Frugal Paris

I found this article in the New York Times, this morning.


http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/travel/28frugalparis.html?em


:)

BBC's 100 Books

Found this from a friend on facebook. I did some searching, and found further instructions, which I have added myself.

If I am to be a writer, I think it is my duty to one day read all of these books.

BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Put an 'X' after those you have read.
Put a ‘+’ after those you love.
Put an ‘*’ after those you want to read

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien *
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X +
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dicken X +

Total: 7/10

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott *
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy *
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller *
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (almost…) *+
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier *
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien *
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk *
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X +
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot *

Total: 1/10

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (started, but never finished) *
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens *
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams *
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh *
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll *
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame *

Total: 2/10

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens *
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X +
34 Emma-Jane Austen *
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe X +
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

Total: 4/10

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell *
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X +
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving *
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins *
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery *
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy *
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (loved the movie, couldn’t get through the book) *

Total: 2/10

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
52 Dune - Frank Herbert *
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons *
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen *
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth *
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon *
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens *
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (If you know anything about me, you know that this is my absolute favorite book of all time) X +++
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon X +
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *

Total: 2/10

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X +
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt *
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold *
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas *
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy *
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding *
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie *
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville *

Total: 1/10

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens *
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker *
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett *
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson *
75 Ulysses - James Joyce *
76 The Inferno – Dante *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome *
78 Germinal - Emile Zola *
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray *

Total: 0/10

80 Possession - AS Byatt *
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens *
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell *
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker *
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro *
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry *
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom *
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton *

Total: 3/10

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad *
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (in French, of course) X +
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks *
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams *
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole *
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute *
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X +
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

Total: 5/10

Total, over-all: 27/100

I need to get reading.

My Favorite Picture

I decided to change the look and layout of this blog, and in doing so, my favorite picture no longer fit at the top. So, I decided to post it here so everyone could still see it. Some of you may recognize it as the desktop background on my computer :)


Enjoy.

My Own Moveable Feast

This weekend I finished reading A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. This book is a set of memoirs written about the famous author’s years living and writing in Paris during the 1920s. There are so many things about this book that make my head spin, because of how amazingly wonderful it is. Hemingway, at least in this book (since it’s the only one of his I’ve read so far—many more to come of course) is a name dropper. There are so many other famous and renowned expatriate writers and personalities mentioned in this book, with whom Hemingway had much interaction, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (by the way, he and Zelda were a mess). I can’t imagine being in a more perfect place at such an amazing time—interacting with all these remarkable people and being influenced by them in so many different ways. I think I will say it—I want his life.

One of the things I’m most excited about in moving to Paris is writing. I want to write, and I think reading this book helped me realize, that I want to be a writer. Wow. I’ve figured life out; well, not quite. I never thought that I would want to be a writer, and now that I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days, it is certainly not something that is going to make me very rich in life, but I think it is something that will make me happy, and that is all one ever really wants in life—to be happy. For the longest time I wanted to be an actor. Those plans changed a while ago. So, I’ll be a starving artist in a different kind of way now.

Now what am I going to do? In the past, I’ve been mostly a poet. I don’t want to be a poet. Not that I wouldn’t mind continuing to write poetry; in fact, I do it quite often. I want to write a book. So, I am going to write a book about Paris. I am going to write my own Moveable Feast. I obviously can’t write it yet, because I haven’t yet been to Paris, but I think as soon as that plane takes off on 3 September, my pen will be on a notebook writing the first dew lines of a masterpiece.

In the meantime, I’ll be sitting in the Olin Library, dreaming.

