Mamie et Papie me visitaient

I got up early on Saturday to pick my mom up from the airport, with my wake up call of a freezing shower, which was typical for me by that time because our apartment building hadn’t had hot water since Wednesday, and weren’t expected to until Monday. It’s like being washed by someone spraying a hose at you on a cold day. Naturally, it makes me more grumpy than I usually am in the morning. There were a couple of events that happened the few days before my mom arrived that were really trying to test my patience, but nothing could bring me down because I was so excited for my parents to come visit me.
I took the wrong metro to the airport and had to switch to the right one halfway through. After a little wait at Terminal 2F, I saw the little munchkin and we headed back to my apartment where she took a post travel nap. When she woke up, we went up to Montmartre and climbed the more picturesque parky side of the hill to Sacre Couer. After taking in a full panorama of smoggy Paris, we found a little café where we had some locks with little red peppercorns, cheese, and a salad with a roasted camembert and a couple glasses of wine. We walked back down to the metro through the neighborhoods of Montmartre and I actually found a vintage store that I liked that was relatively affordable. My mom found a baby blue go-go dress that I fell in love with. The store shop owner looked like Yoko Ono. I bought the dress and we headed home and called it a night.

The next day, we went to the Porte de Vanves flea market. We picked our way along it, with our respective “ooos” and “aaahs” and “look at this’” and talked about how long it would take dad to get through the first few stands. I found the most petite road bike that’s in existence and had to take a picture. What is it about small versions of things that’s so awesome? The big purchase of the day was a thimble that I needed to do my extensive hand sewing homework over the break. After a pit stop at the Bastille food market where we got a kilo of strawberries, we headed to the Marais district, which mom really wanted to check out. Apparently it’s the Jewish district and we were lost until we saw a man with earlocks and a yarmulke. We window shopped and mom must be my good luck charm cause I found an even better vintage shop in that area as well and I found some even better priced gogo boots to go with my gogo dress.
Keep in mind that to get to all of these places we have to use the underground metro system. I have never gotten lost or had problems in the metro, but since my mom was here she of course had to tell me where to go to transfer to the appropriate subways. We got lost a few times, accidentally exited the system where we had to buy her a new ticket to get back in a few times, and got on the wrong subways enough times that I finally told her to just not say anything and I will lead the way. The subway that goes to my stop is called the RER B. Pronounced R-E-R-B. You spell it. I made fun of my mom after she said “rear B” a few too many times, and told her how to say it correctly, we had a giggle, and honestly 30 seconds later, “Wait, isn’t rEar B over there?” She didn’t get it right one time she was here. She’s such a Fulton. You know how Fulton’s add “s” to everything? Fred Meyer’s, Hood’s Canal. The grocery store closest to my apartment is called “Ed”, and so many times I heard the sentence, “So, should we go to Ed’s and get something for tonight?”
“…Well, it belongs to ED”

Monday we were off to Corsica, a small (and I think the only) French island. We landed in the north of the island and took the most scenic 3 hour tra in ride to the town of Calvi. On the way we cruised along the coast, went through mountains and plains dotted with small houses, and saw crumbling aqueducts along rivers that we followed. There was a lady about my mom’s age transforming her face with make up across from us on the little tin train we were on. I was hypnotized by it, I’d try to sneak peeks at the steps of the metamorphosis as she went from au naturelle to trannie. Just as I was wondering what I could do to my mom’s face with a little make up, she leaned over and whispered, “I’m so glad I never got into that stuff, it’s like an addiction”. Touché.
The Island boasts 340 sunny days a year. We got two of the 25 grey ones on our 3 day trip. All I wanted was to lie on the sunny beach but it didn’t look like it was going to happen. Ok, well, at least I can take a hot shower. We got to our very European hotel, and the shower’s pressure was like a light rainfall. I was lucky if I could get any water to my scalp. The first day we went horse back riding. It was excellent. We even got to trot. We went through the beautiful rustic European farm that had 25 horses, two donkies, one big indoor firepit, and three sleeping dogs on the couches of the front porch, then we rode through some fields, across the train tracks and along the beach. Mom thought she was such a pro because she horse back rode about 30 years ago a few times. So Amelie, the guide, gave her the big horse that mom had to practically do the splits in order to wrap her miniature little legs around and I was stuck with the small one that literally fell asleep while I was riding it and who absolutely REFUSED to walk in the tide of the beach. Amelie was telling us about some of the other horses in the crew, and we noticed one had a bell around it’s neck. We found out that it was because when she would let the horses roam out to the fields and the woods, that horse would hide in the trees and stand so still that you wouldn’t see him when you were 10 feet away. So they gave him the bell so they could hear him when they couldn’t see him. But he learned to hold the bell with his chin so that it wouldn’t make noise. And they say animals are below us.

