Some Louvre Pictures

Winged Victory at Samothrace:

Venus de Milo
Georges de la Tour's "Le Tricheur"
David's "Madame Récamier"
The Outdoor Pyramid

A Welcome Note

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for all of Paris is a moveable feast."  ~ Ernest Hemingway

Welcome to my blog "A Moveable Feast!" I just arrived in Paris yesterday, and already there is so much to tell.  I created the blog mainly to keep in touch with those at home and to let you all know how my semester abroad in the city of lights is going.  The title is a little nod to two things I am particularly fond of: food and pretentious references to über-macho twentieth century American literature.  More seriously, the quotation above is one I am hoping to keep with me during my time here.  Four months seems like a short time, but I hope to absorb enough to bring the experience with me after I leave.  

I arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport yesterday morning and took a cab to where I'm staying for the weekend.  There was a last minute problem with my housing assignment, so the coordinator, Katrien, has kindly allowed me to stay with her family until Tuesday, when I move into my permanent homestay.  My cab driver seemed very surprised that I could be American and tell him my address in French at the same time, as though simultaneously living under the Bush administration and breathing should have exhausted all of my energy by this point.  My first French friend then proceeded to tell me everything I would need to know.  I'll pass this list on in case any of you visit me in the near future...

1. The doors on the public street toilets WILL CLOSE, you just need to press a button.  Apparently, this has caused some distress for tourists in the past.

2. Paris is filled with bike stands.  You pay for a bike at one, ride it to another one in another part of the city and park it there.  You are not, however, allowed to ride your bike in front of taxis carrying passengers back from the airport.  This seems to be the stupidest thing anyone could ever do.

3. America is cheap.  And California has a lot of asians, most of whom are related to my cab driver.

4. Wearing a short skirt and doing some kind of behind-the-wheel-crazy-arm-and-shoulder-dance is just asking for it.

While his advice was appreciated, the only thing I was prepared to do after dragging my suitcases up four flights of stairs was pass out.  I slept for a few hours and then took myself out to a 15euro salad and water.  I will say, the goat cheese croutons on the simple salad seemed worth it at the time, but are not a habit I plan on maintaining unless I plan on looking like the representations of ideal beauty in the Louvre.  On the other hand, if I do gain a little love around the middle, I have a valid excuse - I'm listening to centuries of established ideal proportion theory.  Take that!

I had dinner that night with Katrien, her husband Joël, her two boys, and a girl on my program who also had to wait for her housing.  This was the full dinner experience: champagne first, then a salad, then wine and an entrée, then cheese, then dessert.  Marissa, the other girl from our program, and I held our own.  Katrien noted that it was obvious we both came from multicultural families (Marissa is Mexican) because we appreciated the food.  She told us about another student she had stay with her who planned her trip around where the Paris McDonalds were.  Everything was delicious.  Katrien and Joël are very typically European - she is Dutch, but has lived in France for twenty years and speaks six languages, and her husband is half-Algerian.  It's funny how different people react to my French.  Usually they have a difficult time placing my accent because it's not French, but doesn't sound like an American student either.  Joël corrects every mistake I make while Katrien constantly mentions how well I speak.  It's definitely an advantage to be able to get around.  Even when I'm clueless and ask for directions, I don't seem as hopeless, which is always a nice thing.

Today I slept off my jet lag (or travel fatigue, as Katrien says) and went to the Louvre for four hours.  It's simply indescribable.  There's no denying that the collections are incredible, but I just couldn't get past the building itself.  It is simply the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.  You'll be walking through a minor room with Etruscan jewelry in it, but the ceiling will be the most ornate thing you've ever seen.  Even the stairwells have major sculptures in them.  I talked to a student who said they visited the Louvre every day during their first week in Paris and I could definitely see how that's possible.  I took a class on French 18th century painting last semester, so I got to see a lot of the works I had studied up close, like David's "Madame Récamier" or Ingres' "The Bather."

I also loved La Tour's work, which I was surprised at, since I don't usually like 17th century painting as much as the later periods.  There was one in particular that I liked called "Le Tricheur" in which a young man is playing cards with three players representing the temptations of the time: gambling, wine and luxury.  

The greek art is also amazing there: friezes from the parthenon, Venus de Milo, Winged Victory at Samothrace - all sculptures I had studied, but which are so impressive in person.  

A lot of people have complaints about the Louvre's pyramid, but I thought the contrast in style between that and the surrounding structures was really interesting and gave more visual interest to an otherwise massive courtyard.

I planned on walking to the Orangerie Museum on the other side of the Tuileries Gardens.  I walked through the gardens, which are beautiful - as many statues on the grass as there are in the Louvre itself.  I paused to read on a bench for a while and the cutest two year old boy starting flirting with me.  We played cache-cache for a while but I was getting worried that he was so into me that he would lose his sister, but he quickly lost interest.  My the time I got to the Orangerie it was closed, so I walked across the Seine to take the metro to Reid Hall, the home base of my program off of Boulevard du Montparnasse in the 7th arrondissement.  It was closed, but I wanted to know how to get there by metro by orientation tomorrow morning.

I will try to update this blog frequently, but if you're interested, I'm also writing a bi-monthly column for the Yale Herald which you should be able to find online in a few weeks.  Just google "yale herald" and they put the weekly paper online.  Also email me at stephanie.richards@yale.edu.  If any of you are in Europe, I would love to meet up!

Stephanie