Jane Austen hated Bath, but it’s hard to see why. She lived there for six years, and during that whole time she never wrote a word, which is too bad. She only lived to the age of forty one, so to loose six years of productivity was a tragedy (though of course, she would have had no way of knowing that then). To be fair, her father did die while the family was staying in Bath, and she was forced to live on a greatly reduced income, moving into smaller and smaller houses, and snubbed by most of her former acquaintances. So I guess she may have had a reason to hate the people of Bath, but I can’t imagine anybody hating the city. It’s ironic, in the middle school English class sense of the word, that Austen hated Bath so much because it’s the place that I think is most associated with her legacy. And it was for that reason that I decided to take a day trip there last Thursday—I was on a Jane Austen pilgrimage.

As a reward for having (barely) completed our end of term papers, my friend and I decided to spend a day in Bath, which is a convenient hour and a half train ride away from London. I could barely sleep the night before because I was so excited, but because the train left at eight I managed to get to bed early so that I could wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed for the day ahead. When I arrived at the station to meet my friend I was practically jumping up and down with excitement, but I noticed Allison, my friend was looking decidedly lack luster. She’s almost as big an Austen admirer as I am, so I was perplexed by her lack of enthusiasm. I asked her what was wrong, and she explained that somebody in her dorm had decided that it would be cute to spray the fire alarm with gasoline and light it on fire at two in the morning. Consequently, the building had to be evacuated, and she was not allowed back into her dorm until four something. Under the circumstances I suppose I could grudgingly allow for her lack of enthusiasm, but as she convinced me it was nothing a nap on the train and a double mocha couldn’t cure I wasn’t going to let her exhaustion dampen my excitement.

The train ride to Bath was amazing. Allison dozed and I amused myself by listening to that mornings NPR podcast and staring out the window at the passing countryside. British countryside is gorgeous by the way. All of that rain keeps everything nice and green, and as we were experiencing one of the few sunny days allotted to the British isles every month that just barely keep the natives from committing suicide, it was more than pleasant to count the sheep and let the train rock us towards Bath.

When we arrived there were signs pointing us towards the center of town. We secured a caffeine IV for Allison, and then made our way to the central square. One of the things we found about Bath is that every major attraction comes equipped with a little old lady (usually somewhere in between fifty five and eighty) with an upper class accent who is more than thrilled to share with you her knowledge about local history. This was the case at our first stop, Bath Abbey, which I recognized from the cover of my copy of Northanger Abbey. We went inside to pay our respects, and were promptly greeted by the requisite little old lady, who handed us a pamphlet about the history of the church, and then stood meaningfully by the donation box and cleared her throat. After we deposited the “suggested” two pounds fifty, we headed into to explore. I glanced at the pamphlet she had handed us, and noticed that they had printed a timeline for the history of the Church, beginning in 0 AD with the birth of Jesus Christ. I admired their thoroughness. The Abbey was a bit like a smaller version of Westminster—there were plaques all over the walls and inscriptions on the flagstones under our feet. I again got the uncomfortable feeling that comes with treading on the dead.

We wandered silently around the Abbey, and Allison saw a plaque whose inscription she found particularly amusing. She stopped for a minute to copy it, and I wandered on. Seeing me unaccompanied, the little old lady wandered over to me and started asking where I was from, and what I was doing in Bath. When she heard I was American, she took me over to a place she called the “American Corner” which housed a number of plaques for Americans that had been buried in the Abbey. There was a flag hung in the corner, and she pointed out that it only had forty-eight stars, confiding that it was from “Before the War,” which I guessed meant World War two. I asked her if she had a favorite plaque, and she lead me to a corner passed a couple truly garish designs replete with Angels and ivey, to a small marble carving hung on the wall which was decorated with music notes. This was the plaque for a Bath native who had been an opera singer, who had traveled to Europe, where he met Mozart. I’m not sure the details of the story, but he persuaded Mozart to come to Bath when Mozart toured England. I thanked the woman for showing it to me, and asked her if she had read every engraving in the church. “Not yet” she replied, and I liked the way she said “yet.”

After I thanked the guide, Allison and I met up and headed back out onto the square—there was still a whole day of Jane related tourism yet to come!
Two of the six novels take place directly in Bath—her first full length novel Northanger Abbey and her last Persuasion. Though one was written before her disastrous experience there and one afterwards, and there’s a marked difference in the way the city is portrayed in the two novels. But in both novels she mentions all of the Bath attractions, many of which I saw on my trip there.

