Dorm life, ENS style

Ok, here we go, the much anticipated album of my pimped out room, haha.

First, a quick explanation: I'm at the École Normale Supérieure, the big school for literature and some social science in France. It's located in the 5th Arrondissement, very close to the Pantheon. In fact, you can see the Pantheon down my street:


That's the south side of the pantheon, off to the right if you're looking at it directly.

The university itself is actually nestled in trees:



This building has the library and cafeteria as well as most administrative offices and some housing. My dorm is actually called the "annex," so I'm directly across the street. I think this is a lucky occurrence, as I think the rooms in the annex are slightly better. It's all relative though. So this is my building:


Here's essentially the same picture again, except that you can see my room. It's the one four flights up, with the open window and curtain, in the center right:


The residence entrance is off to the side:


The non-descript entrance leads to a non-descript foyer:


Thank goodness for the elevator, though! I've been taking the steps in general (there are 91 from the ground to my room, but who's counting?!), but with suitcases and crap the elevator is most definitely a life saver.

From there we get to the long hallway:

My only complaint with this hallway is that the lighting is timed and there aren't enough little buttons to press when the light goes off. You have to walk a third of the way down before you can turn a light on. This is not so much of a problem when you're arriving since there is enough of a vague emergency lighting system to walk, but it is a problem if you're leaving and want to lock your door but can't see. This is a problem 24/7, since there are no windows in the hall. Every time I leave I have to walk halfway down the hallway to turn on the light and then walk back to my door to lock it.

Anyway, here's my door, complete with some sticker about fake fur under the number, haha:


Of course the room is so small that I can't get far enough back to get a good angle, but here's the view from the door:


There's a small placard-type closet there on the right. Immediately to the right is a sink and some shelves:


Then inside there's a slightly bigger space with the bed and desk, etc:


I don't know what this says about ENS students, but there's no dresser but rather a big bookshelf, haha. So I hung up everything I could in the closet and have had to expand onto the shelves with my sweaters and stuff. I guess it's a good thing that I can't have many books anyway, given the travel constraints of getting them all home.

The desk is reasonably comfortable:


But there are no drawers or anything. In a stellar example of logic not getting you anywhere here, the only electrical plug is on the opposite wall from the ethernet. So there's no way to plug the computer into both the internet and the power supply without having a wire cutting across the floor. Of course, there's still not much distance to cut across and it's not like you can walk around much in here, so maybe it doesn't matter all that much, hahaha.

Here's a pic looking the other way, from the window:


That's the closet by the head of the bed, and fortunately I have more shelves for books, etc.

Moving out of the room, there's a room with two showers and two toilets for I would say around 10 people (I haven't counted, haha):


The first two stalls are the showers and the second two are the toilets:


I'll spare everyone more pics of that, since it's not all that interesting. There are no sinks, though, so you can't really use the bathroom on the way out the door. You have to go back to your room to wash your hands, which does wondrous things for the sanitary conditions in both the bathroom and the hallway, I imagine. Kind of ironic given that this is where Pasteur discovered germs, now that I think of it. Again, logic gets you nowhere.

Further down the hallway, we have a sorry excuse for a kitchen:


The view from the door pretty much says it all:


That's one fridge for the whole floor, which has a good 20-30 people. Needless to say, I'm buying my own. It's empty and STILL smells like ass. The microwave is about a million years old (doesn't even have a digital interface). But it seems to work just fine.

On that side wall there's also a stove/oven and sink:


And that's it. The kitchen is totally empty otherwise. So I bought a pot and pan and some basic implements. I haven't cooked anything yet, since I don't have my fridge (should be getting that on Monday).

There's also a laundry room on the floor, but the door is locked so I haven't seen it yet.

Anyway, that's about it! If there's one consolation prize it would be the view from my room:


Straight up Haussmannian Paris!

So there we have it. Kathryn's living quarters for the next 11 months...

Lessons learned the hard way

So about 30 seconds into my plane ride last night, I learned that the British word for band-aid is "plaster." Not being one to learn from books what one can learn by doing (haha), I figured this out the hard way.

It all started with my carry on suitcase, which weighed a whopping 45 pounds (!!!). This was of course way over any legal limit for a carry on (it was stuffed with books and my roller blades), so I figured I'd just have to play it super cool and make it seem like the suitcase was lighter than it really was, since they don't weigh the carry ons. Really the only way I would get caught is if I had been visibly struggling with it.

So I was very careful to keep a nonchalant air about me as I hoisted the damn suitcase into the overhead bins. Which of course lasted all of about 2 seconds, since I couldn't get it up there without a struggle, haha. I had to take it down and take out some books from a front pouch because it was too bulky. In any case, I did in fact get it up there, even if it did take every ounce of strength I had.

I smugly sat down in my seat (an exit row, no less), congratulating myself on slipping past the crew. And that's when I noticed that my arm was covered in blood. And not just a little bit, this was the kind of cut that makes enough of a mess that you can't figure out where it actually IS. So I had to find a flight attendant, who sent me to the back of the plane where they had their special first aid kits. I got all nice and cleaned up, they're obviously well equipped with sanitizers and stuff on a plane. And I had to fill out a whole incident report. The problem is that the cut is deep enough that it was soaking through band aids (or plasters, as we were calling them at this point, haha). The flight attendant ended up giving me extra and I just kept it sealed as best as I could.

