the white album

there was some snow in Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania

espresso in Bescancon, France

spring arrives in Portland, Oregon

green

the Mattress Factory

almost to New Hampshire

outside the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

Paper Politics

the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon

herb garden in Rodemarck, France

little girl at Renaissance fair in Rodemarck, France

who's with me?

http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/travel/20frugal-paris.html?hpw

three days

What is a journey but a collection of days?  One spent in Luxembourg City:

Another took me back to Brugge:

and another to Strasbourg:

Reims

The Cathedral at Reims is an easy day trip from both Paris and Leuven, which is fortunate if you happen to be taking a Flemish Art History class.   The cathedral, simply put, will take your breath away.  It was built after the fall of the Roman Empire and, until Napoleon, served as the site for the coronation of the French monarch.  The Germans destroyed the structure during the First World War, but it was rebuilt following the Armistice.

The Cathedral at Reims: 

The building is huge.  I was at least 100 yards away and still could barely capture the entire facade.

fish out of water

In early February, I somehow found myself on top of a mountain in France.  Which is interesting, considering that I can't really ski, don't have any particular interest in skiing, and in fact find skiing kind of terrifying.  And yet there I was.  A member of my cohort, an avid skier, had organized a week-long trip to Avoriaz, a resort high in the French Alps.  I signed up, thinking, sure, why not?  Who turns down an opportunity in the Alps? I learned two important facts from this trip.  One: The Alps are stunning.  Everyone needs to see them at least once in their life.  Two:  I still don't like skiing.

I would love to go back, just maybe during the summer.   

Normandy

Tonight my 15 minute commute took 45 minutes.  As a result, I had a lot of time to think about what I was going to write about these pictures.   In fact, I'd been thinking about this post for several days.  Perhaps I've been stumped about what to write because I kept coming back to the question of why I took these pictures in the first place.  After leaving Paris we traveled throughout Normandy, stopping first in the town of Chartres to see the Chartres Cathedral.  It's a massive structure, one of the few cathedrals to survive the de-Christianization purges of the French Revolution.  It's also unique because one spire is built in the Romanesque style while the other is Flamboyant Gothic.  Somehow I chose not to take a picture of the cathedral, and instead took a picture of this (what you find if you follow the path behind the building and down the stairs):

It's pretty, but whhhyyy?

Next we traveled to Mont Sainte-Michel, the island monastery on the Norman coast.

We ended our trip in Arromanches and spent a day exploring Juno Beach, site of the British landings on D-Day.  The remnants of the landing craft are clearly visible on the beach in the foreground and in the distance in the water.

The sun rises over Juno Beach

just the same, only different

I woke up to this scene this morning:

Let's go to France! Prune pour la route!  

Pictures of France have already appeared on this site.  Those pictures were taken in June and July 2009 when I was in France conducting research for a now scuttled dissertation project.  I took the following pictures during my first trip to the country in September, 2000.  Within a week of our arrival in Leuven, our faculty advisor took our contingent on a week-long excursion to Paris and northern France.  The four days we spent exploring the city were among the most extraordinary of my year abroad, not just because everything smelled of freshly baked bread and there was stunning architecture on literally every corner.  While Paris continued to dazzle in 2009, nothing compares to the wide-eyed, youthful exuberance of one's first encounter the City of Light.

But enough about me.  Bienvenue à Paris!

Notre-Dame

Paris boasts of hundreds of internationally renown restaurants.  A picnic lunch in the park behind Notre Dame is a dining experience worthy of a Michelen four-star rating.

The Eiffel Tower

A blurry Starry Night over the Rhone @ the Musee d'Orsay

Exquisite floor-to-ceiling stained glass at Sainte-Chapelle.

"There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.  We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached.  Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it.  But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy."

- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964).