Another really fun touristy thing that Hannah and I did together was go to the Tower of London.

Before this trip I had visited England once before, when I was in fourth grade with my parents. I don’t remember much from the trip except that I was extremely bored at the Changing of the Guard, and that I absolutely loved the Tower of London. I wanted to go back to see the Tower on this trip, but it is prohibitively expensive—twelve pounds for a student admission! Hannah’s mother, though, told her that if she only saw one thing in London it had to be the Tower of London, so in the interest of being a good host I splurged and we went to the Tower together.

The Tower was every bit as fun as I remembered. It’s a twelfth century fort that was converted into a prison and has hosted some of England’s most famous prisoners, including Anne Bolyn and her daughter Queen Elizabeth (Ann lost her head in the tower, Elizabeth was a little more lucky). We had a really fun guide. He was dressed in the appropriate Beefeater regalia and was really campy. He got a kick out of putting on a show, pretending to be bloodthirsty and relishing the gory details of the executions and tortures that he described. At least I think he was pretending. Any way, I learned a lot of interesting and gruesome facts. Like for instance, I knew that the Tower of London was associated with ravens, and the legend has it that if the ravens that live at the Tower of London were ever to leave the tower would fall down. What I didn’t know was how the ravens got there. Apparently, after prisoners were executed their heads were put on pikes, and the ravens would come to feast on the flesh of the dead prisoners. Not the most appetizing thought.

No trip to the Tower would be complete without a visit to the crown jewels, which are kept under strict lock and key. There’s a ceremony to lock them in every night, which we missed, but we got to see the collection, which was fun. I liked seeing Queen Victoria’s small jewel crown, the one that she wears over her veil in all of her portraits. It’s surprisingly small in real life; it could easily have fit in the palm of my hand. Seeing the crowns in general was a bit of a drag. They’re so eager to keep the line moving that the only way to see the jewels is to stand on a moving sidewalk that takes you past the crowns so that you can’t stop to gawk. It makes you feel like you’re at the airport. I did like the non-moving sidewalk portion of the crown jewels, though. My favorite part was seeing the coronation dinnerware. I was just really amused by the fact that there’s a set of dishes that goes with being crowned ruler of Britain. They were all shiny gold with elaborate engravings on them. I liked the huge wine basin that was easily the size of a Jacuzzi, and came with a long spoon to ladle out the wine.

Other highlights of the Tower included a trip to the Bloody Tower, which housed the two princes who disappeared under the watch of Richard the III (though there is no conclusive evidence that he was implicated in the murders, it was just really convenient for him that they were found dead), and a visit to the White Tower, the oldest building at the Tower of London, which now houses the Tower armory. I like seeing the suits of armor that are my height (I’m five two in my stocking feet), and thinking I could’ve totally beat up many of the knights from that period. They also had a great exhibit on Guy Fawkes at the White Tower, who was kept and tortured there before his public execution. They had a fun video on what would have happened if the gunpowder plot had succeeded, which was done as a mock newscast. Hokey, sure, but fun.



It was a beautiful day when we left, and we walked back over Tower Bridge. I remembered the last time I had walked over that bridge it was cold and gray, but now the sun was shining and there was little more than a light breeze. Maybe, just maybe, spring was finally here.

Because my friend Hannah was visiting from Madrid last weekend, I took a break from my paper writing marathon, and spent some time out in the city, enjoying London and showing her around. Last weekend there was a lot of stuff going on—St. George’s day, the London Marathon, Earth Day and Shakespeare’s birthday all fell on the same day, Sunday. But because I’m such a saavy and culturally aware person, I didn’t know about any of those things (except the marathon) until it was too late to make plans.

We did manage to get to the Globe on Saturday, the day before Shakespeare’s birthday, for a guided tour.

I’ve seen pictures of the Globe before. In fact, in ninth grade I did a Geometry project on the building, which involved pointing out all of the different shapes on it’s exterior. I made a to-scale, extremely life like drawing of the theatre, which is a big deal for me because I wasn’t an artist. I spent hours using a grid to copy from a photograph onto the piece of construction paper I was using with a pencil and then went over everything again with marker. Then, when it came time for the grade, I didn’t get full marks because, according to Mrs. Smith, “I didn’t do anything extra, just the assignment.” Grrr. But I digress.

