So behind!!!

Ayiyiyi so this is wayyy overdue, I totally forgot about my blog! ..oops well anyways i have had quite the past month! i'm not sure what to write about... hmm

the entire family went to get pedicures! hahah

ok well i dont really know where i left off but i will start with my unexpected trip back to the lovely US of A. sadly it was not under the best of circumstances, but I wasn't going to miss the celebration of a life that has had such an impact on my own. Bobbin was my best friend. partially because he loved me the most :) but also because of his great sense of humor, enormous smile, screaming cheers at field hockey games, hysterical quotes ("for WHATTTT?") optimism, generosity, and simple joy he brought everywhere he went. i was blessed to have him in life and couldn't thank him enough for his last gift to me, the ability to come back to connecticut and spend time with friends and family. i will be forever grateful for Bobbin, everything he gave me and the gifts that I continue to receive in his memory.

although it was hard to leave my oh so familiar life in the states and at la Trinité i enthusiastically went back to Paris knowing that just one week later I would be traveling to Croatia. Honestly, how could I complain, the US, Paris and Croatia all in one week? I seriously am living the life! Not knowing anything about Croatia, I, along with five new friends from Boston College, traveled to Cavtat, Croatia. (just a thirty minute drive outside of Dubrovnik) The minute we landed my roommate, Mia, and I knew we were in heaven. the taxi driver was so friendly, the hotel workers were all great and no one staying in the hotel was under the age of 65. heaven right?? 

The first day we spent relaxing by the pool..it was amazing - there really arent any other words to describe it! The views were gorgeous with crystal blue water and mountains surrounding us on every side. the town was the size of our neighborhood in st. louis and because it was early april, aka not tourist season, we stuck at like a sore thumb as the six american girls who are wearing shorts and t-shirts. the locals still considered the sixty degree weather winter and a man even told us that it was the weather for penguins...

obviously we didnt feel the same way, here are all of the girls from BC, Brianan, Mia, Jackie, Carolyn, and Emma!

 the second day we took a trip to Dubrovnik, which is the biggest tourist town in Croatia. It was such a beautiful old town with windy narrow roads and really friendly people. we spent the day climbing the wall around the town. every step had a more beautiful view than the last, i think i took a thousand pictures of buildings and ocean instead of people that day!

mia and i

After we finished our trip around the town and ate lunch at a cute pizza place we decided to tackle the mountain -SRD pronounced kind of like surge but..not? it was a long hike but the view was gorgeous the entire time. the picture above shows us on top of the mountain and the little circle of buildings behind us was the entire town of Dubronik! you can even see to the bottom of the water from this high up!

haha the must-have jumping picture

after our fun-filled day we decided a bar on a cliff overlooking the adriatic was a much needed addition to our list of activities for the day. supposedly bill gates goes here when he visits dubrovnik..random? 

the next day we took a cruise at 930 in the morning from our small town of Cavtat to dubrovnik and to three other small islands off the coast. they were all super small fishing villages with more beautiful views of mountains, beaches and cute little ice cream shops so basically more heaven :)

i met this really cute dog and although he is most likely a stray he was so cute and we were best friends for the short time i spent on this island

this is the view from our hotel - so GORGGGG

So after the week in Croatia I spent an entire week in Paris without any class. to say the least it was spectacular. all of my friends had friends and family in town so my days consisted of sleeping in, running and then wandering the streets of Paris for hours on end. this city is literally amazing and even though there are so many museums to go into and restaurants to eat in, there is even more to see and do when you walk around. only 24 days left in paris and im already freaking out!! i have a ton of work coming up but for now i'm off to the ROYAL WEDDING! more pictures to come and i promise to update this sooner than my return to the US for the summer! ahh 

xoxo magpie

Half way over!

Hello!!!
sooo i'm trying to update this more often after Annie, my little sister, told me i NEVER do it and then once i do they are too long for her to read! this past week has been crazy ...pretty much like all of the other weeks ive described! i had a ton of assignments due and this week really isnt going to be much different with all of my presentations and final paper proposals due! ayiyiy but this week has been a lot of fun too. i went to laduree, a famous pastry shop around Paris and had the most amazing macaroons and brunch which was so much fun! then i did a ton of work but my classes were all over the city which was great. at least one a week my art and architecture class has been meeting in the louvre. it seems tough at the time to be staring at paintings and sculpture for so long and then i leave and realize who else is getting such an oppurtunity? seriously, most people run in to the louvre see the mona lisa and run out but i really feel like i am getting the whole experience!

