#I’m at the Rivoli and literally no one is here

[daisies-and-caramel]

I’ve made it.

[gumnut-logic]

Cabochon

I thought I might expand on my previous post about the cabochon I was working on this morning.

I create jewellery through beadweaving. It is not the only way I can create jewellery, but it is one of my favourite and a great thing to do in front of the TV. There was lots of TAG this morning while I was working :D

I recently bought some cabochons to play with. These are domed shapes made out of glass or semiprecious stone. They are flat on the back and have no hole for threading.

In order to use them in beading I either have to weave a bezel which is a three dimensional frame that literally wraps around the cabochon and holds it or glue the cabochon to a metal bezel or to bead embroidery backing and then embroider around it.

But anyway, I babble. What I was doing today was weaving a bezel out of seed beads. Please excuse my blurry phone camera.

Cabochons come in many different sizes and shapes and being the hoarder of art equipment I am, I have a few stashed. The one I’m working with now (upper left corner next to the malachite) is 25mm across. I don’t have a great deal of experience working with cabochons, though I have done quite a few Swarovski Rivolis which are 14mm crystals that also require bezels.

I have done one cabochon before which I actually bead embroidered to teach myself how to do that. I did a total wing-it with the design.

Even with the bead embroidery, I ended up bezelling it anyway to support and hide the backing. Also, for this one I used the clear cabochon in the middle of the photo above and glued some paint artwork I had been playing with to it. With the clear ones you can put whatever you like in the back and then bead embroider or weave around them. I’m hoping today’s project is a little less embellished than this one.

Oh, and here is one of the rivoli pendants I mentiones.

Anyway, jewellery babble over. Back to the Virg :D

Nutty

(who sells this stuff from time to time)

[angloinangouleme]

An Introduction

Hello all, and welcome to the beginning of my blog! If you’re looking for some info about me or what I’m doing, you can head on over to my about page where I’ve written out a brief explanation of who I am and what I’m doing this year. In short, I’m an English language assistant in a few public schools in the southwest of France, centered around the town of Angoulême. This blog is meant to capture my experiences over the coming school year.

If you are wondering what sort of content you might expect to see on this blog, look no further! For the moment, my plan is to update with a text post (like this one, for example) about once a week. The post could be about what has been happening to me in the past week, what has been on my mind, fun things I’ve been doing with students, or anything else that I feel encapsulates my experience here. The post below is a little longer than I’d like these posts to be, but I thought it appropriate to write more considering how quickly things have happened in the past few days.

Between text posts, I intend to post a photo every day. The photo may not always have been taken on the same day, but I’ll try my best to upload something current. If I feel some explanation is necessary I might write something brief about what the photo depicts, but those posts will be much shorter than the text posts.

Finally, before I get into my first real update: if you ever have any questions or comments about what I’m doing, or maybe a suggestion about something you’d like to see me write about or take a photo of, feel free to drop me a line via the mailbox, linked here or conveniently located to the left side of the page.

Muscat grapes in the supermarket and escargots for dinner - French enough for you?

Tuesday, 9/26/17

Well, I’m finally here - I arrived in Paris on Saturday morning, stayed there through Sunday, then left on the train to get to Angoulême on Monday afternoon. I’ve spent all of about one day here so far, and it seems like a pretty cozy town! For this week, my mom has been generous enough to come with me and help my lug my suitcases around France - she’s a very selfless person. I will definitely miss that help when I embark on other journeys during school breaks - although I really hope to avoid ever carrying so much luggage again.