The next day it was raining, and we thought it wouldn’t be such a good idea to rent a vespa like we had talked about so we went on a cruise of the coast instead. It went through a nature reserve and we got really close to the rocky cliffy sides of the mountain. I kept thinking of Leland cause it looked like a rock climbers dream. The boat took it's time going through the reserve, but sped back when the tour was over. Mom and I for some odd reason stayed out on the deck ever after everyone else gave up and went inside and we had the wind and rain whiplash our faces until we went completely numb. It was kind of like a rollercoaster. Later we explored the historic part of Calvi, which of course was the coolest part and the highlight of the trip, and despite the rain I had to jump in the mediterranean and go for a swim while mom munched on some olives, cheese, bread, sauce, and wine.

We came back to Paris on Thursday, went souvenir shopping Friday, and on Saturday Dad arrived fresh from what was apparently a thrilling plane ride where he got to look at Iceland for hours. He didn’t watch any movies. He was like a giddy little boy and we introduced him to the city with the cimitiere de Pere Lachaise. We visited dead Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Edith Piaf. The cemetery is ginormous and really easy to get lost in. The language barrier didn’t stop dad. He started talking to an old man who didn’t speak a word of English, at which point my role as awkward translator commenced. The man told me about a nearby grave and the artist it belonged to, who I actually knew from my art history excursion to the Louvre, and then he gave us directions to the grave we wanted to go to. On our way to Edith Piaf from Oscar Wilde dad spotted a fellow Rick Steve’s tourist book reader and looked at the tour plan this woman was going on. He saw that the next grave on her agenda was Gertrude Stein, at which point he was eager to have an in depth conversation about her role in literature and her influence on authors with more credit, like Hemingway. In usual Dink fashion, info was spilling out a mile a minute, until the woman asked, “And you’re a literary person?”. Then on the way out Dink was trying to have a conversation with a robin.


Sunday we caught the flea market while it was closing and still managed to spend 6 hours there. I was playing translator again, and dad was asking me to ask the vendors things like, “Is this made out of soapstone”, and “Do you have a bottle opener of the same maker?”. You know, simple French phrases.

(check out patient little mom in the background of this picture)








Monday we got a museum pass and headed out to Versailles. Museum passes are false advertising – they don’t let you skip lines. I finally did all the touristy things and therefore got a good dose of that famous French hospitality that makes American tourists loud, ungrateful, and angry. Any place you went for information was filled to the brim with assholes. It’s like as soon as you came up to the people who’s job it is to give you information, they would do anything to push you away and their voice would get increasingly louder and interrupting until you gave up.
“Where do we go if we have museum passes?”
--“A la gauche” (To the left)
“Okay, la bas ou …” (Ok, over there? Or…)
- - “A la gauche!”
“Mais, je pense qu’avec le passe qu’il n’y a pas de…” (But, I thought with the pass that there isn’t…)
-- “A LA GAUCHE! A LA GAUCHE!”