So that was lesson 1, regarding British vocabulary. Lesson 2 really isn't all that new, namely that French medications remain weird. Anyone who has ever had a cold in France knows this. They give you a chalky medication for colds that you have to dissolve in water. Weird as all hell, but on the upshot, I've always found it rather effective. Anyway, an open cut of this caliber was a new experience for me in France, so I made my way over to a pharmacy to consult an expert (keeping in mind that pharmacists have power of prescription here). I have walked away with what appears to be the French equivalent of steristrips, but it comes in this strange webbed goo form. It's like a sticky film that you spread over the cut. I'm unconvinced at this point, as it's bleeding through another band aid. But I just put it on so I'll give it some more time. Lest anyone worry, it's really not that big of a cut. It clearly looks way worse than it is, so I can be rather amused by the situation because it is indeed minor.

Anyway, in other news I'm in the dorm room, which is indeed pretty much what I expected, haha. There was no pillow or comforter or anything, so I've spent the day running all over the city picking up the bare essentials. Tomorrow will be more of the same. Pics will follow, once I get this place in order. I haven't even started unpacking yet.

Last night this side of the pond!

Well, here we are, last night in the States! And I'm woefully disorganized. But it will all get done, since it has to.

I spent the weekend in DC, which was particularly awesome in that I finally got to see the Newseum, a museum of news and events. There was a special show on the FBI and famous criminals, featuring all sorts of objects. We saw the Unabomber's hut as well as the car from which the DC snipers shot their victims. I got a picture with the car:


More importantly, however, I also got a pic with Obama! Well, as you can probably tell, with a cardboard cutout, HAHA.


Anyway, wish I had more time, but I really do need to go make some semblance of order out of the pile of crap in the living room. Particularly since I have to be ready to leave the house at 6:15 tomorrow morning. humph.

Oh the humiliation

So this is a slightly long and complicated story, but let's just say that it boils down to Swathi having a good long laugh at my expense.

There's a bit of background that must be clarified, however. We have a running joke for a good 10 years now (ever since we graduated from high school) over who gets put in our school's alumni magazine. The race, of course, is to see who stays OUT of it the most. Swathi is kicking my sorry ass in this game, most likely because I have a specific contact who has been known to feed info about what I'm doing to the alumni office. So I've ended up with a blurb in that magazine way more often than I care to admit. Back when we lived together at Bryn Mawr, whenever the magazine would appear with my name on it, Swathi would hoot on me for days.

I, however, had one hell of a trump card I could shoot back at her, and of course I did so routinely. That trump card was that at least I was never on the COVER of the alumni magazine, unlike Swathi. This brings us to Exhibit A, the edition that came out our senior year of high school, when Swathi had her professional debut as a Bharatha Natyam dancer and toured India. This was obviously a huge and amazing moment, and the school capitalized on it to put her portrait on the cover.



We refer to this portrait as "the Mobutu" because it appeared about as frequently and in as many random places as Mobutu Sese Seko's portrait back in that Zaire days. Thank goodness Swathi is both a much better and much more attractive person than Mobutu, but you get the point. The Mobutu made the cover of The Patriot.

Ok, so that's one piece of the story. Here's the other piece:

Back in the summer between 9th and 10th grade, one of our friends had a birthday party at which the main activity was to paint her treehouse. This was the kind of friend who planned her parties down to the last minute and got really stressed when they didn't run according to schedule. In any case, this particular party has gone down in history among the rest of us as "the Tom Sawyer party," since it was basically a bribe to get us to paint a freakin' treehouse. We saw this as highly questionable on many grounds, to wit:
1) Dragging friends over ostensibly for a party and then making them sit around and paint is already an issue, particularly since she took full editorial command over the choices. At one point I distinctly remember wanting to paint a certain thing on the door and she made a comment along the lines of "well, fine, do whatever you want, but I'll paint over it anyway." So yeah, not a way to keep your company happy.
2) This is all compounded by the fact that we were 14 and hence not quite at the age to have a sense of humor over being dragged to do things that seemed immature.

Thus the Tom Sawyer party. Swathi hooted on said party for years, as she couldn't make it due to a dance conflict. So she didn't suffer the indignity of being 14 and having to paint the house.

At the very end of the party (the next morning), the father of one of our friends (who is an excellent photographer) came to pick up his daughter and snapped a picture of us. Yes, you can see exactly where this is going. What I remember about the picture was that I had just hit my head REALLY HARD on the roof of the treehouse (just as I was too old to be climbing around the treehouse, I was also way too tall to be doing so). This was probably the second worst headache of my life, second only to the one I got when I knocked myself out on a water ride at wildwater kingdom. But I digress.