Actually, I feel bad complaining about how long it took me to draw the globe, because the tour guide told us the story of how the current theatre came into being, and it took a long time. What happened was Sam Wanamaker, an American fleeing McCarthyism, came over to London to make a new, red scare free, life for himself. The first thing he wanted to see when he got to London was Shakespeare’s globe, so he hopped in a taxi and spent an entire afternoon driving around the south bank looking for the theatre. But to no avail, all he could find was a plaque on the side of a tavern saying that this used to be the site where the Globe Theatre once stood. He was amazed that such a vital piece of cultural history had been allowed to vanish, and from that day forward he dedicated his life to rebuilding the Globe Theatre, in an exact replica of the original.

And he did. Sort of. He died three years before it was completed, which sort of breaks your heart. The Southwark city council (the neighborhood where the Globe is built,) didn’t want to give the project funding because they felt a theatre dedicated almost exclusively to Shakespeare would be too elitist. So Sam turned to private funders, and spent an uber long time raising money and researching what the Globe would have looked like, and how it might have been built. There are a bunch of flagstones outside the theater with the names of the donors who contributed to the building (I can’t remember if it’s three hundred or six hundred pounds that buys you a stone). Our guide pointed out some of the more interesting ones, including one from Sir Laurence Olivier (or “Larry” as she called him) and a stone that was bought by John Cleese which bears the deliberately misspelled name of his fellow Python Michael Palin (the stone has two L’s).

The theater that stands there now (about a block and a half away from the site of the original theatre) is built as close to the original as possible. One of the things the guide (a little old British lady, who was very knowledgeable and oh so English) pointed out was that the entire building was held together by hundreds of wooden bolts; each of which was hand made, using only technology that would have been available in Shakespeare’s time. There’s also a thatched roof, the thatch of which is so tightly woven together that birds can neither steal the straw nor perch on it. The interior is really amazing. I’ve seen pictures of it before, and from the look of it the stage has two marble pillars, but when I got to take a close up look, I found out that the pillars are actually painted wood. The entire stage is painted wood, and it’s been painted to resemble an Elizabethan idea of the solar system. The ceiling is painted with signs of the zodiac, and the stage in earth tones. There are trap doors in both the ceiling and the floor for Gods to drop from above and ghouls to rise up from below.

The tour guide gave an excellent lecture on Shakespearean theatrical practices, and how those practices are being continued today. The Globe productions are done mostly in original costumes with no stage lighting. No stage lighting means no blackouts. I didn’t really comprehend what a big deal that was until the guide pointed out that a dead character can’t get up in a blackout and walk offstage, so if someone dies (and in many Shakespeare plays practically everyone dies) their body has to stay onstage unless there are enough characters standing to carry them off. I’m excited because the Globe season starts next week, and to be a Groundling (people who stood on the ground—incidentally the name doesn’t come from the fact that they stand on the ground, which would be far too logical, but from the name of a fish that always has its mouth open. The groundlings were famous for never shutting up) costs only five pounds, about ten American dollars. They’re doing Coriolanus as they’re opening play, which I read for Shakespeare class. I can’t wait to see it.

We had met a German couple at the Opera, who recommended that we check out the Musee de Chatelet in the Marais district of Paris. I had never heard of it, but we decided to take their recommendation and head over on Sunday.

Marais means swamp, and apparently the area used to be a swamp, before it was drained in the seventeenth century. It then became a fashionable district for the nobility until the rise of Versailles. The brief boom that the area experienced left the neighborhood with a lot of wonderful seventeenth century buildings, one of which houses the Musee de Chatelet—a small museum that tells the history of Paris. Because the museum was smaller than the more famous galleries, it didn’t get as much tourist traffic, and even on a Sunday there was plenty of room to breath. The downside of this, however, meant that there were no signs in English, and a lot of the time I had to guess what it was we were looking at. The museum had a lot of random things in it; my favorite exhibit was a collection of old French shop signs. Apparently merchants in the olden days would advertise by hanging a big picture of whatever it was they were selling. This is all well and good when the wine merchant hangs a bottle of wine outside his shop, but there were some really bizarre ones. My favorite was a surgeon whose sign was a huge bronze hand with a tumor on it.

The museum went through different centuries in Paris. Each century had a room that was decorated as if from the time period. Apparently the French were really into porcelain and print wallpaper. There was also an involved exhibit on the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon, but I could only understand about half of it.

