Luxembourg gardens we saw the Pantheon and decided that we might as well check that out too while we were already there. The inside is absolutely beautiful and it is like a wide open church with beautiful statues in it. Since is was built for St. Genevieve the patron saint of Paris there is a lot of girl power in there which I thought was awesome. I also got to see the tombs of Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and the guy who wrote the 3 Musketeers.
When we exited the Pantheon we saw the French participating in their national sport: striking. We watched this for a few minutes before coming to the realization that we didn't care what they were protesting and most of them didn't either so we just left them to it.
Today is also the day I realized that I couldn't make it another day without doing laundry but since it's so expensive and inconvenient here I decided to do some bathtub laundry. It was a lot of fun and super convenient and I thought that I had come up with the very best idea in the whole world. I couldn't think of why everyone didn't just do this. That was until I hung my clothes up to dry. Now they've been hanging up for about 6 hours and they are still soaking wet. I might need to blow dry them all before I can wear them but hey, I saved about 10 Euro.
I also did a little workout in the park with my Nike Training Club App with this view. Not too shabby except I learned that you can do just about anything in the park without French judgement except exercise. Running is fine, reading is fine, eating is fine, even making out is more than fine, but doing push ups and lunges and they're all laughing.
Here was my daily dose of excitement. When we left the metro in Le Marais (mar-ayy) there were alarms going off and tons of police but there's always a large police presence in the metro and we kind of assumed that the police were there to fix the alarm. However when we exited the metro there was a large crowd gathered around the stairs and we realized there was nobody entering. We waited around curiously and eventually saw about 40 police officers (one with a bloody face and some with police dogs) exit with three men in hand cuffs and one woman who was being detained and yelling at the cops. I don't know what all this was about and I didn't get a great picture because I didn't want any of the police to see me taking a picture but you can see one handcuffed man in the grey sweatshirt. Crazy. We spent the rest of the night in le marais and the latin quarter which I'm starting to know pretty well. We found a burrito place in the latin quarter that is like Chipolte (only better!!). The American working there said it's better because France has higher food quality standards so everything is fresher but I think it's because their chicken isn't super spicy like Chipolte's. In any event, a successful and busy day and I will check the police blotter to see if what these hooligans might have been doing to capture the attention of the entire RATP (transit) police force. Now I should probably go to bed since I have to be awake in 6 hours. Good night all. A demain
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