Waste

I'm finding it easier to produce less trash here. Why? Living in a small space, there's no room for extra things. And when taking down the trash and recycling is a matter of descending and climbing 100 stairs, that kind of makes it a little more inconvenient. I don't want disposable items. Disposable pens, disposable dishes, disposable cutlery, disposable napkins. I give back plastic bags at stores because I don't want to have to put them somewhere. I don't even use paper towels. I don't want extra papers, maps, receipts. Take them away!

I'm also reusing a whole lot. My little glass yogurt jars are very useful for holding hairties and paperclips and makeup brushes and food. It's easier to keep rice in a jar that used to hold tomato sauce than to keep it in a bag I have to find a rubber band for.

And as I have only a little window, it's feels better to use environmentally-friendly/less harsh cleaning products because I'd rather not breathe in a whole lot of chemicals in my tiny space.

And when I hand wash some of my clothes, it's easier to dry them on a rack by the radiator because I don't have a dryer.

I use less water because my shower is so tiny that it feels like a few minutes of maneuvering about creatively (reach the shampoo, try to lean over to shave, reach the soap, bump into the wall, accidentally turn off the faucet by leaning on it, etc.) has actually been a good amount of time.

All in all, conservation in this situation becomes easier...the benefits of reduce-reuse-recycle are immediately perceptible. Less stress, less mess, less ickyness. So if disposable items try to convince you they're convenient and disappearing and elegant, you have no obligation to believe them. They are so definitely not!

Jardin des Plantes

After spending the morning inside...looking bleakly out my window at the cold sky which gave me no incentive to go out there...looking at the computer gave way to playing piano...I decided to go to the "Jardin des Plantes," a large garden/ménagerie, where there is a Museum of Natural History. That was where I went and it was AMAZING. That parade of animals (see picture) just opened my eyes to how much diversity the world is made of, and how fascinating things are, and how humans are just one piece of the picture. The museum was organized so well: you begin at the level of the sea--walking through a dark cave of mollusks and passing by fish swimming in dark blue glass and massive sharks and very strange creatures, looking up at the baleen of a whale skeleton suspended in the air...Because the ceiling is not closed you can peer up to birds sitting above and mammals walking, or crouched over the first floor as though fishing. You ascend the stairs and see this whole world of land animals as though in real movement, like the whole world is contained within this one room. There are glass walls filled with jewel-like butterflies, beetles, and different crickets with big colorful wings. There are birds perched in various places up to the tall ceiling, cases of mushrooms and plants, and a case on taxidermy, which I always thought was some gross and horrible process where they preserve the insides of an animal with chemicals, but in fact is recreating the animal in motion as accurately as possible out of plaster and wood and other things, and then wrapping a real skin around that. The higher floors are about man's impact on the environment and what changes it has undergone. There are rooms of endangered or extinct animals. Visually even the explanations were clever and effective (an example: to show how many species have gone extinct in the last 300 years, they printed words and picture on a glass sheet that stood before a propped-up slice of a tree trunk that was 300 years old. First you look at the tree trunk, and then you read: "In the course of this tree's lifetime, this many species have gone extinct," and then you look at the little drawings and explanations.) The whole experience is awesome and frightening and beautiful...it makes so much sense at the same time. Why shouldn't the world have this much variety, this much detail, this much we are not familiar with? It is easy to forget the world is not just what we make, but has already been existing on a complex level we can hardly imagine for many many years.

GMOs, Music, & La Sorbonne

ORGANISME GENETIQUEMENT MODIFIE: Here's a cute logo (J'en veux pas=I don't want them). Did you know that France now grows no genetically modified food? I find this a good idea for many reasons.

THINKING, PARKS, AND MARKETS:

The parks in Paris are my favorite places. I realized you can go in a park and just think and do whatever you want, and it's up to you. You can look at map discreetly when lost, eat a sandwich when hungry, look at birds and plants and other wildlife when missing the country.

Markets are also magical and unreal, but real. It's like a farmer's market, but less novel to the people participating. Rather this is part of normal life...


MUSIC:

One of the greatest cultural points of contact with the U.S. here is music. Practically every store, restaurant in Paris that I walk into is playing music with English words. I heard a remake of "If I had a Hammer" with a French accent and rock music in the grocery store. This is one domain of American culture that has a lot of influence.