After the museum we stopped into a patisserie for thick slices of quiche and a French dessert (pain au chocolat for me and a fruit tart for Katie, delicious) and then we walked around the district for a bit, which housed the Jewish quarter of Paris. There are no Jews in London, which has been a little strange for me. I’m not exactly a practicing Jew (I didn’t even Bat Mitzvah), but London has made me feel very Jewish because I’m the only one around. I can’t say I felt more at home in the Jewish quarter of Paris, but it was refreshing to see challah in shop windows. I had missed hamintashin (spelling?) season in London, and we tried to find some in the Jewish boulangeries that lined the streets, but we couldn’t find any.

Katie wanted to see a production of La Cantatrice Chauve that was playing, so we hopped the metro to get to the theater to buy tickets for that night. When we got to the theater, however, it was closed, so that was too bad. We spent the rest of the time walking around the area where the theater had been, which took us into French Chinatown. Katie had heard that they have Coco Cola Black in France, a new version of Coke that is coffee flavored. We decided to try and find it to taste, but everywhere we went didn’t have it. We kept seeing signs for it, but every restaurant, tabac, and convenience store that we tried didn’t stock it. After a while we followed the large boulevards out of Chinatown and ended up at the Place de la Republique. Apparently there were riots there while we were staying in Paris, but I didn’t hear about that until after we had left.

We decided to consult the guidebook, and realized that the Musee D’orsay wouldn’t be opened on Monday. We rushed to the metro to try and get there, but we arrived just as it was closing.

It was too bad to miss the museum, but the metro ride had taken us to the oh so artsy left bank (the most elegant neighborhood in Paris, according to the guidebook). We walked around some more, and ended up by the Sorbonne, which had armed guards stationed on every corner. Probably because of the riots and civil unrest that we didn’t see, but I can’t be sure. We went up to the Pantheon, which is a large church on the top of the hill in the Latin Quarter. They were having a daffodil festival there in honor of Marie Curie. There was a parade and people on stilts and unicycles, all carrying daffodils. The Pantheon itself was covered in Daffodils, and there were even snowmen with daffodil faces. We each bought a daffodil, which they were selling to benefit Cancer research.

We decided to go out for a fancy French meal that night, and settled on a Brasserie that our guidebook recommended called Le Petit Prince. It wasn’t wildly expensive, and the food was amazing, although I can’t be sure exactly what I ordered because the menu was in French. We both went for things that we’d never tried before. Katie had a Camembert crème brulee, which was amazing, and I tasted rabbit for the first time. I actually really liked it; I just had to think of it as a mystery meat called lapin rather than an innocent bunny. Katie had veal for an entrée as well, so the meal was not very PETA friendly, though very very tasty.

Because we couldn’t go see a show that night we decided to do the Eifel Tower instead. The tower looked gorgeous, lit up in the night (it’s actually quite ugly when you see it in the day time) but going up it made me uncomfortable. I don’t mind crowds, and I’m not afraid of heights. I think it was just my tourism anxiety kicking in. I didn’t hear French spoken once around the tower. The view from the top really was excellent though, and they don’t call Paris the city of lights for nothing. I kept thinking how amazing it must have been to see that thing when it was first built. It’s still amazing in 2006, but in 1889 it would have seemed like a miracle that anything could be so tall.

That night we were exhausted from all the walking around and heavy eating. We were planning to get dessert after the tower (we had been too full at the restaurant, and it’s a shame to miss a day of dessert in Paris) but in the end we just went back and went to sleep. We missed so many things that day—the play, the Museum, but we had seen so much of Paris that it was worth it. I’m glad we got to see so much by foot because it gave me a feel for how the city was laid out. That night I conked out as soon as my head touched the pillow, it had been a long day.