We were all peeved by the time we found and waited in a 40 minute line to get into the castle, at which point I left my parents to tour the place while I ran out to the gardens and rented a bike and pedaled as fast as I could down off road paths amongst very green very ancient trees. We met back up at the lake thing, had some ice cream, and rented a paddle boat that we each took turns rowing in. We had a picnic in the boat and dad fed a duck that followed us down the lake. I miss my ducks. After we went to Marie Antoinette’s get away country home that’s maybe a half mile away from Versailles. We were about to enter her country home, when mom asked the woman at the door where the bathroom was, and when we returned the house was closed for the day. Why the woman didn’t tell us that before is beyond me. We still got to walk around the country home garden’s, though. I LOVED it. I have nothing to compare it to, you’ll just have to see it yourself. There were bright red orange squirrels with tufty ears and tails, funny little gravel trails that wound through funny miniature hills and forests, gazebos, flowers, fat robin chickadess, and millions of annoying ass frogs that blew up at the chin and the ears everytime they ribbited. At one corner of the area is a little village (not lived in) in perfect condition from the time. Mom and I were imagining if all of our family members had one of the houses and we all lived there. My camera died so I couldn’t take any pictures, but it was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. Quaint little cottages with thatch roofs, towers, mills, picket fences, and so much dimension and character, and they were connected by paths that often had little vined netted tunnels. It’s better than what you’re imagining right now. Straight out of a fairytale like Hansel and Gretel. And they all surrounded a little lake with swans. I wish we could return to happy simple times like that where you had what you needed and were completely self sufficient. As me and mom were looking through the village dad was sifting through a field of dirt pretty much foot by foot for rocks and other “souvenirs”. The following picture is his collection for a day. At the end of the day at home I asked, “Where did you keep all of this”, and he responded very proudly like a little boy, “In my pAHkets”. No wonder his pants kept slipping down his butt. (which... I couldn't find anywhere. Damn, I may have accidentally deleted it when mom told me to stop laughing and rough housing and go to bed already that day)

Tuesday: Notre Dame and Sainte Chapelle. We spent more time in Notre Dame than anyone should ever consecutively spend in a church. Even the pope. I was rather sick of it after about 4 hours. I did get to see the huge bell that quasi modo got to see every day, though, which was pretty rad. And then I found out we were going to ANOTHER church. But it was Sainte Chapelle, a chapel with nothing but one room to explore. And it is completely lined with stained glass windows. It was gorgeous. It gave the effect of prisms, people were lit up allover with rainbows.

This is where I stopped, so my memory isn’t as fresh to recount the remainder of my parent’s stay, but I will do my best:

On Wednesday we went to the Eiffel Tower. We got there via a boat on the Seine river. I wanted the most possible cliché picture in front of the Eiffel tower that I could muster so I wore a Frenchie outfit of a striped shirt, a beret, red lipstick etc. etc. I’m still mad I didn’t get a baguette to include in the pic. Mom played photographer and dad played documentor that day. I personally like mom's masterful skill in taking the pic with the tip of the tower chopped off and another poser in the shot, but I will include a more perfect pic for grandma. Chuck-O took a video of our boat trip and was taking pictures of mom taking pictures of me. The thing about ol pops as a photographer is that he takes FOREVER in order to get the shot he wants, which never even is worth it. We will have places to go and yet we find ourselves posing for these bizarre pictures for like 15 minutes. I’ll see if I can rake up a few to include in the blog... except for some reason I can't find them on my computer anymore? Many rolled eyes later, the photoshoot was finally done, and before we got into line to go up the tower we ran into Mrs. Andrews and her husband and his sister. For those of you who don’t know (which I’m sure the only people reading this are Grandma and Mom so I don’t know why I’m even saying this), Mrs. Andrews was a 3rd grade teacher at my grade school and one of my mom’s coworkers. The world is ridiculously ridiculously small. A couple of my friends – one from Seattle, one from Corvallis, befriended each other independently of me as they were both in the same city studying abroad in Ecuador. It’s nuts how that all works out.
So, we got in line for 15 years to go to the second level of the Eiffel tower in order to wait in another line for another hour or so to go to the top. And there were complications to get tickets to the top. The French really don’t like to make things easy or efficient. Complicated people. Like overly cranky difficult old women. Kinda like the librarians I work with (which I suppose is a good transitioning strategy for me to get used to the States again). So anyway, we got to the top and had special moments. Was this my first time up? I actually don’t remember whether it was. We were so tired by the time we finally made it up. We had some of Tara’s yellow yarn which I wound around the fence in the shape of a heart. Tara loved Paris like me and this is about the closest we can get to a trip together. She and I had a good time up there on the tour d’eiffel taking in the city. It’s pretty cool to look around and see all the neighborhoods and be able to map out everywhere I’ve been and to see all the big monuments like the Arc do Triomphe and the Champs Elyseé. It’s just too bad you have to wait so long in order to go up there! Sheesh. We took the elevator back down to the second floor and walked down the steps to the bottom – which took three times as long as it should because our personal documentor of course, after a long day, had to take a picture of every step of the way.




