Countryside Walks and Other Visits - the End of My Stay in Paris

I'm writing this back home in Finland - It's not too motivating to write about something that happened over two months ago, but as I'm going abroad again today (this time for holidays only), I'm determined to get this done now. Towards the end of my stay in Paris, I got tired of the city...

...and started to miss the countryside so much that I went to the library and borrowed a guide book with 400 walks around Paris. I started by taking a train out of Paris with a friend of mine, Brigitte, and going to the big forest of Chantilly:

Then, with my friend Brigitte and her friend Anna, I headed to the villages of Longueville, Savins, and Saint-Loup-de-Naud:

With another Erasmus student from Finland, Elina, I took a train to Fontainebleau and walked through the forest to Samois-sur-Seine:

And last but not least, I walked with my friend Laure from Chars to Moussy. She adored these yellow flowers:

At Easter, my boyfriend and I visited Orléans, a city famous for Jeanne D'Arc

...and located on the Loire River:

The Loire Valley is known for its châteaux, the castles. We managed to visit one of them, the largest, called Chambord.

Just before I left Paris at the end of the spring semester, my friend Sage from Alaska was cycling in France and came to see me!!

Visitors from Finland

A lot of guests, a lot of photos. Since the end of February, several people from Finland have come to see me here in Paris. First came my cousin with her two daughters and a friend, and we spent a fantastic "family holiday". I finally went up the Eiffel Tower...

...and visited Disneyland. It was, as you can guess, a highly commercial place, but for the little girls it was of course the highlight of their trip.

Then came one of my housemates. At the Centre Pompidou, we saw an excellent photo exhibition: Henri Cartier-Presson. To other museums and exhibitions there was always too long a queue - If you're coming to Paris, I highly recommend you buy all your tickets in advance! Eiffel, museums... (from their websites or FNAC -> Billetterie)

We also walked by the Canal Saint-Martin.

Le Comptoir Général (Ghetto Museum / African bar) by the canal is definitely worth visiting! This bar, Culture Rapide, is in the Belleville district:

My next guests were my longtime friend and her boyfriend. They got engaged here!! A summery picnic with champagne at Parc Floral (part of Bois de Vincennes) was the perfect way to celebrate.

And finally - my boyfriend came to see me! We enjoyed the sunshine at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont...

...went to the circus (Cirque Electrique):

...and visited the Palace of Versailles:

Getting out of Paris

In the autumn, I stayed in Paris and didn't travel around in France. But I figured I should see more than just the capital, so when my boyfriend came to see me for a weekend, we traveled to Lille, a city in northern France, close to the Belgian border. We found this amazing flat in HouseTrip, a website through which private persons can rent their homes to tourists:

One of the top 10 things to see in Lille is the Wazemmes Market every Sunday:

And the old town is very beautiful:

Around the same time, my big brother and his girlfriend came to Paris. I took them for a tour in Montmartre - here's a photo taken from the hill, in front of Sacré Cœur:

Right after the trip to Lille, I moved out of the shared studio where I had been living since November. I guess I never felt like home there... I hated the coulours in the room and listening to my 18-year-old flatmate speak on Skype in Polish for several hours every evening. In addition, as it was a "convent", I had to come home by 10 pm every night. And I got tired of basically sleeping in the kitchen; it was my bed that is on the left hand-side in this photo:

I don't know if my new place seems any better to you, but I feel comfortable in my little room. I can read books on the bed that folds into a sofa, admire the drawings of my niece and nephew, and write new French words on the white board - I love it, I need to get one back home, too. It's way better than writing words in a notebook and never reading them again.

My new home town, Ivry-sur-Seine, a working-glass suburb south-east of Paris, is by no means a luxurious place. It has an industrial past, there are ugly railway depots and river ports, there is trash in the streets, and 38% of the flats comprise of social housing. But somehow I still like this place; it feels like a good place for a small human-being.
Interesting architecture in the centre, and dismantling of market stalls:

Street art in my new residential area:

Sightseeing in Paris

Towards the end of the autumn semester, I became busier and busier with my studies; group work and exams. Now I'll try to catch up with this blog, mainly by posting some photos. "Tourist photos", as I don't have any photos of me working hard... ;-) My boyfriend visited me twice and we went to see some of the most famous sights of Paris. After showing him Montmartre (Sacré Cœur, Moulin Rouge etc.), I took him to Galeries Lafayette department store. We didn't buy any Prada shoes...

Maybe you recognize what is in the next photo? Notre-Dame is among the largest and most well-known church buildings in the world.

This a close-up of Arc de Triomphe, a monument honouring those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars:

La Défense is a major business district near Paris. Compared to the center of Paris with all its decorative, old buildings, this felt like a real future world.

In the middle of the following photo, you can see the Grand Arche. It is in line with the Arc de Triomphe and the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (next to the Louvre museum).

One night we went out to celebrate my boyfriend's birthday. (Notice the Eiffel tower in the background.)

In November, I participated in two more visits to historic districts of Paris. (These walking tours, guided by a retired professor of history, have been arranged for exchange students throughout the autumn.) In Saint-Germain-des-Prés we saw the famous cafés, such as Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore. Where there are cafés and hotels, there are also writers: the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area was the center of the existentialist movement (associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). I could also mention Camus and the poet Apollinaire. With the juxtaposition of old and new, this picture describes well the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area:

Pont des Arts bridge is full of love padlocks (which I actually hate!). The building in the background is the French Academy, the official moderator of the French language in France:

On the last tour, we walked through my favourite street, one of the oldest in Paris, rue Mouffetard, to the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève hill. Have you ever had to queue to a library? These people are waiting to get into a student library, opposite the Panthéon:

Finally, all the exams were over and it was time to go back home to Finland for the long-awaited, luxuriously long Chrismas break. But now I'm back in Paris and will reward those who read this far with a photo of alternative tourism. Not far from my place in the 13th arrondissement, there is an established artists’ squat calles Les Frigos (‘The Refrigerators’, this industrial building used to be a storage depot for refrigerated railway wagons): http://www.les-frigos.com/

Les Frigos’ many galleries have no fixed opening hours, but I happened to be there in the right time and got a chance to visit the studio of the painter France Mitrofanoff (http://www.mitrofanoff.net/):