So now we fast-forward to last night, and I was having dinner with my violin teacher from childhood, who also teaches at GA. She comes in casually carrying the school's calendar for the upcoming year. This year is the 250th anniversary of the school's founding (we had to memorize the 1759 founding date when we were about 7, haha), so they're doing all sorts of festivities in honor of the big year. Putting old pictures on the calendar appears to be one such memorialization event. So anyway, my teacher walks in carrying the calendar. I was like, "oh what's new with the calendar?" And she was like, "well, I figured I had to bring it in because I recognized someone on the cover!"

OHHHHHHHHHHH. This leads us to Exhibit B:


YES, THAT PICTURE IS NOW ON THE COVER OF THE CALENDAR. It's a good photo composition-wise, but we sure look like hell given that we'd just been through a sleepover party centered around PAINTING A TREEHOUSE. My friend Lauren, center bottom, had the very logical theory that it made the cover because Laura, the girl on the top (who sponsored the party), is wearing a very visible Germantown Academy t-shirt. Makes a lot of sense to me. But the girl on the middle row with me didn't even go to GA! She made a lot of the pictures because she was Laura's best friend growing up. We all loved her, she was very sweet...but yeah, she definitely made the cover of the calendar too, hahahaha.

In any case, I think Lauren summed it up quite well when I called her last night and she was like, "I think this both makes and breaks my night, all at once!" ohhhhhhhhhhhh.

The baby

So the rhythm of life at home is pretty much dictated by the new kid on the block, namely Sebastian Gabriel. Here he is again, with the older kitties (Bagheera on the left, Chloe on the right). He likes terrorizing the others, particularly Isabella, who was probably cowering under the couch when this pic was taken. He looks innocent but he's actually very guilty. Of what at this specific moment I don't know, but it's always something :-)


Favorite pasttimes include waking me up by biting my toes at 5 am. And stepping all over my computer keyboard when I'm trying to type. In fact, that's what I was just trying to do right now, and I finally got rid of him by subjecting him to repeated photobooth experiments. The best results are as follows:



So yeah, there you have it. Clearly I really need to get to France, seeing as that the highlight of my day appears to be blogging about the cats, HAHAHA.

Actually, that's not true. I had a lovely day today, catching up with all sorts of old friends from Bryn Mawr :-) Tomorrow and Wednesday I'll be reconnecting with some old friends from my even younger days. Then Thursday through Sunday it's off to DC! Then...next Tuesday off to France! Wow, who would have guessed it would sneak up on me so quickly? No worries, I'm sure I'll check in again before I cross the pond!

Adventures back home

Can't believe I've been home for a week already...time sure does fly. I finally convinced my father to get a new pair of rollerblades, so Sunday was our first grand outing. There's a great trail along the Schuylkill River (and its tributaries), so we did a segment near the house, the part that cuts through Valley Forge Park. My father, in his infinite skating wisdom, decided to bring a starbucks with him, a feat I found remarkably difficult to balance. I tried skating with his coffee cup in my hand and most definitely could not get used to it. Perhaps the funniest moment of the outing was when he tripped over the brake on the back of the skate, went down, and managed to fall in such a way that he didn't spill a drop of his coffee. hahahaha. Clearly someone who has his priorities.


The other highlight of the time at home is of course Sebastian Gabriel, Harley's younger brother. Sebastian just turned 5 months old this weekend, and he already weighs close to 9 pounds, haha.

American Logic Gets You Nowhere

So back during our assistantship year in France, Susannah, Jenny, and I had a motto for dealing with all things French: "American logic gets you nowhere." I find myself coming back to that motto fairly routinely since I still deal with all things French (haha), and right now I'm facing a prime example of it. For my dissertation research, I need to look at book reviews of a certain set of novels, ranging in publication date from 1983-2008. The later years are fine because databases like Lexis Nexis and Factiva cover the major French newspapers I need. It's the early years that are a hassle, because I have to go back to the source (which, more often than not, is in microfilm...BOO). And as if microfilm didn't suck enough, the French have found a way to make it suck even harder: THEY DON'T INDEX. So there is only one way to know if a newspaper or magazine reviewed a book, and that's to look for it. Page by page. On microfilm. ohhhhhhhh. So that is precisely what I've been doing these past few days, using the Columbus method (search and discover). I've put in two 7-hour days and gone through 10 years' worth of a weekly news magazine. The good news is of course that I'm finding a lot of great stuff to work with. The bad news is that I'm finding a lot of stuff to work with...and now I have to figure out what to do with it, haha.

Otherwise, it's been a whirlwind of a week. Last Friday was my going away party in NYC, which was a ton of fun. We started at Yaffa, a great Moroccan-style diner, and then headed to China One, where the atmosphere is amazing, the music is rockin', and the drinks are...well, made with really cheap alcohol, we think, judging by how we all felt the next day, haha. But whatever, it was fun while it lasted!

Here I am with Lisa and Sarah:


And Ana and Junette:


And one of my favorite pics of the evening, with Dane:


And if that weren't hard enough core for you, I got my sorry ass out of bed the next morning to go roller blading because the city is doing this special program where they shut down Park Ave on Saturday mornings in August. And since that Saturday was my only shot at glory, Willemijn and I decided we'd make it happen, whatever the cost. I sort of felt like I wanted to die, but I'm soooo glad I went: