Thursday, January 19, 2012

Well tomorrow morning at 6:30 a.m. I will be leaving my Paris apartment to head to the airport for the long trip back home.  This has been an incredible experience and I believe Darci and I have learned as much as the students.  So many monuments, paitings, sculptures, stairs to climb....it has all been great.  The folks at CEA and especially Helena have done an inbcredible job scheduling a number of our excursions, setting up the classroom space, directions to sites, some of our meals, our apartment, the wonderful metro card so we could easily get around while in Paris and also our ID cards to get into the museums. Darci and I are grateful for all they did to make this expeerience a great one for our UW-L students.

I will miss a few of our neighborhood places like the Picard and the Artisan Boulanger (my favorite place to buy our morning bread and croissant)

Picard is a place where we could buy (authentic) French food to take back to our apartment and heat up.  The students really enjoyed this place too and we had many group meals at our apartment and called it our "Picard night".

This is my last blog.  I appreciated feedback I received from some of  you and hope it gave you a better insight to what we were doing while in Paris for the last three weeks.

Au revoir!!

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 (late afternoon)

It is cold  in Paris, especially in the morning....we have developed what we call a one, two, or three scarf day depending on how cold it is and how long we know we will be outside.  Paris is certainly a city of scarves...if you don't have one when you come, you probably better buy one.  Men, women, young and old all wear scarves here.  I happen to love scarves so no problem.   Our students have decided a scarf does feel nice on a cold day.  Amy  is modeling her latest scarf buy and how to wear it.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Today was our last museum visit so we spent the morning at the Musee d' Orsay which houses Impressionism, Realism, and Conservative art works.  We saw a lot of wonderful paintings by Monet, Van Gogh, Millet and Manet to name a few. We were not allowed to take any pictures of the inside of the Musee d' Orsay so I can only post what the outside of the building looks like.

 After our tour of the Musee d' Orsay, Olivia, Samantha and I went back to the Louvre Museum to explore the Egyptian area.  On our way to the Louvre, we walked thru the Jardin des Tuileries which made it worth a walk to the Louvre. We spent another two hours looking at all the Egyptian artifacts which I found fascinating and was well worth going back since you can't possibly cover it all in one day.

We ended our museum day by taking a tour of the Opera House which is beautiful!

                             Musee d' Orsay Museum which houses French art of the 1800's and early 1900's.  They have one of the best collections of Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh and others.  I especially liked Monet's work.  This used to be a train station with trains running right down the center of the gallery.  The French realized this would make a great place to house art collections that had been scattered around  the city. 

                                                  Musee d' Orsay

                                              Statue in the Jardin des Tuileries

               View of the Jardin des Tuileries as we walked through to get to the Louvre.  It must be beautiful in the spring/summer months with the fountains running and flowers in bloom.

                                                 You can see the Louvre through the arc.

                                                   Egyptian artifacts in the Louvre

                                                   Cats are special!

                                                             Opera House

Tuesday, January 17, 2012-London Trip

Today was exciting as Olivia, Samantha, Amy, Whitney and I all headed to London for the day.  It is an hour and a half train ride from Paris to London so we thought it would be fun to check out a few sites there as well. 

After going through customs to get on the train, the ride itself was very nice. As one would expect, they are more strict going through customs to go into London than on the way back to Paris.  A portion of the ride goes through the English Channel under the ocean.  Since we only had one day, we decided  to do the bus tour where you can hop on and hop off at different sites.  Our first site was Buckingham Palace.  It was not the day for the "Changing of The Guard" but it was still fun to see.  We stopped to see Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Tower Bridge, Parliament, Tower of London, and  others.  I would have loved to tour Kensington Palace and go through Harrods Dept. Store, but we just did not have enough time.  I saw enough that I know I want to go back and take time to explore.

It was really nice to walk down the street and NOT smell the strong smell of cigarette smoke as we do on the streets in Paris...we all noticed that.  It was also nice to be able to talk and understand one another.  We also stopped to have a Starbucks Coffee and did that ever taste good!

One thing we did not get to do that would have been fun was to take a ride on the London Eye...it was broken.

We had a crazy experience when it came time to get on the last bus to take us back to the train station.  After we got off our last bus we stopped a taxi to get a quick ride the rest of the way to the train station.  We asked him how quickly he could get us there and he said he loved a good challenge.  Well we had the ride of our lives....I fell off my seat twice and I thought for sure he was going to hit another car or a pedestrian.  All the while he was driving he was talking and we could tell he really enjoyed trying to get us there as fast as he could....we all had a good laugh about it afterwards :)

                                                     Buckingham Palace

                                                    Buckingham Palace

                                                        Guard at Buckingham Palace

                                                Buckingham Palace

                                                               Big Ben

                                                        Big Ben and Parliament

                                                                  Big Ben

                                                    Westminster Abbey

                                                          Westminster Abbey

                                                                Big Ben

                                                       Will you accept a collect call?

                                                         The London Eye

                                                  Sharie in front of Tower Bridge

                                              Tower of London

      Amy McCubbins, Samantha Vanriper, Olivia Coady, and Whitney Puent in front of Parliament

Monday, January 16, 2012

The following pictures are of the apartment that Darci and I have shared for the last two and a half weeks. It is a nice apartment with a washer (no dryer), stove, oven, and refrigerator.   It is really nice to be able to wash a load of clothes, but we have to use a drying rack to dry our clothes. Electricity is expensive in Paris and it is also easy to blow a fuse so we have been careful not to run the washer and stove at the same time, etc. So far we have not blown a fuse :)   We have a table to eat on, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a little balcony to check the weather each morning and we each have our own bedroom area.  The walls are very thin and it is best to not wear shoes while walking around in your apartment since that is annoying to your neighbors.  I had to adjust to our neighbors coming home later in the evening and playing their music.  Otherwise the apartment has been lovely.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Today we had our last class time with Whitney presenting on the Arc de Triomphe and Amy presenting on the Musee d' Orsay. After class we went on our tour of the Arc de Triomphe.

 Our last class day at CEA - Sharie Brunk, Whitney Puent, Amy McCubbins, Samantha Vanriper and Olivia Coady.

 View of the Arc de Triomphe - This is the world's largest triumphal arch commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 to commemorate the victories of his Grand Army.  The monument is engraved with the names of hundreds of generals who commanded Ferench troops.

                                            Sharie in front of the Arc de Triomphe

                                     Staircase used to climb to the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

                  Darci Thoune and Whitney Puent climbing the stairs to the top of the arc

                                            View of Paris from on top of the Arc de Triomphe

                                  View of the Eiffel Tower from the top of the Arc de Triomphe

 It took two years to lay the foundation and 30 years to complete and finish it in 1836, after Napoleon's death.  The arc today is used for state funerals and the site of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where an eternal flames burns.

There is a constant roar of traffic around the arc.