1109 Paris day1

I woke up at 6am this morning and went to the airport to go to Paris. Technically, I have been to Paris but I don’t remember it at all cause I think I were still 3 years old. It took only 1 hour to go to Paris by airplane, and arrived at there at 10am. Took the train and arrived at the center of Paris at 11am. Everyone speaks French and there were more ethnical diversity in the train. France colonized many African nations so many africans are now living in France. I got off the metro at Nortorldam cathedral station. as getting up to the stairs and first looking at the scenery of Paris, I was stunned. Paris was more magnificent than I expected. I was very hungry so walked around the city and tried to find some place where I can grab something. I found a sandwich shop near to the Louvre museum. 

I heard Paris is famous for cheese so I tried to take sandwich with cheese. And I went back to the museum and I ate it in front of it. I biked it and realized that it was not cheese but kamaboko. Kamaboko is boiled fish paste. Sandwich with kamaboko must sounds very weird but I would say the taste was okay. And during my lunch time, something not good happened. Two women, who looked like asian maybe and aged around 40?, came to talk to me with some board. Asking like “where are you from? Japan? China? Many people from either countries wrote down this paper. Now we are collecting signatures to protect Deaf people”. They said to me something like that. At first I denied but they forced me to write so I just wrote my address and signature randomly. Then they asked me to give a money. You signed so you need to pay!! What the hell. I’ve never met with such an inconsequent way of extorting money!! I just said I had no money and just kept denying. In the end, they gave up and got away from me. But they said to me like “fuck you” in French. Ummmmm as I expected, Paris was insecure place. I need to pay attention to this kind of person.

 Here is completely different from peaceful Leiden city. I still didn’t do anything but wrote too much time to write. Lets continue to write. Louvre museum was super huge and at first I couldn’t even find the entrance. I’m not big fun of art things so I just headed to Mona Lisa as everyone did. There were many people taking a picture of Mona Lisa, but umm for me to be honest it was not so special. Maybe because of the scarce background of art, I was not able to be moved by watching it. There were thousands of paintings in this museum. I did not understand why this painting has a supreme evaluation for a long time. I didn’t think that taking pictures of painting while you are in museum is good way to enjoy works. In the era of medieval, aristocracy collected paintings as proof of wealth. However, same things can be seen in people in the museum these days. They came to the Louvre not to enjoy masterpieces but to take pictures and posted on social media to brag. If art is the explosion of soul, this tendency is not so good. The power of imagination has been getting weaker after the invention of camera I think. What we need to do in front of art must be to imagine how the artists trying to draw. After that, I went to science po, where my friends was studying. This is one of the greatest political universities in Europe and I would like to visit there. It was located in the center of Paris and the area was sophisticated. There were many antique shops and fashionable artistic something around the area. The people in this area looked so fashionable. Anyway I tried to go inside of science po but there were two guard men in front of the entrance so I could not enter the building if I did not show school id. I explained I was planing to study master course here so I just check the inside the building. But they denied strongly in French. Why dutch can speak English so well but French cannot?? This is because of their nationality I think. 

And walked alongside of seine river and got to Orsey museum. It is famous for impressionist paintings. Same as in Louvre, I could go inside without paying. We European students just need to show our identification and school ID. Therefore I just paid for trains and the sandwich today! I liked Monet and Renoir. Louvre was too huge and there were not consistent order of exhibition. On the contrary, orsey is easy to enjoy the paintings. I prefer orsey. And took a train to go to my friend`s house by train. It took 1 hour from orsey, so like suburb of Paris. Had a dinner with his family and talked a lot. I had an awesome night.