Speaking of wanting to strangle a certain someone, the next day we went to the Louvre. It was inevitable. We couldn’t avoid it. We were there so long I literally took a nap in the classical roman statues section. Mom and I split away from dad and we let him go and do his own thing which meant looking at all the ancient culture sections of the museum. The Louvre has quite possibly the best collection of ancient art. Which amazed and peeved Dink. He loved seeing it, but was not happy that it is located in Paris, France instead of it’s respective home countries.

Was Thursday the night of our amazing meal? I can’t remember. We decided to splurge on a meal we know would be good at a restaurant called Le Papillon. It’s a reservation-a-few-days-ahead small intimate wine-cellar bar type restaurant with warm lighting and a waiter who really knows what he’s talking about and where the chubby cook can’t help but pop out and interact with the customers. Especially when one of them is my father. The Menu changes everynight and everyone gets the same 4 course meal with a bottle of wine – that is paired with the palette of the evening. I will try my best to remember this meal. Mom, one of the two people reading this, help me out if I forget something. First course was a carrot soup with perfectly cooked vegetables that both combined well and brought eachother’s flavor out, it had a dallop of sour cream and fresh croutons on top. Hmmm, I don’t remember the other courses, probably because I was just so naturally high off the tastiness of the meal. I do remember a block of blue cheese paired with some very good jam (which is called confiture in French), and for desert was a caramelly panna cotta with strawberries. Mom was quite happy with this investment and I’m pretty sure it was the highlight of all of our week.

Poor mom had a killer migraine all week and we were running around trying to fit in everything.

The next day, Friday, we went to the Orsay Museum. It’s a Museum that is in a building that used to be a train station. The architecture is to die for. The Louvre has art through the Renaissance, and the Orsay Museum has the next period of art up until modern art. So this is the place to go for impressionism, pointillism, rodin sculptures, and art nouveau and kind of the baroque period before art nouveau. I’m way more into this time because although the Louvre is amazing with all these masterful paintings, all they were really allowed to paint were either portraits or religious paintings up through the Renaissance. It wasn’t til the 18th century that they got into more expressive and interesting subjects. Sorry if I’m stating the obvious. So we went through the amazing impressionism section of the museum – which I really enjoyed because impressionism is what originally got me into the world of appreciating art. It’s always the first classification of art anyone learns about. And rightfully so. We left dad in the first room and while we went through the whole impressionism exhibit, and I thought I took my time, he was just on like the third painting in. We agreed to meet at a certain time at a certain place and mom and I waited at that certain place for 40+ minutes until the museum closed. We were a little peeved because we would’ve liked to go around and see more instead of waiting for dad because he supposedly “misunderstood” and went around the rest of the museum with out us.
Paintings are one of the best resources for costume design. That’s what I love about and miss about Paris museums. The garb that the subjects are wearing is so cool and I find myself looking at that more than anything about the painter’s skill. If we weren’t in pointless class all day at the Paris American Academy I would’ve spent a lot more time going to the Louvre and sketching costumes in paintings.


