Artsy Shmartsy

Yesterday's lunch was a lot of bread. And a lot of fantasticness. I got a sandwhich (as usual) and then a viennoise chocolate. Which is like this sweet bread with little chocolate chips in it, but it's like the chocolate is melted, even though it's not warm. I'm not sure if that's a good way of describing it, but either way, it was amazingly tasty.

Then Kay and I went to the Centre Pompidou to go to the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne, but we got there 15 minutes before closing, so instead we went into the Bibliothèque (library) there, which was open later, and had no line (which apparently, when other people on my program have gone, the line was crazy). It was one of the craziest libraries ever, just because it's huge and has escalators and such. We did a little bit of research for our artist projects. They had two books on my artist. Then we had to go meet with a couple other people on our program, and some guy who our professor knows. (Okay, what it is, is that Cathy, our professor, knows some young people closer to our age...around 21ish I think through friends who were willing to take out a few of us Americans to see a certain area of Paris, and get dinner and in general meet some other young french people, especially if we don't have anyone in our host families close to our age).

So me and three others (Kay, Rachel and Prakriti) met Vincent and his friend (not quite positive how to spell his name/what exactly it was). They took us through the quatier chinois-Paris' China Town. Which was kind of amusing, because San Francisco's china town wins, hands down. This one was kind of small and mostly restaurants--not all chinese either. there were thai, vietnamese, japonese and such. So we walked around, got rained on and ended up at this bar that's apparently Vincent's "second home." We were there for a while, and Vincent knew pretty much everyone there. We ate at a chinese restaurant right next door, but had to wait for a table--it was pretty small. So while we waited, I tried a monaco, which I guess is a "young people's drink" because there's not much alcohol in it-it's lemonade, grenadine and beer. It's sweet, and tasty. Then we ate at the Chinese restaurant, which was tasty...I tried lots of different things. There was this really tasty garlic eggplant dish. And I liked the duck too. Then, we moved back to the bar, but I started having a really bad stomach ache (I don't think it was the food, cause it was just me, and I didn't throw up. ahh well.) And Prakriti was super tired (I mean, it was just after midnight) so we took off. It was a fun night, despite the stomach ache.

Today we visited the Musée Picasso with our class in the morning. It was interesting...I didn't know that much about Picasso before this visit, and I guess this museum is special because it has the work that Picasso never sold--he kept it in his own collection until his death. It included stuff from all throughout his life-like a piece he did when he was 12. So that was impressive.

Then I had lunch and went to the Centre Pompidou again, this time for the modern art museum with a group of people. It was pretty neat. Even though there's a lot of modern art I just plain don't get. And I guess you could say just don't appreciate. Oh well. I also saw two of my artist's pieces that they have there. And let's just say they're not the art I would normally stop to look at. I stop to look at things like the two pictures above.

And this is what my artist does:


Good times. So that was my day. I came home, and may or may not go to a club tonight with a group of friends (in honor of Davey and Kenny's birthdays. They're a set of twins on my program).