i don't even know where to start. paris is absolutely amazing - the food, the people, the buildings, everything. the only thing that's not so great are the prices. things are a little expensive, but really only because the dollar is only worth a little more than half of a euro and tax is included in the price for everything.

friday, our second day, we had two different sessions of orientation with dr. costello, the program coordinator, and our placement test. the only other thing we did that day was go to a bar on mouffetard, a street here in the latin quarter (or for the paris-savvy, the 5e arrondissement). it's where all the student bars and hang-outs are, and all the kids just mill around in the street. everything's pretty laid back and it was really nice. six of us went, and we got wine or kir to celebrate leah's birthday.

i guess i should give a little more context for where we are. paris is divided into 20 arrondissements, or neighborhoods. we are in the fifth, which is also known as the latin quarter, and it's where all the universities and publishing companies are. there's a long history of education and general learning here.

today, we walked the grand axe, which is a straight line of awesome sites from l'arc de triomphe to the louvre that you can see all the way down (as you'll see in the following pictures). it was a long way to walk from there all the way back to the area we reside in, but it was such a beautiful day and everything here is just really amazing.

yesterday we all took a charter bus to part of normandy. we spent the morning in rouen, where joan d'arc was burned at the stake, and giverny, the small (and very beautiful and cute) town where monet spent the last few decades of his life. rouen was really fun and, though part of it was a little touristy, was a lot less stressful than paris. though paris is great, it is much more urban - obviously. everybody wears neutrals and dark colors, so our bright-colored american fashion is kind of not mode here right now. it's fine, i planned for that and didn't bring very many bright things, but it's still a little strange. in rouen people wore colors though. we went to the hermes in rouen, and their scarves are so beautiful... too bad buying one would eat up half of my money.

our classes start tomorrow. the fourteen of us - ten girls, four guys - will find out which level language class we're placed in. that class will be from 9h to 11h every weekday. we have our culture class, called paris as spectacle and taught by dr. costello, from 14h to 16h (that's two to four) four out of five weekdays.

we're thinking of going to normandy next weekend, which would be great because the sixth is the anniversary of d-day. it's just a train-ride away (yay efficient, inexpensive public transit!), and hostels aren't very expensive if you can find a room. more on that later, most likely.

and now, 193 pictures. i apologize for the speed at which the pictures switch, i can't control it. i took the captions off of this slideshow because it scrolls too fast to read them anyway, but if you'd like a little more info you can follow the link below to the picasa web album and check them out there.

[web album, paris 5.31]

hello from paris! it's pretty fantastic here. right now it's about 6h50 (six fifty in the morning), and we all woke up because we all went to bed pretty early last night after a full day, which was after a full day and half a day on a plane. all that was pretty fun. we met our professor for our culture class, paris as spectacle. his name is dr. costello and he seems pretty fantastic. our graduate assistant seems kind of obnoxious, but it has only been a day.

today we pretty much just have orientation and a placement test for our language class, but there'll be a boat ride on the seine tonight!

the pictures is a view from our hotel room. we'll move into the hostel (which is for people attending the universities only) in a few days. french professors, university workers, and students were all on strike for about four months, so their classes and finals have been extended into the end of june, as the strike just ended ten days ago. leah is currently rooming with a french girl, but she will be moved out by june 1st and then i'll move in with her.

we have a pretty full day today, tomorrow we go to giverny (monet's home) for the whole day, but on sunday we have a day off. you can expect more then!

So I accidentally slept late and didn't go to the archive until after the lunch break. It didn't really turn out to be a problem, which is both good and bad, I guess.

The archive is in a relatively unassuming building on Karl Marx street (which, for UNC people, I'd describe as the Rosemary St. to Lenin Blvd's Franklin). Inside it looked like a lot of other Russian buildings, with a front security gate and poor lighting. I talked to the woman at the security desk, who gave me a pass and told me to talk to the director, who told me to fill out a form. I did that, she signed it, and then I had to bring the form to the reading room to sign in.

The reading room was much smaller than I'd expected; it had six desks for visitors and one for the archive worker, who was extremely helpful. I think it's at these points that clothing/shaving/hygiene really comes into play; since I was dressed decently, I think she saw me as "cute confused foreigner" rather than "creepy foreigner". I had to fill out a couple more forms, and then she handed me the archive guide and said I was ready to go.

I'm very glad I came here first rather than Moscow, because just the process of doing archival work is so intimidating right now that I certainly don't need the bustle of the central archives to add to my bewilderment. The archive guide is a 1000 pg. or so book that lists all the fondy (subjects, kind of) and describes what they have. You look at that book, decide what fondy interest you, and the archive worker gives you sub-guides for those. From there, you can see all the collections within that fond. You then get a form and fill it up with the numbers of the collections you want to request; the archive workers then pull them out and let you look through them. That process, however, takes a few days when the archive is crowded, like it was today. So I really didn't spend much time there today, since there was nothing for me to do after filing a request form.

The trick is, there's just so much in the archive that it's hard for me right now to even conceive of looking through everything that could be useful...so I'm going to have to just budget my time well to make sure I can look at all the different sources that might help me. Just the papers of the local soviet from 1941-1945 take up thousands and thousands of pages, and I also need to look at regional soviets, individual factories, letters/memoirs if I can find them, banks, etc. So it's going to be tricky; I just hope I can adjust on the fly well enough to get everything I need to write a good paper.

And don't worry -- I won't be writing about archival work in the future unless it's of general interest, but I figured that this stuff might be interesting since most people never have and never will work in an archive. Speaking for myself, it was interesting because I always had this vague conception of archives as a place where people do research, but I couldn't really imagine how exactly it worked. So now I know.

So in my mind, it's been the same day since Wednesday when I woke up before leaving Houston, and now it's 7 pm local time on Friday here in Tomsk. I got some sleep on the planes, so that's how I'm alive, but I'm not going to have trouble sleeping tonight.

It's also been a very...strange day. Even though I was only there for four hours, Moscow was half-stressful, half-hard-to-stay-awake, and I was pretty much homeless here in Tomsk from 6 am until noon or so.

The first reminder that Russia is a weird place came when it started snowing at 7:30 am, and continued off and on until 11 or so (though none of it stuck). Furthermore, I found that the guy I thought I'd be renting an apartment from apparently disappeared, leaving his phone number to some pharmacy. So I spent the morning in a cafe periodically calling real estate agents until I found out that the waitress had a friend who worked at a real estate place, and through her friend I found an apartment.

Not that that was easy, either. They waited a while to tell me that there'd be a pretty substantial finder's fee, and only after some heavy bargaining did the price come down to something reasonable (but still annoying). So only after all that could I actually sit down and relax in my apartment and watch Game 1 of the Cavs-Magic series with Russian commentary. It was a very appropriate end to my day (except for being at the internet cafe now) in that it was just like the rest of my trip here so far: strange, cool and kind of off-putting, but at least I learned some new words.

just a note - instead of making a new url and blog for every trip i take (a la arden in iceland), i've set up this one for all present and future travel/blogging adventures.

so look for pictures and stories from my upcoming trip to paris for a month (i'll try to post for more than three days, i promise) as well as potential, though probably infrequent, updates from kevin on his research extravaganza in russia.

check back soon! i leave may 27 - less than a week!