Speaking French in Central Florida

I am spending this summer working as a research assistant in the department of Anthropology here at Rollins, working on a project studying French slang usage from a linguistic perspective. I would prefer not to get into too much detail here on the project because we are still in the early stages of the work, but it is an ethnography, so our main source of information is one-on-one interviews with native French speakers living in the central Florida area. So far I have met with three French people living near by, and I must say that it has been amazing, and it is helping me become even more excited about leaving for France. All three of these people have been absolutely fantastic. They are more than glad to talk to us about our project, but even more glad to speak with me, because I am a student of their language, getting ready to move to their homeland. They have been easy to talk to (all in French, of course) and it has been a really positive reinforcement for me as I prepare to move to a country where I will have to use this language 24/7. I am feeling incredibly confident in my linguistic capabilities, and my ability to communicate in French. I am so glad to have this job this summer, because it is unexpectedly preparing me for my trip abroad. I am also learning a lot about French culture through these interviews, which will certainly help very much while I am over there.

And yes, I have finally applied for my visa. It was a difficult process, but I submitted all of the forms and mailed my payment. I have about another week and a half until I will hear back from the embassy. I'm sure that it is all fine, however I am still nervous that I did something wrong. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see.

I am also anxiously awaiting the arrival of more information about my departure and arrival. I really want to know where I will be living. That is really the most pressing thing I want to know. I have no idea when I will be finding this information out either. It could be tomorrow, or it could be the last week in August, which is obviously very frustrating. I also want to know about my classes, but I know that I won't know about these until I arrive in September. Apparently we need to take a placement exam during orientation. Slightly annoying yes, but how hard could it be?

Anyway, I'm sitting here in the Olin Library avoiding real work, and I think it would be in my best interest to get back to that. Or, take a nap...

Flight booked, anticipation runs high

At the beginning of this week, I booked my flight to Paris. I can't begin to express enough how much more excited I am about leaving, now that the flight is booked. My friend Meredith recently wrote to me, in anticipation of her own trip to Berlin for the fall semester, "Got my plane tickets today! Frolicking together across Europe is fast turning into reality!" She definitely hit the nail on the head: everyday the fact that I'm leaving is getting more and more real to me.


I am very aware of the fact that I am leaving for a very long time. 3 September 2009-15 May 2010 (with only about 2.5 weeks at home in December) is a very long time. I know that I will have a bit of a difficult time with this. First of all, I have two homes that I am going to miss. First, of course, is Long Island, New York, the place where I grew up. I love it here--I could not have asked for a better place to be a kid. Massapequa Park, although not a big, vibrant, and exciting place like Paris, will always be my home, and I will miss it greatly. My family is there and my history is there. For the past two years I have adjusted well to missing this place. Now I need to prepare myself for missing my second home, Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida. This amazing school is just as much a home for me as Massapequa Park is. Sometimes I even feel more at home there than I do in New York. I have the most amazing network of friends at Rollins; it has been a dream come true, considering the types of friendships I have had in the past. Many of those friends will be abroad as well, and we are sharing the same amounts of excitement about our journeys throughout the world--England, Spain, Germany, Italy, China, Japan, Australia, Greece, and so many other different places. I am as anxious and excited for them as I am for myself. There are several other friends who will still be at Rollins too, and I know it will be difficult knowing they are all still together in the place I think of as home, without me. If I could bring everyone I love with me to France, I absolutely would in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I don't think I can find a suitcase large enough.

On the other hand, I am so ready to get away. I often find myself, eyes glued to the computer screen, looking at maps of Paris, and reading articles about French history, reading anything I can get my hands on that has some remote connection to life in Paris. It's starting to become an obsession. In fact, I'm on my way to having the entire metro system memorized (an exaggeration, of course). I suppose I am a bit too excited to leave.

Still need to get cracking on that visa application...

Applying for a Visa...

Applying for a French visa is quite possibly the most grueling and difficult process I have ever had to go through. You first need to register with CampusFrance (a sort of student visa clearinghouse) before doing anything else. You need to fill out countless amounts of forms with the most irrelevant information, and sometimes you don't even understand what kind of information they are looking for. The directions are in English (and confusing), and parts of the form are in French/parts of the form are in English. This leads to even more confusion. Once you have finally filled out all of the forms (and probably incorrectly) you can finally submit all of the information. Then you have to wait three weeks for them to respond to you. This is what I am doing now--waiting three weeks for a response...

I've been told that if I were studying in Germany, I would not have to worry about this at all, since they do not require a student visa. If only life was that easy...