After the Orsay, we went to something I was really looking forward to and which later became my favorite part of Paris: the Cinema Museum (Museé Cinematique). This is where my nerdiness really shines through. Like a burning bright star with a pocket protector. I was like a little kid in a candy store. Whoah! Look at that! Oh my god! I can’t believe this is here! My favorite period of film was the very beginning. 1895-1920. And they had all the original historic pieces that came with the fast paced evolution of film. They had the original photograph’s of Muybridge setting up and taking consecutive pictures of a horse running that was originally for a bet the governor of California had going that a horse always had one foot on the ground – which not only started the idea that we can create the illusion of something moving through taking one picture after another but also changed how people depicted horses running. They also had ancient equipment like kinetoscopes, a zoopraxiscope, a cinematograph. The French were the cutting edge at the beginning of film – I already mentioned the Lumiere’s (which they had original movie poster’s for!), and they had a whole exhibit dedicated to the genius of Meleis! The original special effects master and developer of interesting stories versus just filming spectacles (well, maybe not the first, the Great Train Robbery was first). They also had costumes! Including the robot costume in Metropolis! Way too much fun, I couldn’t even handle it. Yet, still, my dad HAD to out do me and be MORE fascinated with this aspect of art/history that isn’t necessarily one of his favorites yet he still probably knows 3x more than me. He even made me weary by hanging out too long in there. I returned to this museum almost every weekend for their old movie screenings on Sundays targeted towards kids – so they were either English movies with a lot of action or very basic French movies. And they were only 5 euro. They had screenings every day, but Sunday was the only day I would actually know what was going on and I was almost always late. The ticket booth vendor knew me and I don’t know whether he was entertained by me or highly annoyed. It’s hard to tell with the French. I would go to these movies by myself despite throwing out countless invites and they lock the doors once the movie starts so I would always have to have someone let me in. And there’s no going to the bathroom once your in there which makes you have an anxiety attack if you even get the inkling that you gotta pee.

BUT, the week with ma famille was sadly coming to a close. Saturday we went to that Porte de Vanves flea market again. It was raining and the pavement was warm and wet. A disgusting what looked like a 15 year old was flirting up on me along with his whole family watching and trying to set me up at the crepe stand there. He thought it was him that I kept coming back to, but I just really like crepes. And when you have to wait for Charles D. Olson to go around a Parisian flea market you bet I am going to be there long enough for more than one meal. My mom and I actually went to a café for a while to thaw out and have a cappuccino. I actually bought an old valentino couture purse there at the market and was admiring it heavily when we were at the cafe. It was a purse I saw a couple weeks earlier and obsessed over until I had to get it. Now that I’m poor again in the states I kinda wish I had been smarter about my spending but whatever. I would much rather splurge on a vintage couture purse that I really like and that no one else has than to buy the designer purse that people will recognize is 4 seasons old in two years. Yes, below this seemingly sweet exterior I am a secret pretentious bitch, if you were wondering. That purse is pristinely hanging in my closet and I dawn the weathered ratty purse that’s falling apart that I bought at the OSU thriftstore I bought two years ago for $3 every day. My how my style changes when I go back to the country. We collected dad and I believe went on one last walk along the Seine before calling it a day and the next morning they were off.
Amy returned from her Mediterranean cruise the next day. And the next few months were a living sweat shop hell as we crammed four months of work into a month and a half of school. This is a big reason why I stopped blogging. I had no time to eat or sleep. I made 3 ensembles including 2 hats, a velvet jacket (nightmare!), a 6 meter of fabric old time box pleated skirt, a disgusting pink vionnet inspired dress that ended up looking like it was made out of lunch meat and oh so ugly for how much I slaved over it, and then a smocked top with a skirt I made in a day. During my end of the year presentation all my professors focused on was that damn “moche” (ugly) skirt and didn’t mention a thing about all the other stuff I actually put a little thought and time into. I just made that skirt so that the model wasn’t bottomless going down the runway at our end of the year show. Which was a joke of a fashion show. I started out loving that school but became pretty bitter by the end of the term. Pretty much it used to be a great school with a great president and founder who worked really hard to get great connections to supplement a great education for his fashion and art students. But that founder died with out leaving a plan for someone to take over. The current president, Peter Carman, assumed position and is just piggy backing on the connections he has still managed to hold onto and have as a bragging right as the actual academic pillar of the school is crumbling and crashing fast. And he ignores it. It’s such a waste and shame. It was so amazing to dress the models at the fashion shows, but other than that I would definitely not recommend the school. Going back I wish I had just spent the extra money and go to a general exchange program where I stayed with a host family and maybe would’ve had a chance to honestly learn French. But being stubborn little me I had to do things my own way and suffer the consequences. C’est la vie.