Numbers

Okay, now I've got a new sim, so please don't try contacting me with my old (English) number, if anyone who rightly feels they need my new number haven't recieved it, please contact me via email or something (or just my parents or siblings, if you're relatives) and we'll get it sorted out.

In other news, Roomie found a snail indoors the other day, I've never seen a snail inside a house, on the wall, just like that. I don't know what's happening anymore.

Also, the ice cream maker makes delicious lime sorbet!

Tlatloc

 

First day of school was yesterday, it was a really tough day. We like, had to attend one unit launch, in which we had to pick our preferred group options for the upcoming seminar unit, I'll talk more about it when I know which group I got, suffice to say they were all different kinds of vague. All of this took about an hour, but it was nice to catch up with some classmates.

Paris was a neat place. Our hotel was located near the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, where all the famous people are buried. We arrived in Paris in the morning, and couldn't check in at the hotel until 2 p.m., so among other things, we explored this beautiful place. It was really quiet and soothing, and filled to bursting with mausoleums, sepultures and headstones.

They also had any imaginable shape

If you climbed up the hill and went to about the middle of the place you saw quite an astounding view of Paris. There also was some really neat flower-arrangements in the garden around. The most interesting aspect of them might be that they seriously seemed to use dill as a decorative plant. I've never seen it happen before. I almost went there to pick some in order to assess if it really was what I saw.

So now we just need some new potatoes and crawfish and we're back in Finland!

 Out of all the celebrity graves we saw, Oscar Wilde's was maybe the most interesting looking:

It actually was walled off with a metal fence in addition to the plexi, 

there were baskets provided for gifts and letters.

Besides Wilde's, we saw Edith Piaf's Georges Seurat's and. . . who could the last one be. . . Jim Morrison's tombs. It was fun trying to find these (there were maps located around the various entrances), but the place itself was the most interesting part.

Paris has many interesting buildings, some are actually pleasant to rest your eyes upon. Centre Pompidou, not so much.

It doesn't matter how much or little of it you include in a picture. 

In the end it still looks as terrible and chaotic.

The view from up there was stunning, and the exhibitions were interesting (maybe Gerhard Richter's most of all). But that facade. . . no, just no.

Slightly more aestethically pleasing was the main building of the original Galeries Lafayette department store complex with it's immaculate glass cupola:

Looked especially good in the dusk .

During the really rainy day we saw one of the more popular buildings:

 

Do I really need to write it out?

Paris also seems to be full of 'street art' and all kinds of (often funny) little details. I think this wonky fellow is my favourite among the ones we happened to find.

They really do exist. If not, why would there be a codex entry about the 

Myrmecophaga camellus then? I believe they are nocturnal.

And of course, another (delicious) form of art is delivered by the numerous boulangers and patissiers:

This was (part of) my breakfast the last morning.

I think that starts to be it about Paris for now. I hope I'll get back there soon enough. I already miss the croissants. Well, at least me and roomie managed to take a couple of bottles of wine with us from there, and I even bought two cheeses to try out. Nothing terribly moldy (or stinking for that matter, at least the odour doesn't reach through the plastic wrapping), I think I'll have a taste as soon as my nose has gotten a bit better.

Au revoir, la maison mince.

Bonjour à tout le monde!

Today was a marvelously rainy Sunday. The weather was terrific for sitting inside doing nothing. A perfect day to get better. And I have literally just loitered, see, there's no treatment like loitering when it comes to colds. Good old lazing.

I'm trying to justify my not writing a beautiful picture riddled update here. But hey, I've got you something to get started with, a shot of me and roomie:

It is only very slightly photoshopped with a mousepad.

Coucou!

Because that's what all Frenchmen look like. They also can't stop leaning on columns. (Roomie is Very adamant about the fact that this charming monsieur doesn't look French in the slightest. I tried to tell her that not every Pierre wears designer outfits and carries baguettes, or is romance personified, but she refuses to listen, so help me out here. (Don't tell her that I don't view this fellow as particularly French  myself, let's all just exclaim what a formidable Jacques he makes.))

The pictorial update might come tomorrow, here's a short wrap up:

    ~Trip went well, for most parts

          + Paris was beautiful and the weather was mostly nice

          + The macarons, croissants, crepes and pains au chocolat were delicious

          + We found cheap wine and chocolate

          + The hotel room was pleasant enough

          - I got a cold right on the second day of the trip, yay!

