End of week...

Wednesday: What another fun day! during the 4 hours of unwritten about studio on tuesday i'd found that the opera Rigoletto was going to take place on wednesday, student tix on sale 15 minutes before the performance. So day took it's shape from that. Tony and I wanted to dress up a little bit, and sigh no dress clothes meant having to go shopping in Paris... horrors... and check out the new spring clothes. Back to the Galleries Lafayette in the morning, an hour of wandering the beautifully laid-out designers, wonderful tailored or flowing clothes in wonderful fabrics... mostly quite a very lot more then i'd be willing to pay, could be a lot of fun to be a rich girl here though.... ha. Ended up buying a suitish jacket I had drooled over in Rome... fit attractively in a lovely fabric, and blah blah blah I can use it for work and it goes with all my pants... very glad I bought it. Lunch in the department store cafe/cafeteria on the top floor, delicious salmon. A goal for when I return is to find or manufacture a green been and lemon juice recipe that is nothing short of wonderful.... they didn't serve one, but some lemon from the fish went splashing around, and mmmmm.......

5 minutes of studio with the internet out was enough, we went back home to wear our new glad rags and be honestly studious in a french library at the Centre Pompidou. it was not American. PACKED with people being scholarly, an acre of tables and a line to sit down... was fun to stuff brain with architectural images and philosophy (plenty of english books) in such an earnest atmosphere, got quite a bit of material and validation for my project, most successful.

Wandered through the Marais towards the Bastille, satisfied 'vegetable' craving with french fries eaten, foiled again at the Place de Vosages, still a neat square park to look on. The mist falling in front of the streetlights at dusk mmm. The scale of the roustabout around the Bastille column (there is no longer the prison, knocked down long ago) is always suprising. Our opera attmepts were foiled, though, due to a strike. Bastards. So French.

Enormous pot of garlic mashed potatoes, bread and cheese for supper, topped off by strawberries dipped in melted nuetella.... that is a desert exportable, i recommend it even more then chocolate.... oh man... animated conversation before sleep. Despite the lack of anticipated opera, it was still a very good day.

Thursday: quite relaxed... all day in studio, wasting time on the interwebs, a period of pretty intense productivity and project revision, called mom, pasta/pesto supper, tried my own hand at simple crepe filling, worked well enough, writing until bed. Earl Grey an unfortunate addition to evening, a cup'o'tea is lovely, sleeplessness is not. I shouldn't complain though, my fault and I normally sleep enviably well. Cool dreams.

Friday: is today! I'm caught up! Took washed clothes to the laundromat to dry, tried out the greek baker on our corner, horribly pain au chocolate from him, very disappointed. i needed the change though, so shrugs to that. In studio posting much to much text for too little activity - i might try to get some switzerland written up before i leave to to make this really up to date, it'll be back in the right dates though, I'll link it. Train leaves at 2:22 for Amsterdam!

Picture is of Zaha Hadid's Fire Station at the Vitra complex in Germany, from the unwritten Swiss adventure... that i am writing about, finally: installation one

Quick Summary (liar!)

Monday: Went into studio early to finish mapping assignment, rather tounge in cheek I made a fairy-tale type map, overlay on a 1700s lithograph map of paris, "Here be foreigners," "Gulf of Shifting Sands" ha i'm such a nerd, and Kober totally caught it. compared it to John Heyjduk though, haha.... i'll take what i can get i guess... that was all day, some of it wasted time - way to ready to laugh at webcomics, just about crying at some points... hehe... click on the 'funny' links on that del.icio.us tagroll to see which ones i read. No guarentee of quality, sometimes I have unrefined tastes... but no, they're all awesome ;). Boasas and Dinosaur Comics if you're only going to read a few. Made a good supper on Monday, but all our suppers this week were pretty good and homemade, so i don't remember what it was. More reading/writing, makes for damn pleasant evenings.

Tuesday: Weirdly full yet empty day.... I went back to the states on tuesday! Ha.... had to go to the embassy, technically US soil. back story was that on night trains the conductor takes your passport and ticket so they don't have to wake you up in the middle of the night to see your passport as you cross boarders. I was zonked after venice, so i was bleary giving my passport to him, and bleary getting it back in the morning... and didn't double check that it was mine. so i got another american passport, claiming me to be a male born in '66 from philly... hmm so not me!
didn't realize it until Saturday though, didn't get to the embassy until tuesday. had to get an emergency passport, the id'ot that got my passport turned it into the French police... wtf? like they'd be able to do anything, it was pretty obvious what had happened. the embassy said it was pretty unlikely they'd get the passport from the police (they knew it had happened because mr. id'ot came in for his emergency passport too earlier) so i had to buy another one. grr, but the workers there were prompt with immaculate grammar and beautiful demeanor... it was a pleasure to talk to them. amazing, we should have that in the real States.... and my passport now has a picture of a human strongly resembling Beth in it, rather then an inhuman glazed-stare freak. ha :)

Went to the Madeline (and went inside this time!) on the way home. Greek temple exterior, triple-dome in a line interior with mini-greek facades lining the hall, wierd and gold-gaudy. Pastelly art nuevo mosaics in a band under the apse dome were neet, solid stone feathers on the unusual altar-piece fun.

Shopping was an experience today... goal was to BUY SOCKS! and i did, wandered through much of the teen section of the huge Galleries Lafayette department store though... realized a wierd distinction in shopping, clothes more as decoration and fun then burdensome necessity... a bit more subtle then that, but i think i will look forward to shopping more in the future, and be better at it.

My socks are beautiful! Ha.... kind of expensive, but so much fun to wear.

I had a commission for a painting from eli for when i return, he has a wall 8' x 4' ish he wants filled with art... really looking forward to it, and the challenge of figuring out something worth filling up that much space with...

Orbitz fubaredness, i booked plane tix for the wrong week!?! for spring break... idiot beth... but brandon was able to help me fix it sans the $200 switch fee, yay friends! ha... will be more careful? that was outrageously dumb though.

Palais du Tokyo... graphics and contemporary art overload. many fun exhibits, thoughts on contemporary art and permanence and quality, maybe post another time, this is, despite promise, still long. Full days are amazing.

Quick overview - er, just sunday 5 mar....

So, having been a bit of a slacker since Saturday - at least as far as updating, here's a quick (hopefully) summary of my week:

Sunday: Fun! Beautiful sun in the morning, climbed up to sacre-coure (again) but this time paid to climb up to the top of the tower, highest point in Paris... fun. the hill it's on is high enough that it didn't make THAT much difference over standing at the bottom, but it was fun. Not too many tourists, I was by myself on the top of the world :). Home, made omlettes for myself and kind of for Tony hehe, off to the Pompidou Centre to take advantage of free admission first sunday of the month to finish off the exhibit we were rushed through last time. Seeing an exhibit twice is neat, memories strong but you've always missed something... waited out the rain inside the center, walked down to the river.... Paris rocks - on Sundays they close off the major road that runs by the Seine so that pedestrians, bikers, and skaters have free rein... I skated uphill against the wind from the Bibleotheque Nationale to Trocadero (all the way across paris)... didn't skate back though, took off my skates to check out the Challiot and the Palais du Tokyo... I'd forgotten my student ID though and didn't want to pay full admission, and i rather bonked... blood sugar drop... so i happily took the Metro home, devoured a nuetella crepe and slept a wonderful couple hours sleep. Supper of some sort with tony, probably sat and read and wrote for the rest of the evening. Wonderful, wonderful day/weekend.

Er, that's enough... quick summary? new post time