Monday, May 2, 2011

It's vacation it's vacation it's vacation...

Hello once again!

It has been a while, so I hope you're prepared for a long post. For those of you who don't know, the title from this post is an excerpt from my brother Sam's "Vacation Song". If you have never heard it, I strongly suggest you ask him to perform it for you and be sure he does the dance that goes with it. That said, it's update time.

So, since it has been about two weeks since my last post, I'm going to start from the beginning. The week following my last post was, as I had mentioned, spent working almost entirely on my Centre Pompidou expose. I gave my presentation on Thursday and surprisingly, she did not tear me apart. In fact, it seemed like she kind of liked it. She had one reproach on my organization which made it a bit repetitive and she was right too. I managed to get away with going about 24 minutes (it was supposed to be 20) without her saying anything, so I was of course happy about that. Overall, I was happy with my work and to be honest, if she told me she didn't like it I would have been pretty upset since I read a thesis, the book based on the thesis, and numerous articles about it and spent countless hours trying to figure out a plan (Ask me anything about it, I dare you). To Amy: Thanks for the link, but I had already done my presentation. I read a lot about how iconic it is for the architecture world and in some ways I understand why, but to be honest, it really is a hideous building. Moving on...

Luckily, the work was not yet over. I got to write 4-5 page paper for my economics class on the economic crisis and household consumption. One of the students had told me he would find me a copy of the expose someone had done on the topic for the course, but Thursday afternoon he sent me a note saying that there wasn't one. So, I stayed up all night writing the paper (and maybe taking a break for the Bulls game which was at 1 a.m. here) and finished around 7 in the morning. This one I was far less proud of. It was only about 4 full pages (although with our smaller paper size it would have been more like 5-6) and the organization was difficult to do and caused some problems with the content. In general, it wasn't great, but I have an oral exam in which I think I will do much better. I walked to school Friday morning around 8 to drop my paper off and returned home to find an email from my friend saying someone had just posted the expose. So, yea I was a little upset because, if it were me, I would have asked around (the class is only 18 people and it meets every week) on top of checking the server at school to see if someone had posted it. But, I had already turned it in so I did not stress about it too much. Instead, I reflected on how, once again, the word "French" proved synonymous with "Late".

I spent most of the rest of Friday sleeping and then packing for my trip to Amsterdam and Paris. I spent the next 24 hours or so freaking out that I would somehow miss a method of transportation (train metro bus train2) or that I had already boarded the wrong bus and was headed to Spain instead. Of course, this was not the case and I arrived safely in Amsterdam Saturday evening. I met up with my friend from Beloit and got settled in. Luckily, I had brought a little cash with me because apparently the only cards that work in most of the shops in Amsterdam are the Dutch ones, which is surprising for a city overflowing with tourists (Seriously, the entire time I was surrounded by at least 4 different nationalities). We spent most of the week walking around town, hanging out in the city center where they had a carnival, relaxing in the park (which was filled with neither heroine needles nor tons of people on LSD...Dad...) and of course seeing some of the sites. I met up with my friends from Rennes to do most of the touristing as I did not feel like Jake wanted to be dragged through museums all week that he had probably already seen. I will not go into too much detail on the touristing, but here's a brief overview. First, we went to the Heineken museum. We thought it was a tour of the brewery, but as it turns out "The Heineken Experience" is mostly just a museum. Nevertheless, they gave us a few beers along the way and we learned some fun facts about how it's made. Next was Anne Frank house. This was very interesting and depressing at the same time. They had a lot of quotes from her diary on the wall and video interviews with people who knew her playing in different rooms (getting to which was nearly impossible since the stairs were smaller than my feet and basically went straight up). Last on my list was the Van Gogh museum. I particularly liked this one and spent a lot of time there. They also had a Picasso exhibit that was pretty interesting. Overall, the touristy stuff was fun, but I mostly enjoyed having a calm week without having to focus on schoolwork. I ended the week with a pre Queen's Day celebration (I left Saturday which was Queen's Day) on Friday night when we went to Den Haag to celebrate. The whole country gets pretty excited about the whole thing and to be honest, it seemed a lot more interesting than the Royal Wedding (which I unluckily caught the end of while it was playing in a bar). That's the basics of my trip to Amsterdam. To those of you looking for stories of debauchery and legal prostitution: Sorry, no dice.

My bus left Amsterdam Saturday morning and that afternoon I arrived in Paris. Not surprisingly, we were greeted by several customs agents and a drug dog who preceded to sniff every suitcase and everyone on the bus (the dog not the agents). For a moment it seemed they had caught two women and we were about to see a drug dog attack or at least an arrest, alas, we were not so lucky. I met up with Morgan and her friend from home and we started our plan to sneak me into the hotel. They dropped my stuff off in their room (telling the guy at the desk that they had bought a new suitcase) while I waited outside. We then wandered around town and then saw Thor (the original version). It was not bad, but a bit cheesy for my taste. Upon return to the hotel, we discovered it would be much harder than we thought to get me into the hotel. The guy at the desk saw me try to walk in behind them while they spoke to him and called us on our bluff. In stereotypical French fashion, he proceeded to be extremely rude, call us typical Americans (think we're smarter than everyone) and be generally condescending. He then of course pretended to apologize while simultaneously telling us that he had done nothing wrong (funny right?). Apparently, the hotel had already changed which building they were in and switched their room the next day (which involved moving all of their things while the were out with no notification), so as you may imagine we were expecting a bit more hospitality despite our deception (which we also felt was justified).

The following day, we had hoped to visit the museums of Paris since they are all free the first Sunday of every month. What we had not considered, was that it was actually the French Labor Day so they were all closed (typical). So we instead went to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery (where lots of famous people are buried), got some ice cream and wandered around Paris. It was a pretty relaxing day, followed by a nice dinner where I tried escargo for the first time and surprisingly kind of liked. Our train left at 10:05, so we spent some time hanging out around the train station and then headed home.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable and relaxing trip. I got to see a couple friends from Beloit, hang out in a beautiful city, and see some sides of Paris I had not previously experienced. As for the rest of my semester, it will be back to work. I have two papers to do this week and then it's exam time. But, I'll be finished with my exams on May 19th, so I'll have some time to travel before May 30th, when I leave. I welcome any suggestions on locations. Here are some pictures from the past couple of weeks.

Amsterdam Central Station

View from Jake's apartment

Carnival downtown

Vondel Park

Dog swimming in the park

Outside Anne Frank (there was no line when I went)



Outside the cemetery

Oscar Wilde's grave. Apparently a lot of women don't know that he was gay...

Fountain at the Centre Pompidou (That's not it in the background, it's way uglier.  Don't believe me? Google it.)
Concert in Den Haag for Queen's Day
Behind Notre Dame
View of Paris from a bridge over the river

That's all for now folks. I hope you have enjoyed reading and I will be keeping you posted on my adventures, boring/studious as they may be, through the coming weeks.

TTFN

Tom


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