la vie en rose

Whew - time for a quick update (many photos to come, I promise). Ben, my best friend from home, is here to visit this week with his mom. I've been accompanying them on many of the popular tourist excursions. Tuesday, I met them at the Musee d'Orsay, which is a huge impressionist museum with all kinds of famous Monet/Manet/Van Gogh. Very beautiful and amazing to see all these paintings that you've seen your whole life in real life, as opposed to in a flat print. I remembered some of Van Gogh's work from when my family and I went to Amsterdam, but I sure appreciate it more now. Most of what I remember from before was losing a tooth on a very crusty sandwich.
Wednesday evening we went up the Eiffel Tower, which was also breathtaking (I feel like words are falling flat as I'm trying to describe all of these things). I got off the subway stop and started walking to meet them - very confused because I didn't see any large, metal object recognizable by most of the world - and then I turned a corner, and there it was. It was lit up and I could not stop smiling - as cheesy as that seems. Meanwhile, the street vendors were trying to bask in the glow of the tower's beauty by trying to sell me cheap baby versions. I warded off a lot of "Ciao, bella"'s with this new blank "do-not-try-to-talk-to-me" Paris stare I've acquired. I'm practicing it a lot. French girls provide a lot of inspiration. Anyway, the Eiffel Tower is incredible. I can't wait until it gets warm and we can picnic in front of it (oh, what a life I'm living). We then went to dinner and I got my first taste of a prix-fixe menu in Paris. Most restaurants have them - you get an appetizer, a main course, and a dessert for one price. They range from reasonable to excessively expensive, ours was very cute. There was a man outside the front door accosting people walking down the street and we got reeled in.
Today, I went with my school to the Centre Pompidou. It was, to say the least, the most bizarre museum I have ever seen. Their consistent collection was pretty normal - IES arranged a tour for 15 of us, which was very nice. I definitely learned to appreciate some modern art (yes, I now even understand the background behind the bicycle on top of the chair as "art"). Their current installation, however, was very odd. Very, very, VERY "modern". It was an all women's collection. Some of it was thought provoking, some of it was fun to look at it, and some was beyond my comprehension. Ben and his mom happened to be there at the same time, so we browsed together for a bit too. Overall these last few days have been a sweeping overview of what Paris is famous for. I can't wait to delve deeper and see what's hidden behind the masses of tourists. A bien tot!