A few Parisian pictures.

I will probably upload the pictures on Facebook later, but I wanted to post a couple here, with comments. I took these on the surprisingly good RetroCam app on my Android phone - I much, MUCH prefer Hipstamatic, but I don't have an iPhone and getting my iPad out is such a hassle for quick pictures. Still, this camera did not actually disappoint. I like the polaroid effect, and it does great things with contrast.

The house where Sarah Bernhardt was born - we came across this place completely by accident, since we had lunch shortly after our arrival in a place just across the street and then spotted the plaque. Still, pretty cool. I like Bernhardt.

One of the buildings of the Sorbonne. I really like this shot. I like places where everything is old and beautiful, except the subway, which smells.

Because I'm easily amused, I come bearing Happeh Hasidic Child versus Angreh Hasidic Child. I didn't actually buy either book, but they looked hilarious. The second one obviously says 'KVETCH', by the way, and deals with Yiddish.

Les Deux Magots - an overpriced café where Sartre and de Beauvoir supposedly hung out back in the day. Also possibly Racine, but not at the same time, and that may be made up.

The inside of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I really love Gothic architecture, even if I dislike the heavy, incensey scent that always seems to hang around in those old churches.

I also love stained glass windows. Same church.

And a closer look at the star near the front. I really, really like this picture a lot. This camera app does a good job for contrast shots like this one.

Notre Dame. We didn't go inside... yet again... because the line is always crazy long. I need to investigate if there is a way to pre-order a ticket online, because I really want to see the inside. At least I've been inside the Sainte-Chapelle before, I guess - the line for that one was crazy as well.

Another view. I love the architecture of this church. It has a fairly interesting floor plan.

The gargoyles, seen from below. This picture turned out a lot trippier than it was intended, but I like it. They really are a fine example of the nutty side of Gothic. I love them.

Inside picture of the restaurant we had dinner at. The food was nice, but the menu was littered with weird French shit. I can say that, I'm Belgian. I don't want obscure meat on the bone, I don't want soup made out of shellfish, and I don't want to suck marrow out of a bone. I realize those don't sound that weird. I'm going to be quiet now. Good food was had.

I actually forget what this was. My mother and I have a tendency to just... walk through random gates. One day someone's gonna shoot us as trespassers, or something. But hey, it looks pretty.

Then, we went to Jewville, kind of - but only kind of - getting lost on the way. This was an old synagogue in the Rue Pavée. I like Judaism for many reasons, but one superficial one is the fact that a star is just a much nicer and less horrifying religious symbol than a cross. I mean, who are you gonna kill using a Star of David? An insect? (Six legs! You could conceivably crucify an insect on a Star of David! I'm going to be quiet now.)

We had lunch at an interesting Israeli falafel place. For some reason, I turned into a photography noob, and this is the only picture that turned out decent - the little Israeli flags on the wall just beside us. The food itself was good, but way too much. Which tends to happen at falafel places.

Of course, there were also heaps of bookstores - one was called the Temple Bookstore, or something like that, and it was beautiful. Of course, I made random purchases, some of which can be seen here. I bought Le Petit Prince in Hebrew/Yiddish - if you turn it over, it has the Yiddish text. This is good, because I can read Yiddish if I read it out loud. Mostly. The postcards are illustrations from Medieval Hebrew manuscripts. Score!

The red Christmas trees on the sixth floor of the Centre Pompidou. I oddly liked them.

And the view. This was the Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre. I really like how well you can see the hill.

And the Eiffel Tower. We didn't go there - I've been to the top three times before, and it's usually crazy crowded - but I figured I had to at least see it to make the Paris trip complete. :)

Okay, this turned into a much longer post than was intended, but oh well.

Paris s'éveille, if not too early...

I spent the past two days in Paris with my mother - we went there by train (which only takes about an hour from Brussels) and spent one night at a hotel, which was nice. Though Paris is very close, it had been over a year since I'd been there, so this trip was a lot of fun.

Our original goal in going there was the Munch exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, although I'm not sure why that was our goal since neither of us actually even knew where Munch was from. We eventually decided on the Czech Republic, but of course he turned out to be Norwegian. To complete the picture of total cluelessness, we also thought they had The Scream, but then they didn't. Anyway, it was an interesting exhibition and I enjoyed it a great deal. We also briefly visited the other special exhibition, which was about dance, but me and dance have a love/hate relationship. On the one hand, it is near the top of my list of things I would love to be good at but am not, and I love to watch it, but on the other hand I only really love to watch it if it's ballet dance or some pretty couple dance (like swing, or charleston, or lindy hop).

We also walked around aplenty, of course, and had some excellent food - and we also visited the Jewish area, the Pletzl, which was rather wonderful. I have always had this latent, crazy obsession with all things Jewish, which is odd since I really didn't grow up around any of it, but I had never seen any of Jewish Paris. Though the streets were in many places commercialized, it was still a really nice area with an old synagogue, nice food and coffee places (Kosher certified, yo) and a lot of really nice Jewish bookstores. I was really pleased, and also spent a lot of money, which is why I should really never visit Jerusalem, though I SEKRITLY want to.

It's not that expensive on a direct flight from Belgium.

This is bad.

How Noah killed grandpa

The day before yesterday, sadly, I did not have my Hebrew class I usually have every Sunday. This is tragic, because I love that class and Hebrew in general - I'm a big language nerd, and luckily that entails that I pick up languages easily. I already knew some of the Hebrew alphabet, since I've been trying to learn (admitted half-assedly) for years, but this class is REALLY paying off during services, since the Siddur does not provide transliteration for a number of the prayers and songs. And I love singing along.

