miam!

The weather for the last two days has been absolutely terrible - blustery, rainy, and cold. All kinds of bad. The sky was cloudless and beautiful while I was walking to class yesterday - the Pont des Invalides was shining beautifully. By the afternoon, however, it was definitely time to hide inside and travel by Metro.

Our winter group crossed off another thing on the communal to-do list: Angelina's hot chocolate, here known as chocolat chaud. Between the six of us, we ordered 5 hot chocolates, one hot white chocolate, and three pastries: the famous mont blanc (chestnut paste, whip cream, my favorite), religieuse pastiche (pistachio-cream filled tower of fluff), and the tarte au chocolat avec framboises (chocolate tartine with raspberries, too bitter for my taste). I wish someone had told us that we were never going to be able to finish our hot chocolates - we could have done away with half of them and saved 5 euros each. They were terribly rich - some people liked them, but I was not one of those people. It was like drinking straight dark chocolate and half and half, which sounds great in theory, but was heavy beyond heavy in real life. The pastries, on the other hand... ooh la la.

Photographic evidence of such decadence, courtesy of Cathy:




Today, I escaped the rain by hanging out at the Musée de l'Art Moderne, aka the Musee de Tokyo. My art history professor said it wasn't very well funded and therefore lacked the "presentation" that she usually preferred, so I was expecting something run down and bland, but I don't think she could have been more wrong. It's a small museum, but 1) it's free to the public every day and 2) it's got some incredibly important pieces from the Parisian avant-garde, all of which are well-displayed. I was floored by Delaunay's "The City of Paris" - a piece I studied in an art history class last quarter and most wanted to have for my future home. I wasn't expecting to see it there, and I certainly wasn't expecting it to be as big as it was. Oh well, when I buy it, I'll just have to build it its own separate room...



They also had "Boite-En-Valise," by Duchamp - an incredibly important work which (like all of Duchamp's works) calls into question the meaning of art, several Modigliani's (whose women never fail to intrigue me just a little more than they creep me out), some Picasso, Braque, Léger, etc., and a really great painting by an artist I had never heard of before, Gérard Schlosser, called "Il ne se plaignait jamais" - meaning, "He was never pleased". Seemed more pleasant than the title let on.

Finally, I ran across a piece of stencil graffiti that totally tickled me today:


"Berk" means "yuck" in French.