my entire program also went to the chateaus Chantilly and Ecouen. Chantilly is famous for their whipped cream but the castle itself was amazing! it had a moat the length of a football field surrounding it and was gorgeous! when i become a bagillionaire i will build a house just like this one :)

So many people have had visitors which has been so much fun. it is always interesting seeing people's friends from home in paris because we are such a mixed group! with my friend sarah and her best friend from home, zahra, we went to a restaurant called derriere. this is not a normal restaurant ..instead of sitting in a normal seating it is themed like a house and you eat in different areas of the house. we were fortunate to sit in the "den" and lounged on big comfy couches while others were seated in the bathroom, dining room, kitchen, play room and bed rooms. the food was...interesting but the atmosphere made the experience! 

of course this week was st. patricks day and being an american, i had to celebrate! i went out with my roommate Mia and her friends from BC to a couple of irish bars that were around Paris and met some very interesting people. it was so funny to see how many americans were out celebrating..and how few french there were! we even met some crazy welsh people who were in town for the 6 nations rugby match of wales vs france. they started talking to some of the girls from bc who play rugby at school and offered us 4 tickets to the game! we went the next night and although i have absolutely no idea what goes on the entire experience was insane and fun! mia and had seats on one of the goal ends surrounded by a million welsh people! between singing the Marseilles  or screaming "allez les bleus" the welsh werent very happy with us :) but we had a great time! now i am just trying to get through the next two weeks and then i will be off to croatia!!! i am so excited it is going to be absolutely amazing and i cant wait for a break from school! i will write again soon 

xox magpie

one of the rooms in derriere

Mia and I with really awesome hats!

our new welsh friends

allez les bleus!

its spwing, its spwing, its spwing!

It has been far too long since my last post im sorry!! with classes starting to pick up, midterms already around the corner and planning breaks its been pretty crazy but i will finally spill out everything i've done in the last ...3 weeks! ayiyiyi

ok so first of all my first spring break!! it was so amazing being so in such different countries but definitely a challenge being so out of my element. i went with three people from the program, sarah, katie-lou and will they were all fun and ready to see all of the sights which was good but they were all such sleepers haha it definitely made me appreciate all of the family vacations ive been on and the early risers i usually surround myself with! we started off in Berlin which was really cool. the city is enormous which i wasn't expecting and our hostel was really nice. randomly there were a bunch of other kids from st. louis staying in the same hostel and even more random a good friend of mine from camp in minnesota who i had not seen in years! it was so much fun being together! we went to the jewish museum which is so intense but definitely a must-see and a bunch of other contemporary art museums because the other people i was with are art majors! we also went to the zoo which was definitely the highlight of our time in berlin for me! it does not compare to the st. louis zoo but you can get so close to all of the animals it was insane! here are some pictures...

 The whole group with the elephants!

for some reason all of the monkeys were sleeping. they were so adorable!

i love this picture and it isn't even zoomed in, we were actually that close!

An Andy Warhol piece in the biggest contemporary art museum in Germany!

So after Germany we got on a train to Prague - my favorite of the three cities! Prague is like Paris minus all of the French people and the really good food! the city is so small and medieval and the people were so friendly. Although it was absolutely freezing we walked around the entire city, the castle town, old town, the jewish quarter and the new town. even though we didnt speak a word of the language everyone was so nice and we somehow managed to communicate. of course all of the sights were amazing, i didn't know anything about Prague before i got, but the best part was our hostel was across the street from a restaurant called bohemian bagel. yes they served american bagels!! i haven't had a real breakfast in 2 months so could not resist being american and eating there every morning. the night scene is prague is really cool too, with a club that is 5 stories with each floor being a different theme and tons of cool bars. one of the bars we went to was a competitive drinking bar where you had a tap at each table and it calculated how much each individual person at your table drank and then how much your table as a whole had drank and then compared you with the entire bar, but then you were also competing with other pubs around the city and around the czech republic. it was so much fun and my competitive nature kicked in so....to say the least it was a lot of fun. anndddd i even met another kid from st. louis one night while we were there! - funny story about prague i got there with a black long down north face coat. i went to the bar was talking to this random st. louis boy and his group from BC and went home. the next day while we were at the castle i realize my coat is brown, naturally i start yelling "THIS ISN'T MY COAT! WHO'S COAT IS THIS?" all around teh castle while my friends laugh hysterically at me realizing that one of the BC girls had the exact same coat in brown and we had swapped...everyone likes the brown better anyways but it was pretty embarrassing at the time!

the fashion in prague was questionable....

taking absinthe shots...from a straw...never again.

