I've been here for three weeks now. Tonight I'm feeling very far from home, a little too detached from any sense of normalcy or comfort. I've had a weird couple of days here. Last night, I ended up at a small theater somewhere out in the 20th to see Macbeth, which NYU had provided the tickets for. It turned out to be a very loose interpretation of Macbeth; it was actually a play about the revolution in Tunisia. It was not in English or French, but instead Arabic (as if we were not confused or unprepared enough). The play was disturbing, which I guess was the point. It was incredibly violent, bloody, and creepy, with life-sized rubber mannequins and fake dead bodies.
But moving on to today...
Wednesdays are turning out to be problematic days. They're exciting and museum-filled, but exhausting and stressful because I don't have adequate time to travel from campus in Passy to any given neighborhood/museum around Paris. The professors seem to be understanding, but today was not a lucky one for staying on top of things and beating time.
This is St. Suplice. I assume it's done in the Romantic architectural style, but I can't tell you that with certainty because I could not find my class for the entire hour I walked around looking for them.
The church's interior was beautiful, though it wasn't structured like any of the other churches I've visited so far.
No classmates there, so I continued to wander around Saint Germain...
Came across this historical-intellectual-élite-hangout-turned-overpriced-tourist-trap café...
...And an enchanting book tree, with fluttering pages blooming from the branches
L'école des Beaux-Arts, with [unpictured] that same yellow smiling cat cartoon that I've seen on the High Line in NY painted on the wall. Could not find the Musée Delacroix, our original rendez-vous point. After returning to St. Suplice and waiting on a bench outside for the last 20 minutes of class, I left. It would've been pointless to waste the sunny part of the day, though, so I kept walking.
Took a Monoprix break to buy bread and speculoos cookies and saw these juice bottles wearing caps to stay toasty
Walked along the Seine while rain pitter-pattered down in a sun shower
Crossed over the river to get to the 1st arrondissement for another trip to the Louvre
The wind picked up after the light rain. It was cold as I sat in the Tuileries and watched the fountain spray and the seagulls freeze in flight from too much wind pushing them back.
Finally, the Global Orientations group met and we were able to enter.
Hoping for a better weekend. Off to write an essay for French class.
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