The next morning was Saturday. We had a not very good guidebook with us, which my friend had borrowed from another American who had visited Paris before us. The guidebook had a penchant for superlatives. We were staying in Montmartre—the most romantic neighborhood in Paris. We decided to go back to Sacre Couer in the day time, so after the hotel provided breakfast (baguettes with jam and café au lait) we headed back up the hill, through the swarm of bracelet weavers to the Church. The view was just as dramatic as at night, and the guidebook informed us this was the best view in Paris (second to the Eiffel Tower, which was apparently also the most dramatic view in Paris). The interior of the church was also lovely, and there were no people buried under the floor, which is a plus. I hate walking on dead people, which seems to be what you have to do in every church in England. We decided not to miss out on the dead people entirely though, because our next stop was the Montmartre cemetery (after a brief stop in front of the Lapin Agile, which was closed, but we genuflected in front of it and moved on). One of the most famous cemeteries in Paris (according to the guide book) it contained the bodies of Degas, Delacroix, Zola, Stendhal and Francois Truffaut. The cemetery provided us with lovely maps in order to locate the rich and famous dead, but they were confusing and hard to follow. So I can safely say I’ve been to the graveyard where Degas, Delacroix, Zola, Stendhal and Francois Truffaut are buried, even if I didn’t see their graves.

The Montmartre area is much nicer in the day than in the night. At the top of the hill (right near the church) there was square which was filled with artists hawking their work, and the tourist shops sold prints of Toulouse Lautrec and Picasso along with their croissants and crepes. We could easily have spent our four days in that section alone, but there was more to Paris than just that quartier, so we moved on.

Our next stop was the Latin Quarter, the most ancient quarter of the city. I liked the Latin Quarter immensely. The streets are still small and narrow and full of twists and turns. Somehow they never got Haussmanized, so much of the neighborhood is the same as it was in the medieval period. The streets we walked down seemed to be filled with ethnic restaurants, bookstores and cinemas—the Paris version of a college town. The narrow streets made it difficult to walk when cars drove through, but the French drivers seemed to take it all in stride, moving slowly down the roads and not using their car horns, which was terribly decent of them. We got off the metro at St. Michel, and walked through the streets until we came to Shakespeare & Co.

Shakespeare & Co. is an English language bookstore across the street from Notre Dame run by the grandson of Walt Whitman. It used to be frequented by such famous ex-pats as Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, and the shop still maintains a room on the second floor for transient authors and poets who are broke in Paris. They had a wall filled with cards from all of the people who had slept there. It was one of my favorite stops of the day.

After Shakespeare & Co. we made the obligatory trip across the road to Notre Dame de Paris—the grand church of Literary or Disney fame depending on your taste and generation.

There was amazing stained glass as well as some interesting relics on the inside (pieces of the true cross and St. Genevieve’s finger bone) but the entire scene was incredibly overwhelming. Katie, my traveling companion, is a preacher’s daughter and the level of commercialization overwhelmed her. There were coin machines in the church, which would turn euros into commemorative coins from Notre Dame, which she likened to money changers in the temple. I wasn’t that offended by it, but I did feel bad for the three or four people who were attempting to worship there. I find those big churches aren’t very conducive to worship because they are so overwhelming that you end up admiring the architecture more than communing with God, but I imagine the swarms of tourist snapping photographs and talking loudly doesn’t help too much either.

That evening we wanted to go see an opera at the Opera Garnier. The Opera house in Paris is a work of art in and of itself. The outside is covered in statues of famous composers and statues of allegories for the arts. One of which, Carpeaux’s La Danse, I recognized from my nineteenth century art class. Apparently the thing caused such a scandal when it was first unveiled that people threw ink at the statue, and there was some talk of having it removed. The objection was that the statue depicted allegorical figures as ugly and human. It was so cool to finally see the statue in the flesh (or in the stone?) instead of just on a slide list.

Inside is just as grand as the outside, they seemed to be really into gold leaf and marble in those days. The ceiling of the theater was also cool: it was a fresco by Chagall.

I was excited to see the Opera because they were doing Le Nozze de Figaro, which is my all time favorite. When we got there they said that they were all sold out for the run, but if we waited in line for that evening we would be able to get partial view seats. We decided to stick it out because we figured that with opera it was more important to hear than to see, and when the time came we were able to purchase seven euro tickets for seats in a third tier box. I was ecstatic, and was thrilled when we finally got to our seats. I was thrilled right up until the opening chord, which was decidedly not by Mozart. It turns out that we had read the schedule wrong, and had accidentally purchased tickets to the modern dance performance instead of the opera! Partial view may not matter much for the Opera, but it definitely puts a damper on watching a dance performance. We couldn’t see anything, and by the time intermission roled around I was ready to simply go home. But my friend is a very determined character, and she went and found a couple who were leaving at intermission, and got them to give us their seats. There were three pieces in all, and we ended up watching the second two from seats in the orchestra that cost a hundred and thirty euros a pop! Not bad for the seven euros we paid.

