Paris Pictures

http://picasaweb.google.com/micramm/Paris

Enjoy.

Weekend in Paris

“Now playing, Shrek le Troixieme”

Right now I’m deleting all the music from my laptop, so I could transfer all 2GB of pictures of took in the past four days. Paris is, truly, an amazing city. We arrived Thursday night. The flight from Heathrow to De Gaulle was only 40 minutes long, but the departure was delayed by an hour and a half. By the time we got our luggage and went through the passport control, it was already past midnight. The airport, by that point, had pretty much shut down. The cleaning crews were dispatched around the terminal, no people walking around, all the restaurants and shops long closed. As we were walking through the terminal towards the train station, a female voice with the French accent was announcing “the airport is being evacuated, please exit immediately”. Creepy. This feeling soon turned into disappointment: when we got to the train station, the last train for Paris had already left. Our options were to sleep at the airport or to take a cab, and we chose the latter.

About an hour later and with 50 less Euros in the wallet, we arrived at our hotel. The room reminded me of a dentist office with its blue-colored bare walls, and a small television next to the ceiling in the corner of the room. Still so much better than a hostel. With that in mind, the first night in Paris came to an end.

Where to go first? The Louvre, of course. After figuring out the metro system (after all my New York subway adventures, I felt like fish in the water) , we took a train to the most famous museum in the world. We entered around 11am, and by the time we left at 4pm, we had seen the entire section of the French paintings, along with the most famous paintings and sculptures in the right wing. Then we walked down Champs Elysees towards the Triumphal Arch and had dinner in a cafe. The weather had been hot up to that point, and all of a sudden it started pouring. With thunder and lightning, the pleasant walk couldn’t proceed and we quickly scrambled to take the metro back to the only place we knew was still open: the Louvre! We stayed there until the closing at 9.30, now having seen every painting on display. What a wonderful place – besides the breathtaking collection of art, I loved how the decor contributed to the viewing experience. I’m usually not a big fan of sculptures but, in the right setting, the stoned figures almost came to life.

We then walked over to the Eiffel Tower. At night, it was shining and sparkling with thousands of flashes going off every second. We then scrambled to find the metro back to the hotel because, somehow, the metro closes at 12.30am. We really didn’t want to take another cab.

Day 2 was all about churches and chapels: we went to Sacra Coeur in the morning, followed by Saint Chapelle and Notre Dame. Absolutely majestic. I don’t know enough synonyms for grandiose and fantastic to properly described my impressions. Maybe that’s why I took so many pictures. I couldn’t believe I was there, looking at these famous sights. I felt very privileged to have the chance to be there.

We then did the most touristy thing of all and went up the Eiffel Tower. This was followed by a wonderful dinner at a French restaurant in the latin quarter. I got cheese for dessert, I’ve always wanted to do that! Oh yeah, and I had a crepe for dessert during lunch. All part of the French experience.

We slept in a bit more the next day. Our flight was at night, so we went to the Opera Bastille, and then walked around Marais. Then we went to Musee D’Orsay, which is now my favorite museum in the world. I went straight up to the top floor – the impressionism exhibition. One of the first rooms had the most famous Monet paintings in the world. I stayed in that single room for what was probably an hour. I’ve never felt as moved by art as I did at that point in time. I felt in love with the paintings, and I have never experienced such a feeling towards an inanimate object. But all the good things had to come to an end, we had to leave fairly soon to go to the airport.

It was already dark when the plane started accelerating on the runway. Before we entered the cloud-cover, I took the last brief look at the city of lights. Out in the distance, I saw the Eiffel tower, flashing with its strobe lights. Then it was covered by the clouds. “I’m coming back to this place”, I thought. I don’t know when, but I have to come back.

Having struggled with the French language for 4 days, it felt s good to be back in an English-speaking country. The accent didn’t make a difference anymore, I understood what the people were saying, and the people understood me. It was time to rest and relax.

Week 6.1 (sounds like an AOL version)

” I are scientists” – writing on the front of a shirt.

I felt like making another post before leaving for Paris tomorrow. I feel like today deserves its own post.  Nothing particular happened, but it was sunny, I had my ipod playing “Lovely Day” from the Snakes on the Plane soundtrack while I was walking to my tutorial, people were sitting in pubs celebrating finishing their last exams, tourist buses were driving by, and I just felt really happy to be here. What contributed to my good mood was that, amidst not sleeping a whole lot towards to the end of last week, somehow I managed to produce my best tutorial work of the term here. It’s all a matter of luck here, a few of my guesses were right on the spot this week.  One bad thing about having one on one tutorial, besides not being able to fall asleep in lecture, is that I don’t have anyone to consult while doing the problem set. I do my best with the resources I have, and that’s the end of it. It worked out well last week, but the trouble is that I won’t ever replicate this impression.  If you think about it, you never want to do too good of a job. Everything that follows will be like The Killer’s second album.

After the tutorial, I took pictures of the summer 8s, the annual crew race between all the colleges. I think I need  to consume more Pimms before I can get into the crew stuff. The boats race trying to bump each other. The women are beastly. Is there more to it?