Playing dress up in the castle...

The astronomical clock! it measures time as well as 12 other things..which i dont remember

Our friend Caroline, who is also studying in Paris, was in Prague and met us one night for drinks

Finally we got to Vienna! This picture was at the opera house. We decided to be intellectual and sophisticated and go to the opera to see Figaro which was amazing, but we were in teh standing section and after the first act, which was an hour and a half, we left and walked around Vienna which was so much fun. Vienna was a lot like paris as well and our hostel was great again. We were all so exhausted by the time we got there that we didn't do much sight seeing but we walked around and definitely got a good feel for the city and hopefully will be going back again eventually!

So now i've been back to paris for almost 2 weeks...i've been really bad at blogging haha but this past couple weeks has been amazing! the weather has been so nice and i have been going to different gardens around the city everyday. i even started running again which has been so nice! School has been getting super intense, this week is midterms but naturally i find this blog and the people back at home muchhhhh more important! so back in paris...i have done a bunch of stuff including visiting the Musee Cluny, the Tuileries (its Paris Fashion Week for Ready to Wear), gone to the Gobelins Tapestry Manufactory where the kings tapestries are made and now they furnish all national buildings in France and around the world,  the Madeleine Church, i even went to the American hospital! the hospital wasn't for me though...my friend rolled into the wall in her sleep and broke her nose hahahah

This past two weeks have been busy but some pretty crazy and entertaining things have happened that have lightened the mood. First of all while i was having lunch with a friend outside a sort of marching band called the Plaies Mobiles came through the square. this is not a school marching band but one of those street bands who starts at one point around teh city and dresses in crazy outfits. they walk around the entire city and people just join them and sing and dance around in the streets its hysterical and so much fun to watch! then the next day i went to hang out at the tuileries gardens outside of teh louvre with sarah and realized it was fashion week. literally hundreds of beautiful people surrounding us with the coolest clothes i've ever seen we got so jealous and stayed for awhile hoping to see someone famous haha! then as we were leaving i see this woman blowing up an enormous balloon. i figured it was just a street act where she has massive lungs or something but that wasn't the end of it! she continued to put her head inside and then the rest of her body! it was so bizarre and you couldn't help but stop and laugh out loud...only in France 

 Some of the cool people waiting to go into a fashion show

ooook so i think i wrote an excessive amount but its been a long time! i hope you dont get bored reading all of this! i will hopefully write sooner next time! xoxo Magpie

Ayiyiyi!

Ah! I can't believe so much time has passed since my last post, the time is really flying! I am going on my first trip tomorrow for our February break with three of my friends to Berlin, Prague and Vienna and I have been so busy figuring all of our trip plans out I totally forgot about this... So the past two weeks..they have been amazing as has this whole trip! i dont even know where to start hmmm basically classes have really started and my teachers all have decided that their class is the most important. this means 2 hour classes are 2 and half, one hour classes are 2 - to put it simply i have been to the louvre for 8 hours in the past week for one class :) i mean how could i honestly complain about that but it seems to be getting a little excessive.
sites in the past 2 weeks
- for a class we went on a walking tour of monmartre which was gorgeous, and i always love climbing the stairs to Sacré Coeur. I attempted to brag and whip out my "Etudiant de la Sacré Coeur" passport but then everyone realized its on a business card and weren't quite as impressed...
- being an American, i love the super bowl. not for the game, solely because i dont understand the rules, but for the commercials. because of this desire to see the best gathering of american commercials in one day on tv. i gathered my friends together at 1 am to watch the game at a canadian bar. We got there only to meet tons of other american students from all over the US but much to our dismay they aired french commercials! my friend sarah and i were thoroughly disappointed and after watching Christina Aguilera flub the national anthem, went to the only restaurant still open at 2 am and ordered fries.

- this past friday was quite possibly my favorite day in paris thus far. it was 63 degrees!! Luckily for me, my classes end at 12 on fridays so I casually went to the gardens of the Rodin museum, nicely situated across the street from my house, and sat, attempting to tan and do work for 3 hours. it was absolutely heavenly and for about 3 minutes i had even convinced myself that i was french.
- anywaysssss for the weekend a bunch of people from my program decided to go to a famous fondue restaurant called Refuge des Fondues where they serve wine in baby bottles. although it seems completey absurd the atmosphere was so fun. the restaurant is so small that when you walk in the owner literally pulls out a chair for the women and tells you to "climb"(one of the few english words he knows) and you literally have to climb over the table to get in on the other side. i cant wait to go back soon with friends that come to visit!