After the opera we made our way back to the hotel, and had a late dinner in Montmartre (Indian food, which was amazing. Better than the Indian food in England, which just makes no sense) before turning in.

So far the European trips I’ve made have all been to visit people—Hannah in Madrid and my cousin Rachel in Dublin. But I don’t know anybody who’s studying in Paris, and I was determined to get there. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to find Americans studying abroad in London who want to take a weekend trip to Paris, so my friend Katie and I decided to go after the last weekend of classes. We searched around for hostels and travel fares and we found a place called the Perfect Hostel in Montmartre—with a name like that we knew it had to be good. Booking travel was a little more complicated, but after searching hi and low we found the best fares were on the bus, so we decided to defer our comfort to our wallets and suck it up for the eight hours each way that the bus from London to Paris was going to take.

In the end I’m really glad that we chose the bus. Yes the eight-hour journey was long, but it was far from dull. We got gorgeous views of the British and French countryside, including getting to see the white cliffs of Dover, and the herds of sheep and Clydesdales, which freckled the countryside. There was also a rainstorm while we were driving which was followed by a rainbow. I’ve seen rainbows before, but never like this. It was stretching over a field and made a complete arch—if I looked out the back of the bus I could see where the other edge touched down. It was a fabulous reminder of the things you miss when you spend your entire time cooped up in cities, but I took it as a sign of good luck for our up coming urban adventure.

The question everyone asks when they hear you are going from England to France is how are you going to cross the Channel. I was hoping that the bus would go through the Chunnel, simply because I love that word. Chunnel. It makes me smile. However, the bus was going taking a ferry from Dover to Calais. In the end that proved to be much more enjoyable than the Chunnel because it meant there was an hour in our trip where we could get out and walk around the ferry, which boasted a whole host of amenities including two bars, a coffee shop, an arcade, and a duty free shop, not to mention a slew of restaurants. We spent most of our time watching the sea out of the window, and ogling the chocolate in the duty free shop. The ferry also allowed us to get wonderful views of the White Cliffs of Dover, which are really impressive and, well, white. I tried to take pictures, but none of them really came out.

We arrived in Paris an hour ahead of time, and schlepped our luggage through the metro to our Perfect Hostel. The Hostel itself was really more of a hotel (with hostel prices!) and we had a room to ourselves, which was lovely. We decided to go out in search of dinner and ended up at a pizza place near the hotel. If you are going to be staying in London for an extended period of time let me just warn you that Londoners don’t know how to make pizza. It’s always far to thin crusted and greasy without being either particularly cheesy or particularly good. Paris pizza was amazing, closer to what I’ve had in Italy than what I’ve had in New York, fresh dough and cheese with just the right ratio of cheese to sauce. Mmmm, pizza.

Refreshed from dinner we decided to go poke around the area. Montmartre is hilly, so we decided to walk in the general direction of “up” so that our return journey would be all downhill. Walking up lead us the foot of a steep staircase to a large church, which turned out to be Sacre Couer.

The area was swarming with tour groups and the like, and we were approached by a group of Senagalaise immigrants who were making friendship bracelets and wanted us to buy them. We got drawn into a conversation, and it ended up being really awkward because we didn’t want the bracelets and they got angry with us. We fled up the stairs to the church (note to self, the next time you flee don’t flee up a steep flight of stairs), and were rewarded with an amazing view of Paris in the nighttime.

After that we continued to wander for a bit, and ended up in front of the Moulin Rouge, as in the Toulouse Lautrec Moulin Rouge. It was one of the things I had heard about in text books and guide books and bang, we just wandered into it. Seeing the Moulin Rouge was neat, but the area was a little seedy. It was surrounded by sex shops and peep shows, which combined with the time of night made the area unpleasant for walking (the cat calls felt worse than in Spain, but maybe that was just because I could kind of understand them). We turned off of the main road where area was much nicer, filled with little bars and cafes (the cafes were closed, the bars were open) and cute shops. The streets were narrow and hilly, a lot like French villages you see in movies, and I was overwhelmed simply to be there. It took me weeks before I was comfortable walking around at night in London, but even with the cat calls and the con artists Paris felt so much more like home than London. There’s something about the vibe that Parisians give—more laid back than London without being sloppy. Even their famed snobbery feels comforting to me; the very fact that they take the time to disapprove means that they are at least thinking about you as opposed to simply ignoring you. I would have been content to walk around all night, but it had been a long day on the bus, and we were tired so we headed back to the hotel.

