27 November 2008
Mumbai
If like me you're looking for live info on what's happening in Mumbai, check here for video and here for twitter updates.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I've made pumpkin pies and cranberry sauce, Betsy's taken the day off for doctors' appointments and a massage and shopping, and she and the boys are on their way home soon. We'll head over to spend Thanksgiving dinner with our new friends Rachel & Greg, plus old friend Philippe and family, but we'll be missing you all and thinking of you. Happy turkey and don't stuff yourselves! (ugh)
26 November 2008
23 November 2008
Flat Stanley in Paris
The boys' cousin Cooper sent Flat Stanley to visit Paris, and all he got was these lousy photos!
14 November 2008
Field trip!
Today I went with Calvin's class to the city's modern art museum. No, not the national museum of modern art (a/k/a, the Pompidou center, that ridiculous alien Habitrail dropped on the Beaubourg neighborhood. The much less known city's museum, or properly le Musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris, which occupies part of a decrepit and alarmingly fascist building left over from the fifth and last world's fair in Paris, the same one that gave us the excruciatingly bad Palais de Chaillot at Trocadero. I actually like a fair bit of the modern art I've seen but I haven't found a museum of it I like. Anyhoo, I rant.
Wait a sec, I'm not done! What a fun one that 1937 World's Fair must've been, eh? As the ExpoMuseum site says, "it is remember (sic) mostly for the contrasting pavillions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which literally 'faced off' in front of the Eiffel Tower." Gee, sounds like fun for the whole family. If that didn't float you, the art highlight was Picasso's Guernica, showing the atrocities of the Spanish civil war.
Well then, back to fun for the whole class! I met them at school around 12:30, and the kids had just finished lunch and were heading outside to burn off steam for 15 minutes. They returned and my group of five kids joined the other four parents (moms), teacher, and 20 other kids to troop to the bus stop around the corner. I'm thinking the other passengers noticed we were there, eh? After a slow walk up the hill from the bus stop to the museum, and a crazy maze of directions trying to find the bathrooms for the kids, and then waiting 15 minutes with the kids being shushed by museum guards, the docent finally showed up. I recognized her french accent as American, and from speaking to her briefly learned that she spent a year at the Smithsonian American Art museum a couple of years back. Too bad I couldn't remember the name of the woman we knew from there - Duncan's mom?
The docent showed the kids two major works - La fée electrique by Raoul Dufy, and something else by someone else. (Fine liberal arts education coming through here!) It's easy to describe the first, an enormous panorama of the history of electricity (!) painted for the 1937 fair. It's hard to picture, though, since it's 10 meters (33 feet) high and 60 meters (200 feet) long, wrapped around a mostly oval room. You'll have to check out the movie. The second main piece she presented was a geometric abstract, and if you know the artist shout it out! The kids did little art projects with each, making a colorful fairy inspired by the first, and (you guessed it) a colorful geometric thingy from the second.
Blah blah blah, we made it home fine after a walk in the rain and a wait for the bus. Thanks to the wait, you get to see a movie of the kids singing in a bus shelter too!
And those and other pics are located here. Enjoy.
Well then, back to fun for the whole class! I met them at school around 12:30, and the kids had just finished lunch and were heading outside to burn off steam for 15 minutes. They returned and my group of five kids joined the other four parents (moms), teacher, and 20 other kids to troop to the bus stop around the corner. I'm thinking the other passengers noticed we were there, eh? After a slow walk up the hill from the bus stop to the museum, and a crazy maze of directions trying to find the bathrooms for the kids, and then waiting 15 minutes with the kids being shushed by museum guards, the docent finally showed up. I recognized her french accent as American, and from speaking to her briefly learned that she spent a year at the Smithsonian American Art museum a couple of years back. Too bad I couldn't remember the name of the woman we knew from there - Duncan's mom?
The docent showed the kids two major works - La fée electrique by Raoul Dufy, and something else by someone else. (Fine liberal arts education coming through here!) It's easy to describe the first, an enormous panorama of the history of electricity (!) painted for the 1937 fair. It's hard to picture, though, since it's 10 meters (33 feet) high and 60 meters (200 feet) long, wrapped around a mostly oval room. You'll have to check out the movie. The second main piece she presented was a geometric abstract, and if you know the artist shout it out! The kids did little art projects with each, making a colorful fairy inspired by the first, and (you guessed it) a colorful geometric thingy from the second.Blah blah blah, we made it home fine after a walk in the rain and a wait for the bus. Thanks to the wait, you get to see a movie of the kids singing in a bus shelter too!
And those and other pics are located here. Enjoy.
Châteaux
Carter has an exposé (project report) on châteaux forts (medieval castles) in a couple of weeks. Here are some pictures he's collected from our trips to Provins and Vincennes.
Cassoulet?
See the things we miss by not having US TV coverage of the election!
From the Wikipedia page on cassoulet (which is a southwestern french dish of beans and duck and sausage and ... general yumminess),
From the Wikipedia page on cassoulet (which is a southwestern french dish of beans and duck and sausage and ... general yumminess),
Cassoulet enjoyed a burst of unexpected fame in the United States on election night, November 4, 2008, when a large "Cassoulet" banner along with a smaller "Cassoulet Forever" banner was repeatedly held aloft from a crowd gathered outside ABC News' Times Square studios in New York. This banner was a joke made for a French TV show named Le Petit Journal presented by Yann Barthès (in Le Grand Journal presented by Michel Denisot, Canal+), that was broadcasting from New-York for the election. In a matter of hours, the word was actively looked for over the internet[1], being the 62th most searched word on Google [2].
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