I just read a news article on how Dell, desperate to bump up its revenue, is going to start selling their computers in retail. Its profits are projected to shrink by 24%. The world is changing, the early business models that were so successful in the world of computers and the internet are no longer working. Just look at AOL, which lost 1 million subscribers in the first quarter alone.  AOL introduced the idea of e-mail and internet to millions of users is now struggling to find new business models. Online advertising is booming and they are failing to transition to a new market. I feel bad for these companies, they were pioneers of new technology now struggling to survive in the face of vigorous competition. What else is new though, buy low, sell high, and cut your losses while you can.

Week Six

Kel: “Is it really offensive if I try to do an English accent?”                                                                                                                                         My cousin (laughing): “Yes”.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Oxford Union debate. The House believes in a woman’s right to choose. It lasted for a few hours. After opening statements by students, each had 3 guest speakers from various companies and organization. I am normally rather skeptical of debates, but I can honestly proclaim that I truly enjoyed this one. It wasn’t so much about the issues – all the typical arguments, examples, and counterexamples came up in one form or another. It was about the pure art of debate, the English are great at it. A lot of prime ministers were presidents of the Union during their time here.  Sometimes I doubt they spoke the same language though: I could understand the arguments fine, but when they joked, they said things under their nose with an extra level of Englishness. There was some fake laughter on my part while I was thinking, what the hell did he/she just say?

The tutorial on Wednesday went really well again. We stayed for almost 2 hours, discussing the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, quantum communication, quantum cryptography and the future of quantum computing.  And the problem sheet for this week wasn’t all that bad, although one of the “problems” was a paper.  I don’t know what I did Tuesday night, but it certainly wasn’t work. No such thing was done until Sunday.  For my ethnography class, we are supposed to interview people at pubs. So that night we went out. The pub ended up being deserted, so instead of making any headway on the assignment, we just stayed there and had beers. I then stayed up until Kellen arrived from Berlin.

The next three days were ridiculously fun. Thursday, I showed Kellen around Oxford, went to Christ Church and Magdalen. He also joined our architecture class on a really good day, when we went to the top of the Sheldonian theater. That night we went to the most happening club in Oxford in the most happening night. They had several dance floors: one way playing techno, one American hip-hop and the other one a very good selection of music that ranged from Johnny B Good to the Beatles. So we had a drink at the bar, when to the hip-hop floor and when we got tired from that, sat back and listened to the good-music floor.

My previous clubbing experience here was May Eve, when I went to Filth. It was a very appropriate name for that club. They were playing techno stuff the whole time, so I never really got into it. But the Bridge (that’s the name of the happening club)  felt right it home with its hi-hop repertoire. We stayed for a while, but we had to leave when they started playing some songs for the 3rd or even 4th time that night.

Friday Kellen and I did more Oxfordy things. We went out punting during the day. You get a boat and go around the Ises pushing it off the bottom of the river with a really long pole. I think the boats in Venice are like that although I have never been.  Then we went to formal hall at Magdalen, and my cousin was able to join us for that. At night, we went out to a really sketchy Jamaican pub and had red stripes.  London, the next day, was also a pretty intense affair. I was so impressed by the Westminster Abbey! Plus they had a choir of boys singing with organ accompaniment. Truly majestic sound. After throughly exploring European Art 1500-1600 at the National Art Gallery, we met with my cousin in London and then walked around until early hours of Sunday morning.

When Kel departed, I promptly went to sleep.  The following day, I had to read a 300-page book for ethnography and do the majority of the problem sheet. I got it done somehow, but it wasn’t fun. In fact, I’m in the middle of a pretty tough stretch: in addition to catching up, I need to get ahead on my work so that I wouldn’t need to worry about it when I got to Paris this weekend.

Week Five

“It’s not what you know in this world, it’s who you know” – director of Stanford at Oxford

“You did photography for the Stanford Daily? I know because I googled your name before we met” – my tutor

I’m starting to enjoy the tutorial more and more. I’m no longer nervous before the one-hour long meeting. They are no longer the early drill-sessions of the material I was supposed to know, but the amazing once in a lifetime learning experience I was hoping they would become. It helps that my tutor is not an old emeritus professor but a graduate student, just a few years older than I am. After our last tutorial, I think I’ll invite him to a pub. It’s totally okay that he googled my name, because I googled his before we met as well.

It’s been raining for the last 7 days. The English kind of rain, this on and off drizzle. Sometimes the water droplets are so small, it’s hard to tell whether it’s raining or just misty, but it manages to get you wet anyway. I think it’s a bad omen for the weather when I do sports photography. At Stanford, the vast majority of baseball games I signed up to shoot were rained out. Here again it started raining the second I joined the student newspaper. So far I’ve done cricket, sailing, and track. I got absolutely drenched during all three events. But my pictures should be in the next issue of Oxford Student.

