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/):
