Inauguration Week

Even though we were several thousand miles away from the action last week, we still took time to celebrate the inauguration of President Obama. We met up with several friends at a Canadian bar -- it was kind of funny to see all the screens which are usually filled with an array of hockey games tuned to CNN. We got there fairly early (about an hour before the swearing-in) and were fortunate to find places to sit; by the time the ceremony began in earnest, it was shoulder-to-shoulder.

I couldn't believe how homesick I felt for D.C., even though I would have (1) been incredibly cold and (2) not really been able to see anything if I'd attended in persion. As it was, the experience was still incredibly inspiring -- we laughed and cheered and even sang (the National Anthem) alog with the crowd. Even from across an ocean, I could feel the spirit of hope and change in Washington.

The picture doesn't really capture the crowd -- but it was incredibly packed.

Over the weekend, we attempted to visit the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes, which is the second-oldest zoo in the world. (Its first animals were brought to Paris after the French Revolution; until then, they had been part of the private zoo kept by Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI in the Palace of Versailles.)

Since we missed the zoo, we ended up just exploring the park for a couple of hours -- as you can see, even in winter, it's beautiful. This is a view facing west, toward the Museum of Evolution which we visited last weekend.

Unfortunately, we ended up having a quitessentially "when in France" kind of moment. We arrived in the late afternoon, somewhere between one and one-and-a-half hours before the announced closing time. (We had come specifically to see some six-week-old leopard cubs which had been put on display only that week.) The attendants refused to sell us admission tickets, saying that they felt an insufficient time was left for a visit to the zoo.

We've had similar experiences elsewhere: for example, the hostess in a crowded restaurant will often turn you away if all the tables are filled ("C'est impossible! C'est fini pour ce soir!"), rather than asking if you'd like to wait for one to be available. Slowly, we're starting to get used to this mentality -- and secretly, I've been starting to wonder if it might not, on balance, be a more pleasant way to live.

(I hate the way the waiters in the US often seem so anxious for you to eat quickly and be on your way. Restaurant food seems more expensive here, but the service charges are built into the menu prices, so there's no expectation for a big tip -- and no financial incentive to 'turn the table.' I've really been enjoying learning to eat more slowly and enjoy the conversation... Of course, it's hard to remember that when it's 9:50 PM, I've just realized there isn't enough milk for breakfast, and the grocery store security guard refuses to let me in despite a posted closing time of 10:00. It's still a new-philosophy-in-progress, I suppose. :))

This picture really isn't worth enlarging -- but I'm posting it anyway because I wanted to share the beautiful sunset we saw on the way home.

School Makes A Comeback

This past week focused pretty heavily for both Jess and I on school. On Wednesday, I had the final exam for my big class that meets for three hours every day. It was, you guessed it, a three hour long exam. While not a lot of fun either to take or to prepare for, I think it went pretty well. While there are still two exams this coming week, much of the work for the semester has come to an end.

For Jessica, it was her first full week of classes for the new semester, along with some extra lectures thrown in for good measure. She has a bit of a crazy schedule with a number of both early morning and late evening classes. Fortunately though, she does not have to attend a class until 9:30 pm at night one evening and then arrive for class the next morning at 8 am as she had thought she would. There is at least one professor she is really excited about, saying that she hasn’t had a professor who was both this knowledgeable about their subject and excited to teach it since her undergrad days.

With all the focus on school, we’ve been something of homebodies. But last weekend, we were able to go visit one of the museums of natural history in Paris that focuses on evolution and speciation. On the lower floors were extensive taxidermy collections you would expect from a flagship French museum. There was even a room dedicated to endangered and extinct species, such as the Tasmanian tiger (extinct), Cape lions (extinct), and mountain gorillas (endangered) along with many others. The upper floors of the museum though were dedicated to exploring how people have shaped evolutionary pressures on animals and plants. The obvious example is in agriculture where there were examples of primitive corn, modern corn and many of the intermediate forms, and examples of domestic farm animals next to their wild ancestors. It was all very impressive, even the building was a gorgeous mid-19^th century exhibition hall.

The real highlight of our week though was going to visit Nick, Monica, and their new baby Victor (we watched their dog Luna during the birth in December). I had not yet met Victor, and Jessica had only seen him immediately after he was born. We ended up spending the whole evening at their apartment and went to dinner at a crepe shop. It was a lot of fun to spend some time with Nick and Monica.

Happy New Year!

Sorry that this post has been a little delayed. We're each back to school this week; Matt's first semester continues for a few more weeks, while I have begun a new schedule of eight (!) classes.

Our New Year's celebration wasn't particularly exciting...I'd procrastinated a bit too much, and ended up spending most of the day/evening finishing up a paper for one of my fall semester classes. We tried to make it out to one of the big celebrations for New Year's (the Parisian equivalent of the Times Square party), but the metro train we were on was held up for several minutes. Rather than greet the New Year sitting on a crowded subway underground, we wandered out into the street -- just in time to hear cheering crowds and popping fireworks. Without planning for it, we'd ended up near some of the largest department stores, so we spent a fairly long time (until I was too cold to stay out anymore!) looking at their beautiful Christmas lights and window displays -- much more peaceful and far less crowded than our original plans; to my mind, perhaps even better if things had worked out as we'd expected!

Later that afternoon, we headed up to London for a few days. Because we'd each been to London before, we concentrated on filling in the thing we felt like we'd missed the first time: perhaps my favorite was the long afternoon we spent at the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum. This was the extensive underground complex from which the British fought World War II. Unfortunately, our pictures came out terribly -- as you can see in this "image" of the bedroom/office prepared for Churchill. :) (Apparently, he slept here fewer than five times during the entire war -- he actually observed most of the Nazi bombing raids of London from the roof of the War Department. )

We tried to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. The last time I attempted this, I was nearly crushed against the fence, and couldn't really see much of anything (I was kind of trapped behind a large stone pillar). This time, I figured we'd be smarter and stand several hundred feet back, so as to have a broader vantage point -- of course, many, many other people had the same idea, and we ultimately ended up behind the tops of too many heads to see very much.

An unobstructed view -- if you shoved a few hundred heads into the foreground, you could approximate the view we had of the Changing of the Guard. :-)

Our last night in London, in front of St. Paul's Cathedral.