Last Friday we went to London to see Othello at the Globe. That was an amazing experience. I had no idea that the Globe was an open-air theater. There was a vast crowd simply standing next to the stage. When the actors needed to get on stage, they had to push aside the audience to get through. We were sitting in a covered section, which was much appreciated because it was…raining. Before the Globe, we went to Tate, the modern art museum. I really enjoyed that too. Sometimes I feel bad for the modern art museums, it seems like they need to constantly defend themselves before the public. The question of whether or not any of the exhibits are actually art is always up in the air. It’s inescapable – the very movement challenges the definition of art. This is a noble goal, but it also means that the whole modern art movement will always be under a cloud of doubt and suspicion.

Speaking of cloud of doubt and suspicion, I’ve been meaning to write something about environmentalism in England. (Hey it’s my blog, I don’t have to worry about smooth transitions). Every news program I have watched on television here had at least one Global Warming related story. They don’t all claim that global warming is a fact. Indeed, they’re very careful to craft the issue in a politically correct light of ambiguity. I personally am completely lost on this issue. But no matter whether you side with Al Gore or Michael Crichton, I think we can all agree that the reduction of emissions, recycling, and increased awareness for the health of the environment are all positive outcomes. In all of these aspects, England seems to be decades ahead of the United States. And it’s not just that they drive small cars. At supermarkets, they don’t give you a plastic bag unless you specifically ask for one. And if you reuse the same bag again, some places will give you a nominal credit towards your purchase. Most bathrooms do not have paper towels. It’s either one made of cloth, which is washed and reused, or those hot air dryers. The buses on the streets are all environmentally friendly. Finally, the food growers do not use as much hormones of insecticides. Throughout my stay, I’ve been continually impressed with all of these things. It pains me to realize that American will not come to this way of life for quite some time.

Birds at Farmoor Reservoir in Oxford.

Week Four

“I consider myself to be a member of lower-upper-middle class” – George Orwell.

The time here is really starting to fly by. I’ve settled into a routine, and I’ve observed this happen time and time again:  as soon as I settle down, the weeks just pass in a blink of an eye. Let me tell you about this routine though before another week passes:

I have my tutorial problem set (which they call problem sheet) due on Tuesday. So late Sunday and all day Monday I spend working on that. It compares time-wise to a hard Stanford problem set. The problems are easier but there are more of them. Monday I also have ethnography, a 3-hour class with a break for lunch. On Tuesday my only job is to turn in the problem set by noon. Then I come back and read for next week’s ethnography class. We do a book a week, and I try to sit down and get it done in one day. Wednsday I have my actual tutorial for an hour, and Thursday is a 2-hour walking tour of a new place in Oxford known as the architecture class. The workload is like a quarter of what I would be doing on campus, but nonetheless it keeps my occupied 4 days a week. The rest of the time is spent taking pictures, traveling, going to pubs etc.

My second tutorial meeting went much better than the first one. The tutor had looked over the problem set and was clearly pleased with the results. This time around, I was on top of every question thrown at me. Then he assigned me to do 40 problems for this week. It’s okay, I can handle it. The one on one sessions are pretty amazing. You don’t realize in lecture how much time is spent explaining stuff that you already know. In a tutorial setting, all of that can be skipped. So despite the fact that it’s one hour a week, you still cover a lot of ground.

The British education system so immensely different from that in the United States. It all starts in high school, where by the time you’re a 3rd year, you pick your A-level classes. You start to only takes classes in the area of your choice: if I were here, I’d do math, physics, and maybe a third science. It’s so strange: how can you just stop taking English and History? This early specialization only worsens during the undergraduate years. One picks a subject, and sticks to ONLY classes in that area. This is exemplified that instead of saying “I’m majoring in history”, they say “I’m a historian”.  I’d be hard pressed to call myself a physicist at this point, but at Oxford, even first-year students are lawyers, medics, mathematicians and so on. And by the time they’re done, they are very good at that one subject. But what about the other ones, which they stopped taking at the age of 16? Picture a physicist who hasn’t read above sophomore year of high school level. Maybe I’ve been preached the idea of a well-rounded education so long that I fail to see past it, but I just don’t get how you can go on and be a fully-functioning intellectual this way. On campus, how would you even interact with students from different majors if you did so little in common for the last 5-6 years?

I went to London twice within the last week. I  really enjoyed being in a big city again. There’s something above walking through massive crowds of people, and looking at traffic jams that reminds me of home. First time I went by myself and just walked around for hours. I got there at noon, and I didn’t stop walking until it was 10pm and time to head back. During those 10 hours, I saw so much of the city. I walked from Piccadilly Circus to Trafalgar Square to Westminster Abbey, all the way to Saint Paul’s, Tower Bridge, and then back to Victoria. Last weekend I stayed at my cousin’s home and we went to the National Art Gallery and the British Museum. Spent quite a bit of time at both of them, and I’m so glad to have seen them.
Somehow I’ve become a sports photographer for the OxfordStudent – their weekly equivalent of the Daily. They just had no one to cover sport at all, and when they found out that I was a photo editor for 2 quarters, they really wanted me to help. So now I’m going to be shooting cricket, sailing, crew, and track. Cricket is today – Never before have I  shot a sport that I didn’t understand.

Other news: Got tickets to Paris at the end of May, and Kellen is visiting next week!