          - Our second night at the hotel we didn't have any towels. The cleaner had apparently
           taken the old ones away and then there were no fresh ones to replace them with.. what a
           bummer.

          

 And the grande finale: The last night we came back to the hotel we were in a big need of a hot bath (the very bath we had planned taking the earlier night, but then we had no towels), it was a rainy day, we were soaked and tired and I still had a cold (still have, by the way). 

    But whoop-de-doo whadd'ya find? I saw the bathroom floor was wet, then Roomie discovered a wet towel under a leaky pipe. Guess which pipe it was? That's right, the hot water pipe, of course! It could have been fixed with a tool easy enough, so Roomie was kind enough to fetch the manager/receptionist/whoever. He was well prepared enough not to have a pair of pliers in the whole hotel, so his solution was to turn the little leaky valve in the other direction, shutting the hot water flow in our bathroom. Then he apologised, said that we can't use hot water tonight, that it would be repaired tomorrow, dried the floor and left. 

    At this point I fell into despair, because I was cold, tired and miserable and had a cold, but Roomie fixed everything and saved the day: she came up with the idea that we could just turn the valve back to it's leaky old self until we'd filled the tub, and then shut it again, and we did just that. A warm bath can make everything so much better! In defense of the manager/receptionist/whoever, he actually offered us another room, but that wasn't until we came back to the hotel after dinner, so we just smiled and said we wouldn't need one. His offer came a little too late.

Other current matters:

We haven't used our English phones in a couple of months so the SIM-cards have disconnected. It would've been nice if someone in the phone shop could have mentioned it to us foreign students who might not stay in the UK all year round anyway, but no. This probably also applies to you, Longhaired Roomie and Finnish Friend. So, you who are affected by this, prepare to recieve a new English phone number from me in the near future.

Veni Vidi Vici

Unflinching, I ventured into the beast's maw, and emerged victorious. Has anyone of you went to IKEA, and only bought one single thing  (keeping to the shopping list in a strict fashion also counts)? I got my worklamp returned and they gave me a voucher, which I used to buy another lamp (which sadly was a couple pounds more expensive than my old one, but it's blue so it's all right). It was all quite hassle-free in the end.

As a bonus I got to see Croydon! It looked like this:

 Resembles an English city, yes?

The old (150 years) department store in the area, Allders was closing for good. It had only six days to go, and was mostly empty already, but I found this:

 Fluffy, colourful textiles! Oh wow!

And that pretty much made my day (: Imagine what I can do with them! Everything is possible.

Roomie had taken care of herself all right while I was gone, she even made a new friend:

Have you ever seen such a fat and green locust or whatever it's called in English. (Grasshopper?)

Tomorrow we'll take the early train to Paris, so au revoir for a little while!

Creamy

There's a crazy cat outside our window. It's staring at us, right at our souls. It's almost starting to turn unsettling.

In more important news:

 Homemade chocolate ice cream! Aww yeah!

My ice cream maker works. I've been dreaming about getting one all summer, and a couple of days before we flew I ordered one on amazon, and it had already arrived upon our own arrival. I'm so happy right now.

One thing that I'm not so happy about is this:

The cool four-wheeled trolley I traded from my brother wasn't as high quality as one would hope. I wonder if it has (global) warranty, if so, please let me know. It seems like one wheel melted and another one almost did it. I might have packed it too heavy, and then it apparently didn't like being pulled a couple of kilometers across town either. Well, as I mentioned yesterday, the wheel gave up relatively close to our destination, I just had to drag its smoking remains uphill for half a kilometer.

The worklamp I got from hell (IKEA) last year has a terribly annoying and loud buzzing noise that escalates as the adapter warms up, so I'm getting it swapped for a new one. I won't let them win this one! I'll also do a little sightseeing Croydon, I'll let you know if I find anything interesting. Apparently there's an Art Centre somewhere there, let's see if I can find it. . .

Backeliback!

From here on, I solemnly vow that blogging will be much more frequent. Got back home to Canterbury with Roomie today. The trip went well except that on the last couple of hundred meters before reaching our house one of the wheels in my lovely four-wheeled trolley (that I got second-hand from my brother) melted. So the last bit was rather draggy and frustrating.

Stay tuned for more about our marvelous adventures from today, and maybe a short best of listing of the summer. The future is also bursting with exitement: Paris, unpacking, ice cream machine and

dun-dun-duun

 IKEA.



That's it for now. My computer's slowly dying (the cord is somewhere in the middle of a mountain of stuff), and there's really important stuff to do, such as watching Pretty Woman.