I did have my Intro to Judaism class, which is very interesting and this week covered Jewish and Biblical history. I always loved learning about that at school - it's fascinating how at a certain point myth and history collide and the Bible gradually gains a degree of historically verifiable fact. Maybe one of the reasons why I love the Old Testament is because it is essentially a mythology - a heap of stories in vaguely chronological order, which may or may not have happened, and which carry some sort of message.

The Rabbi said that some Jews have tried to read what we know about the origins of earth and people into the Bible - 'yom', or 'day', then, does not literally mean day, but can stand for an entire era, which would mean the world was created in six phases, not six days. I quite like that idea, maybe because I am a structuralist by nature and maybe because it is an intelligent alternative for creationism (which I have zero patience for - come on now, guys... the earth is only four thousand years old and people rode dinosaurs, amirite?), but in the end, it doesn't matter. The Bible does not accurate represent the actual origins of the earth because it was written thousands of years later, and I like a religion that can acknowledge that. It does not take away the morals and ethics we may find within this ancient text and apply to our current-day lives.

I also learned last Sunday that while Noah was all a-okay on his Ark, his grandpa was actually also still alive, but apparently not invited because according to my Rabbi's calculations, he died that same year, presumably in the flood. Poor grandpa.

It was an interesting class.

Judaism

The truth of the matter is, I have always, to some extent, wanted to be a Jew.

That idea in itself is odd to me, since I have never been one of those God-people. I seriously can only deal with so many capitalized pronouns - He, His, whatnot. I don't capitalize pronouns because I believe in grammar and because I believe that if there's a supreme being out there, he/she/it most likely has bigger and better things to care about than whether or not I capitalize pronouns when referring to him/her/it. It sounds obnoxious, maybe I am obnoxious, but it always sort of irked me. To each their own, etc etc - but that's a rule I follow pretty badly, as you can tell, since I am all: my judgement, let me tell you it.

My point is simply, though, that I am a little bit terrified of organized religion, which may be in part because I am a rational being and in part because I am a cynical bitch who likes to be contrary - and in all honestly, in part because I grew up in a country that is largely secular these days, but that used to be very strongly Catholic and still bears the scars. I don't think everyone who is Catholic is evil and all Opus Dei fifties-style brainwashey. I don't even think every Catholic priest is a crazed child molester. I do however think that when one religious organization becomes too powerful in a certain locale, it can do horrible things - and since religious organizations derive their power from something that is super-human (as in, above human understanding), they are extra dangerous in that regard, since they can easily terrify great numbers of people into obedience.

But anyway, so far for conspiracy-theory paranoia. I have always wanted to be a Jew, and that is odd for yet another reason: I didn't grow up around any Jews. At all. I am from a small, European country, and whereas the larger cities do have a number of Jews (many of them Chassidic, but there are Reform Jews around as well, and there's at least one temple), I'm from the countryside where there is little religious variety: everyone is technically a Catholic by birth, but people are largely secular and religion is not much of a blip on most people's radar. I went to Catholic schools and there, especially in high school, I was given some background on Judaism and its holidays (we had pretty in-depth classes on non-Christian religions, which I am grateful for), but it was all very theoretical, since there were no actual real-life Jews around to celebrate Sukkot, or Purim, or Rosh Hashana. I learned what these terms meant - I had to memorize them for an exam at some point in my highschool life, I'm sure - but I didn't know what they were like in practice.

And yet I've always been drawn to Judaism, even back when the only Jews I'd ever encountered were Anne Frank and some chassidim I saw, even if I didn't actually 'meet' them, on a train when I was little. I was fascinated by the holocaust, but not in a morbid sort of way - I wanted to know about these people's lives, not particularly about their deaths, because they were the only point of reference I had to Judaism, if that makes sense - I wanted to know about how they lived before the War, and afterward. When I was fifteen, I bought a book to learn Hebrew, and though I never quite got somewhere, I worked on the alphabet for a while. I have always been fascinated with the Bible, in an academic way, but it was always the Old Testament that fascinated me, rather than the New: a religion teacher I once had, a dear, dear religion teacher, once referred to it as a library of stories, and that's how I saw it and why I appreciated it.

I have a childhood, a youth, of being a little bit Jewish at heart in a variety of ways. I never thought actually converting was an option, maybe because I didn't realize people COULD convert to Judaism. But there you go, you live, you learn.

A Lady of Chance

I'm bad at blogging - I'm really bad at blogging. Or at least, I've become bad at blogging - my teenage self seems to have had no problem keeping up a regular schedule on LiveJournal. But LiveJournal makes my brain cry (on a purely aesthetic level) by this point, so Blogspot it is.

I'm unsure what I want to say here. Currently, there are two major things going on in my life: one is my PhD, which I am in my second year of, and one is my Reform Jewish conversion. One is something I always sorta kinda expected to be involved in at one point - and one comes as a complete surprise. I always knew I would at least attempt to get those two letters - Dr. - in front of my name: it happens when you have more than average intelligence and a love for learning from a very young age. I never knew that I would one day, willingly, try to join an organized, or, if that is a bad word, an established and traditional religion. But here I am, and both things are going on, and I want both very much - and I also want to survive both with my sanity intact.

So there you go.