…I went to Paris as soon as classes ended, before going to Egypt. I then got back from Paris and, in a frenzy of packing for Egypt, applying for summer internships and attempting to clean my room, wrote three entries about my time in Paris. I then realized I was late to meet my travel buddies for Egypt, so I ran out the door leaving the freshly written blogs on word documents in my computer. So, I went to Egypt, blogged my travels there, and when I got back home to my computer sent in my Paris blogs. So these are old, and hearken back to a kinder gentler time before Egypt and the looming due date of April 24th, when my fate will be decided. Until then, sit back, grab some wine and cheese, dust off the bon mots and read about my travels in the most European of all European cities — Gay Paris!

The third city that we visited in Egypt was Luxor, which, according to the guidebook is known as the hassle capital of Egypt. In Cairo and Aswan there were two Egypts: living and dead, but here it felt like there was only dead Egypt with modern Egypt surviving as Ancient Egypt’s impoverished ghost. The thing is, Luxor was the ancient city of Thebes, which was the religious capital of Ancient Egypt. This means that Luxor offers access to some of the most spectacular ruins Egypt has to offer: this is where you find valley of the kings and the temple of Karnak and other unbelievable sites (Pictures are at the bottom). The richness of the ancient sites has made Luxor the tourist capital of Egypt, and the locals there seem to live for the opportunity to pick up tourists and show them around the temples for a little backsheesh. We decided a good marketing slogan for Egypt might be “Egypt: Where the cabs hail you!” because everywhere you go cabbies would stop and try and get you to take their cabs, although we didn’t anticipate that the slogan could be a very successful slogan outside of New York. As we were walking down the Corniche and people kept coming up to us offering shoeshines, felucca rides, and postcards we kept saying “La shokram, la shokram,” over and over. Once, Caroline whispered to me, “Hey, what’s the Arabic word for yes?” and I didn’t know. We both realized it hadn’t yet come up.

As bad as the hassling was, however, the temples were incredible. There are two main archeological sites in Luxor—the west bank and the Valley of the Kings. There are also two separate temples located in the middle of Luxor proper—Karnak and Luxor temple. Luxor temple was located directly across from our hotel, so we went there the first night we were in Luxor. It is huge, though it turns out not as big as Karnak, which probably has its own zip code. Seeing an ancient Egyptian temple in the dark was a wonderful experience. The crowds had died down some and we didn’t have to deal with the intense heat that we had in Valley of the Kings or the West bank. Also, Egypt has these amazing fruit bats that seem to really like to hang out in temples. They are huge, a little bigger than your average pigeon, and swoop around screeching, but don’t bother humans. I’m too short to fear bats, and its kind of fun to be in an ancient temple with them as they add a touch of atmosphere a la 1930s Hollywood.

Valley of the Kings and the West bank were both also really cool, but we visited them mid day and the heat was really intense. We all took plenty of water with us and wore sunscreen (although I still managed to turn a little red on my arms) but there’s only so much you can do before the heat just wilts you. The Valley of the Kings is where many of the Pharoh’s (including King Tut) were buried. You are allowed to see up to three tombs in a day. All of the tombs are empty, with the exception of King Tut’s, whose corpse has been moved back in in one of it’s original sarcophagi, but the carvings on the walls have been nicely preserved out of the sun and the elements. Many of the tombs had their original color left on their walls, which was something you don’t see a lot. My personal favorite tomb was one of the first to be located in the Valley. The Pharoh had wanted a particularly hard to access location (to guard against tomb thieves), so he set his tomb far up the mountain and dug deeply into the rock. It’s now accessible only through a series of steep ladders and staircases up and into the mountain. What I liked about it, though, is that the hieroglyphs on the wall are clearly from an earlier period than the other carvings that we saw. They are mostly stick figures, and this gave them a sort of comic book look, which was fun.

