San Francisco

Wolfback Ridge, Sausalito. Sculpture Beach, Point Reyes.

Doesn't this look like the setting for a fairytale? That, or a horror movie right before the calm and happy opening is shattered by an axe-wielding mass murderer. Take your pick.

OMG Taiwan! & Verton, France

I think it only just hit me that I’m going to Taiwan. There are only three words for this: oh my god!! I’m getting chills. This is so exciting. I’ve always felt like I wasn’t enthusiastic enough whenever someone asked what I was doing after college. I was excited about it, but for some reason that excitement never really surfaced very strongly, except right when I found out I was going. There was a lot of jumping up and down, shrieking a little, laughing a lot, and running to all over the Sem to tell my friends the good news (only one was around actually, but she gleefully joined me in the jumping/laughing). And I had a huge smile every time I told someone for the rest of the day. But after that, it felt kind of unreal. I was so focused on other things: classes, and then saying goodbye to my friends, coming to terms with school being (for the time being) totally over, and of course the grand adventure that was Bonnaroo. But now, I’m packing. I’ve had my visa for nearly a month now. I leave for San Francisco in two days, and after about a week there, I’m going to Taiwan! For real! Oh my god!

Other than spazing out over Taiwan, I also visited my mom's summer home in Verton (a tiny little town in northern France). I had not been there in several years and my memory conjured this: a decrepit old farmhouse with a lot of mice. Chunks of the ceiling would fall to the floor of my room every time a truck rumbled by on the road. And the weather is awful. Think England but in France. Cold and raining all the time.

Well, the weather was the same. It rained every day I was there (as it has in New Orleans - I literally have not seen a non-rainy day since I was in Lyon about two weeks ago). However, the house was completely changed. I could actually walk upstairs because there was no longer any danger of falling through the hole that used to exist in the floor over the kitchen. In fact, I was given a nice little room tucked away behind my sister's room. I like cozy corners like that. With the door closed, it looks like it would just lead to a closet - but it's actually a whole other room. It's too bad mom wants to sell this place for a small house in southern France.

Lavender Fields Forever (Drôme, France)

 

 

A Few of My Favorite Things (Lyon, France)

Strawberries. Making souffles. Feeding turtles. Magnolias in the bathroom.

 

 Oh. And watching my cousin Alice play her video games.

The Sound of Toads (Lyon, France)

I love this sound. It's pretty much the sound of my summer childhood in France.

The volume is pretty soft, so turn up the volume as high as possible. Typing on the european keyboard of my grandmother's computer is slow-going and frustrating (strangely enough, my laptop will not connect to their internet signal). Solution: video.

Paris Promenade

Aside from the museums, I walked around a lot, crossing the Bir Hakeim bridge to get to the 15th arrondissment from Passy. Yesterday, I passed mom's old apartment from last year, picked up some food at the market, and had lunch out on Champs de Mars. That night I had dinner with my mother's cousins. Nicole had bought a quiche lorraine and her son, Charles, had made merengues for desert. She gave me an extra merengue - for breakfast, she said. No arguments from me. I ate it on the way to Gare de Lyon this morning.

I wanted to take more than just photos with my iphone but it appears, um, that I forgot to bring my battery charger for my SLR. And the battery does not have one second of life on it, unfortunately.

East Asian Art, Food & History in Paris

Yesterday, I went to an exhibit at Musée du Quai Branly called Seductions of the Palate: Cooking and Eating in China. The exhibit chronicles the history of Chinese cuisine through a collection of ceramics, cooking ware, and artwork. There are also recipes every now and then, like this one: Chien Braisé Dans Un Boillon De Tortue, which is essentially braised dog in turtle soup. Yum.

On the right, I also have a photo of a grill, which dates back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD). It'd be fun to grill a few burgers and hotdogs on that for the fourth of July (although being that I am in France, there hasn't been much celebration). According to the exhibit, during the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911 AD), the Office of Internal Affairs was in charge of the imperial kitchens. Four hundred officers were assisted by one hundred and fifty eunuchs to cook around 12,000 meals a day. No wonder China had so many peasant revolts...

I love the prints and Japanese folding screens at Musée Guimet, which I went to today. It's just something about the bold lines and the patterns. The first three photos are of the prints (some of the first graphic novels - I wish I knew the stories behind the pictures) and the rest are from folding screens.

Across the Atlantic with Kar Wai Wong

A few hours into my flight from Philadelphia to Paris, I was thoroughly frustrated. My (nice) apple headphones had broken when I'd gotten up to let the passenger next to me return to his seat. Which they would, you know, when the passenger refused to be patient and give me a decent amount of space to get out of my seat. My leg knocked the headphones clean off the socket they were plugged into, but the little end of it remain embedded in the hole. So much for watching movies the whole way through. Just as I sat down again to investigate the problem, the irritatingly oblivious passenger commented on the tv show playing out on my screen: "Oh! How I Met Your Mother! I love that show!" Yeah, I did too.

Then I realized there was one film on my computer I had yet to watch. I bought the cheap, crappy airplane headphones. The movie was a Kar Wai Wong film called 2046, staring Tony Leung, Li Gong, Faye Wong, Takuya Kimura, Ziyi Zhang, Carina Lau, and Maggie Cheung. Like Chungking Express (one of my favorites, also directed by Kar Wai Wong), 2046 has some very beautifully vivid shots. In addition, a lot of the film is shot with objects partially obstructing the view, kind of making the audience like a voyeur looking at people's private lives. Which is kind of what movies are, anyway.