My music school in France is really nice. I am taking solfège and piano. It is my favorite class of the week. But try converting ABCDEFG into Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti ("see")-do and you will see it is a little unnerving at first. I play the piano in my host parent's house downstairs. Sometimes when I am walking to my room, I hear another piano in the apartment building. I think there is a professional pianist living here...

LA SORBONNE:
And...Took my first classes at the Sorbonne today. I successfully entered on the second week of classes (this was not my fault), found a seat in the giant lecture hall, later for my discussion section ran all around the building trying to find "E" when everything seemed to jump from F to G, consulted the man behind the desk in the Philosophy department who was a little like one of those fantastic characters from magic bookshops with white scraggly hair and glasses (he made several telephone calls and then handed me a map with clear directions), after which I found the place but took a while to realize that the room "S" was actually an "F", entered the room fifteen minutes late with appropriate bashfulness, listened to an interesting two hour lecture all about Navajo culture from a French woman who is an expert on the subject and is part Navajo, only to find out after class that though the same teacher from the lecture that morning was there, I had just participated in a lecture for a master class. All said and done, I finally left with the right documents for the class I am taking, and with plans to take the discussion section on a different day so I won't have missed two. Whew!

Anyway I love hearing from you all. My posts are a bit far apart so far. Try subscribing to my blog and then you will get an email when there's a new one. Much love!

Stores, big and small

Many stores in Paris are tiny and sell about one thing, which means I have a completely different and complete experience buying each thing I need. I have seen stores selling only:

-socks and gloves,
-a store solely for kitchen knives,
-boulangeries (pastry/bread shops),
-a seafood store,
-men's clothing,
-stores only selling pens,
-only posters....the list is endless I presume.

It's a little like magic. It's easy to walk from one place to the other because the stores are close to eachother.

That being said, the most terrible place I've been to yet is Châtelet les Halles, a giant underground mall where the floors are listed as negative (-1, -2, -3, -4), the flow of people is uncontrolled and not even the people who work there know how to find their way. I was lost there, swimming in circles through the crowds of people, up and down escalators and stairs, for an hour, getting hotter and hotter in my jacket, consulting clueless people and maps. So France is hardly exempt from the massive store culture I see in places in the U.S., and can be worse. I think I'll stick to the little shops when I can---it is far more adventurous and precious.

Bonjour,
I just saw the film Persepolis, an animated film based on the "bande dessinée" (that is, comic book--a popular and loved genre in France) by Marjane Satrapi. It was creative and effective and an incredible story--I hope you all can see it.

-by the way, the movie theaters in Paris are often tiny and fairly plain, without stadium seating. Though apparently there is one near me that is supposed to be cool because it is in a Pagoda-like building... American theaters are descendants of the palaces created at the turn of the 19th century, designed to treat everyone like royalty. France I guess has a different story...

La Premiere Semaine

To everyone who is reading this, I am very glad I can share bits of my life in Paris with you. I will probably use this blog to share pictures and little facts and impressions of singular places in Paris, but by way of introduction I have a lengthy post:

Already I can see that everything is different here. Last year I was mistaken when I imagined Paris to be similar to American cities. The major difference? It's old. There are buildings that are hundreds of years old and cobblestone streets...Regarding my American Studies-environmental concentration interest, I can already see with that it would be impossible for people all over the world to have the same cultural view of the environment and our natural resources. More to be said on this subject later.

I am speaking French all the time. After one week I am already much better at understanding people and speaking. At first everything (saying something, shopping for groceries, etc.) took at least twice as long as usual. Additionally, all our classes are in French. Orientation has been 1. French language, 2. art and architecture history classes, and 3. How-to-write-a-paper-in-a-French-way (rule #1: no personal opinions!)

My room is cool. It is tiny, like a room at Middlebury, but with a kitchen and a bathroom. The shower is the size of a person, but remarkably lovely nonetheless.

I love to buy yogurt in glass containers! There is also Tropicana orange juice in glass bottles! There are many of the same brands here (e.g. "Dannone") but I think the ingredients and the presentation is quite different. Peanut butter is not my favorite thing, but it might interest you (it does my classmates) that it's uncommon and also very expensive here.

Missing the U.S. a little bit. But being here is really something.