It was fun to see Queen Hatcheptsut’s temple on the West Bank, but the highlight of the West Bank, which is a collection of ancient temple complexes, was the Ramsesium. It contains a huge tumbled statue of King Ramses The Second (I think it’s the second, I can’t keep my Ramses straight). The statue was supposed to have been the largest of Ramses, and now his huge stone body parts are strewn everywhere. His huge stone feet are supposedly very famous, but I had never seen pictures of them before. The statue inspired a poetry contest between two nineteenth century poets (I think one of them was Shelley) and the phrase, “Look on my works, ye mighty and tremble” is based on it. While we were looking around the temple we struck up a conversation with four Egyptian girls who were also there. They were students at the university in Cario, studying English and they were just our age—all nineteen and twenty one. I was a little surprised because I hadn’t seen many (or in some places any) actual Egyptians at the temples, but they were really nice and spoke excellent English. We exchanged email addresses, so lets see if they write.

So Aswan. Aswan was our next stop after Cairo, and I think it has been my favorite destination so far. It’s not a huge, slightly scary, metropolis like Cairo, and it’s not a uber touristy hassel capital like Luxor.

Aswan was laid back with beautiful scenery and tons of old temples to go poking around in. We ate practically every meal in restaurants overlooking the Nile, and our hotel was close enough to the center of town so that we didn’t have to haggle for a taxi every time we wanted to go somewhere. As with every city we’ve been to so far our activities have included a mixture of living and dead Egypt. In Aswan dead Egypt was represented by an amazing temple of Isis at Phyllae and Abu Simbel–a huge temple dedicated to Ramses II. The temple of Isis was lovely. It was located on an island in the middle of the nile, so we had to take a ferry over. The whole complex was huge, covered with ornate hieroglyphs and had large statues lining its walks. Apparently the entire complex had been moved because after they built the Aswan dam it was submerged in water for half the year. Visitors used to hire ferries to take them to the temple and then would paddle or swim around the ruins. I think it would have been neat to swim around an ancient Egyptian temple, but as I forgot my bathing suit it probably would not have been such a good idea. There was also a shocking amount of graffitti on the temple, but I’ve noticed that there’s a shocking amount of graffitti on all of the ancient temples. The thing is the graffitti is almost as interesting as the actual temple–it’s in all different languages, not just European and arabic names, but phrases in greek and latin as well. I can’t imagine the ego it would take to carve your name into a centuries old monument, but it was cool to see the fingerprints of so many different periods in history.

Abu Simbel was a more elaborate production than the temple of Isis. It was rated the number one must see attraction by one of the many guide books we are carrying, and I can understand why. The temple is located in the middle of the desert and is huge–four giant statues of Ramses are seated outside the temple which is built into a cliff face. The temple itself goes into the cliff face and contains some reliefs with their original paint still in tact. Abu Simbel was also moved from its original location because of the dam, but it was a much more elaborate production because they had to dig it out of one cliff face and implant it in another. I can’t even imagine the labor that must have entailed. Getting to Abu Simbel is also a huge production in and of itself. When I announced that I was going to Egypt my parents flipped out, and for weeks before I left I kept getting state advisory warnings about Egypt, detailing everything from terrorist threats to landmines. Everything has been beyond safe here (one of my traveling companions, Katie, whose French says the crime is much much worse in the south of France, which I find funny.) But Abu Simbel is in the middle of the desert, and very close to the border with Sudan. The Egyptian government is concerned about toursist busses getting there and back,as if they break down there is nothing to help them for miles. In order to combat that Abu Simbel is only reachable by road from Aswan in a state convoy which leaves at four in the morning from Aswan and then gets back at noon. This means we had to wake up at three in order to get to our bus by three thirty am, and then face a three hour drive to get there, and then spend two hours there before getting in the bus and driving three hours back. The fact that I don’t regret the whole experience speaks to the magnificence of the temple.

That was dead Aswan. Living Aswan was represented by amazing meals with friendly waitors who did magic tricks for us, a bazaar to rival Cairo’s and an unforgettable falucca trip down the Nile. Falucca’s are Egyptian sail boats, and you can’t throw a stone in Aswan without coming across somebody who wants to sail you a falucca tour. Our original plan was to take an overnight falucca trip to Luxor, but that turned out to be too expensive, so we settled for a three hour cruise up the Nile. The whole thing was absolutely surreal, sailing up the Nile is something that I never dreamed I would ever do, but I did. I’m still in awe.

The sailboat was really relaxing and the weather was gorgeous. We split up the trip by stopping off at Kitchners island, an Island in the middle of the Nile that has been turned into a botanical garden and bird sanctuary. The entire island was covered with flowers and cactuses, and the bird song was nearly deafening. I kept wondering when I was going to wake up.