In any case, let’s back up a few days to our arrival in Paris. The airport was, as it almost always seems to be, a test of patience; we waited in the customs line for well over an hour before finally getting through. Fortunately, we had had the foresight to book a taxi in advance to take us to our hotel in the Latin quarter, an undertaking far preferable to bringing six large suitcases through the RER (Paris commuter train). Once we arrived at the hotel around 10:00, neither of us wanted anything more than simply to give in to our bodies begging us to sleep but unfortunately we had resolved to stay awake the whole day to avoid the worst of jet lag and unfortunatlier still, we wouldn’t be able to check in for another four hours. So, having left our heavy burden in hotel storage, we set out to walk the streets of Paris. We ended up mostly exploring the 3rd arrondissement, heading up to the place des Vosges to buy some tea at Damman Frères (highly recommended!), eating lunch at a café on the rue de Rivoli and walking past sites such as the Musée Carnavalet (a museum about the history of Paris) and the tour Saint-Jacques. Eventually, we found dinner and slept heavily all through the night.

A cute - and somewhat kitschy - café in the 5th arrondissement

Sunday was somewhat calmer than Saturday. Beginning the day with a mass at Notre Dame, we had had grand plans to follow that up with visits to both the medieval Musée de Cluny to see the famous series of tapestries known as La Dame à la licorne, or “The Lady and the Unicorn” as well as to the Mémorial de la Shoah, or Holocaust memorial, which contains many extraordinarily meaningful and excruciatingly heartbreaking exhibits. After seeing several placards on the right bank on Sunday in parts of the old Jewish quarter memorializing individuals who were arrested in those very buildings - schools, offices, and homes alike - and deported, “by French police officers complicit in the Nazi occupation,” as some of these signs remarked, we felt it would be important to visit a place dedicated to all those whose lives were unjustly extinguished by a government rife with hatred and xenophobia and lacking in self-reflection and empathy. The exhibits in Cluny took much longer than we had thought, however, and we were not able to make it to the Mémorial de la Shoah before it closed for the day. That evening, we found dinner on the rue Mouffetard, a street filled with little restaurants that provides an escape from the constant crowds, noise, and tourist traps of the Quartier latin.

7th-century Visigothic decorative crowns at the Musée Cluny

On Monday we elected to visit a church before departing, and so we walked over to the Église Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais. This church is known for two things: firstly, a tragedy on Good Friday in 1918 in which a German artillery shell fell onto and collapsed the roof during a service, killing 88 civilians; and secondly, a family of musicians known by the name Couperin, including the composer François Couperin; the Couperins were organists at Saint-Gervais for more than two centuries and significant portions of the organ date from that period. After that quick stop, we boarded the TGV (Train à grande vitesse, or “High-Speed Train” - a very inventive name) in the direction of Bordeaux and almost exactly two hours later arrived in Angoulême. The rest of Monday was spent getting set up in the apartment we had rented out for the week and poking our heads around the main downtown drag. Angoulême is a relatively small town that overlooks the idyllic landscape around it from atop a hill.

Looking down from the top of the hill

Today began with a breakfast of tea, baguette and jam, and a pain au chocolat (what might be called a “chocolate croissant” back in the US; this, however, is an abomination of language for the French). I’ll take this over a bowl of cereal any day. After breakfast, I did more exploring of Angoulême on foot and later joined up with another assistant who will also be working at the Lycée Guez de Balzac (quick note: lycée in France is roughly comparable to high school in the US). The two of us talked for hours about our concerns with starting on Monday, what we are excited to do, and everything else that has been on our minds leading up to the beginning of our posts. While we chatted, we shared with each other what we knew of Angoulême and walked up and down the town – quite literally, considering the topography of the place (I’ve been reconsidering my idea to buy a bicycle). In the end, we said au revoir and parted ways for the evening. I’m very excited to meet more of the assistants in the area, not to mention the teachers and students I’ll be working with!

A nighttime view looking out over the valley

One of the main takeaways from my first few days in France is the realization of how much more I’ve been walking - it’s something I always find when I travel abroad, but the knowledge that it will happen never seems to make my feet hurt any less. Stay tuned for my next text update, which I hope to write next week after I’ve begun in both of my schools, as well as for the daily photo updates I’ll be posting!

