Paris

Paris. Just got here on the 23rd of June. You spend a lot, sweat a lot, and walk a lot during the summer. If you're stupid, you spend a lot of money on single metro tickets as opposed to a week-long navigo pass before the next month starts. If you're smart you look up good rates for french sim cards in paris before you go, you also look at required materials for your eventual apartment such as a towel before you check in there.

All these minor failings aside (there are many many more), this is one hell of a city. It's beautiful. Of course the Notre Dame, Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Pantheon etc. are all important to see. But though I haven't climbed Notre Dame yet (huge lines and I get my student discount next week...) or for that matter the Eiffel Tower (I'll do it tomorrow), there are other wonders in this city. New ones like La Musee D'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou (which is generally a fantastic place), featuring an interesting exhibit on contemporary feminine work and also an incredible exhibit called "Promises of the Past," which is a display of post WWII soviet underground art all the way to contemporary work in the poorer (considerably more so than France) countries once part of the Soviet Union. The concept of the exhibit was to consider utopia. Which is to say the "imagination of the future." Imagination more in the sense of trying to envision a more perfect future, which is, for better or worse, I guess what communism was about. What was so cool about much of the work was that it was, as opposed to making some kind of commentary, was also envisioning a better future but with the benefit of hindsight on an era in which that kind of attempted clairvoyance was destructive and instead constructed.

Now I'm here, in la Cite (Cite Universitaire), tired at 11:23pm, listening to Aphex Twin, about to upload tons of pictures. I'll also be generally blogging in a very stream-of-consciousness kind of way, so pardon the general non-chronology and non-blogginess of the blog. At least I certainly hope it's non-bloggy. Conformity sucks.

Love,

Ethan