- Sunday it unfortunately was rainy and freezing again so what better thing to do than march around underground with the dead bodies in the catacombs. I never really realize how clausterphobic i am until i get into small areas like these. adds a couple thousand skulls, arms, and legs and you have me literally shaking in my boots. the ceilings were about 6 feet tall and your arms could nearly touch the side of either wall. while being super freaked out, it was a very cool experience. to think that someone literally spent hours and days taking bodies out of their burials and nearly rearranging them in an underground cave is pretty crazy. the quotes around the bones were very interesting, all with the common theme - death- but still somewhat inspiring.

Finally the end of this post and the most interesting thing i have learned so far in Paris - the word dingue.  pronounced dangggg it means crazy and for some reason my roommate and i feel like it is the most fun word in the french language. i have decided that when i get back to america i am figuring out a way to add this to everyone's daily vocabulary - dang that girl is dingue! ...anyways try it out and let me know how it goes! i am off to berlin, prague and vienna so i will have plenty to add next week too! Happy almost spring!!! 

xoxo Magpie

Can we use personal pronouns?

at an exhibit on the "bon gout" de Andrée Putman...i think that's her name at aleast

the last day of french class!! alleluia!

in front of the gates to versaille

the hall of mirrors!

 attempting to do the brady bunch in the gardens at versaille

Soooo school has begun... definitely a bit of a shock when you have 3 papers and a project in the first week and someone asks if we can use personal pronouns in our journals and I have to mentally remind myself to google what a personal pronoun is when i get back to the house! anyways i figured out what a personal pronoun was long before i got online but i am counting that as my welcome back to school brain fart for the semester. anyways... my classes all seem great even if i am going to have a ton of work this semester! Most of my classes are at museums every time or at least once a week which is amazing because i would be going to them either way on my own time.
okkkkk so its been awhile since my last post - what have i done?
Orientation is finally over! it is such a relief to not have to wake up at 7 for our 3 hour french classes every morning and then our 4 hour "fun walking tours" around the city. i can finally officially say i have a routine with life here. our final part of orientation was a trip to Louis 14th chateau, versailles. It was unbelievable! The amount of gold in that place is insane, everything from the glowing gate outside to the trimmings on the wall, the balconies, the tapestries, his bed, and pretty much anywhere on the walls. Fortunately for my program, we have two teachers who are professionally designated as Versaille and Versaille garden experts so I learned every little detail about the chateau that I wouldn't have if I went alone. The first day we went on the tour with the public through all of the "grand apartments" to the hall of mirrors and finally louis's bedroom. he literally has gold woven into his sheets! its a little outrageous if you ask me but then again...i wouldn't mind curling up under those covers! then we had dinner and i attempted to translate the French news on Egypt to my friends until we all passed out from museum exhaustion. Little did we know what was coming for us the next day. We were surprised to find that although the itinerary said we were starting at 1:15, our first private tour was at 9:25 am. Of course it was with a curator from the museum taking us to the private "petit apartments" so who could really complain? These apartments were also gorgeous and we even got to see some hidden rooms where the servants were kept and the opera which is not open to the public. finally it was lunch time when disaster struck! we were served celery puree with some sort of meet on top and for some reason there was a massive stomach for everyone involved the rest of the day. our teachers magically did not feel the same way and decided it would be a perfect time to tour the gardens for 3 hours and then roam around for the extra two hours before our bus got there to pick us up! It really is a gorgeous garden/s so i can't complain that much and all in all it was a really great trip!
Lucky for me the next day I had a surprise visitor. My dad and grandpa's friend happens to visit Paris often every year and he was in town. I had a delicious lunch with him at the famous Drugstore overlooking the Champs Elysée and the Arc de Triomphe and then we went to the Musée d'Orsay. It was so nice to be with someone from home and hear fun stories about my grandparents and dad and enjoy paris all at the same time. The Musée d'Orsay was really wonderful and I finally saw van gogh's famous self-portrait which was a surprisingly mind blowing experience. Its one of those things that Mrs. Groneck showed you pictures of every year over and over since I was 4 but when i saw the real thing in person i was almost speechless.
the best news so far that i've heard is that mom is coming to visit!!! we are just in the process of planning the trip now but i can't wait to see her and have part of the fam back in my life!!! i am also planning my trip over february break and it looks like I am going to Berlin, Prague and Vienna! I have an exciting few weeks ahead of me !! I will write alll about them soon!!
xox Magpie