[7hours-flight]

yup, so that happened. It was one of my proudest achievement actually. 21 freaking kilometers! I didn’t even realize it at first but man it felt good. So here’s a recalling of that one proud day. 

Morning 

The morning started with me going to “Fragonard Musée du Parfum” for the field trip the university set for us. It was located near the Opera and well as the name called it’s a perfume museum. It was nothing too interesting, there was a museum on how a perfume was made and the history and stuff. The lady thought us about the difference between perfume and eau de perume and then we went to the second floor where they let us smell different perfumes and guess what ingredients they made of which was pretty fun. 

I’m so in love with the tiles!

When we exit the building there was this pole? and it was filled with the visitors sticker from the museum which I thought was soo cool!

Since the opera was right there in front of us, we decided to take a look. We were hoping to get in for free by using our student letter from the uni but whoops it doesn’t work, and since we’re poor (lol) so we just took some pics from the outside. 

Lunch

We were getting hungry, and mas Ferdy had this idea/thought that since Chinatown in Asia is always such a great place to eat, maybe it’s the same with Paris. So, off we go with no research at all.

We climbed up from the metro to this empty streets filled with buildings with Chinese name on it so we thought ‘Hmmm, this must be the place’. It was not what we were expecting. We expected some festive Chinese decoration with Chinese food shops but no signs of it at all. We walked around, it looked deserted but then we came across this one Chinese food shop, and since we were just too hungry we decided to eat there. 

Surprisingly, the price was alright. I ordered a bowl of noodle with beef for about 8 euros and it was a hella big portion. The owner was really nice, June talked to them in Chinese it was nice to see. 

2-ish

After lunch, we met up with Meen and Bas at the Arc de Triomphe, to hang out and decide how to spend the rest of the day. Arc de Triomphe got some great history and meaning as it honor those who fought in the French revolutionary war but the place was just so so crowded with tourist and it was real hot so I’m not a big fan. 

When we got there, Meen apparently went up by himself cause he can get in for free with his visa which lasts for 3 months so he can sorta say he’s gonna stay in EU for 3 months which is the requirement for the free entry. So, me, June, Mas Ferdy, and Bas hung out under the monument waiting for him and planned. Since it was a Friday, the Louvre is free admission from 5 pm or something, so we decided to go there. Bas got this bright idea to go to a freaking cemetery to hung out until 5 pm, and since we didn’t know where else to go so we did! 

Cemetery Père Lachaise

Okay, wow definitely wasn’t in my must visit list for the summer but it was surprisingly fun! Bunch of the cemeteries were decorated with big-ass domes and some got engraving on it. OH! and apparently Jim Morrison was also buried there but I didn’t know it until after.

It was hella big, but I swear it’s the perfect place to escape the summer heat which is getting hotter and hotter! Anyways, we checked out the crematorium which was so so creepy my Taiwanese friend told me the night after she got nightmares from that outing. 

The Louvre, 5-ish

After the cemetery (sounds weird lol), we finally decide it’s time to go to the Louvre! We took the Metro to Louvre Rivoli and took the mall entrance. I love the vibes! on this particular metro station hallway, there’s always someone playing live music! 

Getting in was a breeze since it’s free entry for everyone, and the crowd was actually ok. It was unexpectedly not too crowded. 

I. LOVE. LOUVRE. 

well, I love museum in general. The feeling of just walking through rows and rows of unknown art and reading the tiny explanation is really enjoyable for me. 

Louvre is BIG. I’ve been there like what 4 times on my time in Paris and I don’t think I’ve looked into every rooms and nooks and crannies. 

it’s a blurry blurry pic, but I love it

Mona and her adoring fans

I literally saw nothing but heads and butts going through the room where she’s staying, but my experience was actually better than most people cause I read somewhere that people been lining up 1.5 hrs just to pass this painting! 

After strolling around for a while, we got some mcdonalds and went outside to see the famous triangle thingy

Thus end my very long day traipsing (haha) around Paris. 

Love, 

Shafa