Remember: There's all kinds of love

Happy Valentine's Day!
(click an image to enlarge)

What a great 2008

A good paper
Innovation party
Lunds visit
New Delhi, Agra, Mumbai, Bangalore
Anders & Cory visit
Wilfried & Sarah dinners
Tapes & Tapes
Papers
Edinburgh
Compassionate Care for Rape Victims becomes law
March for Sex Workers' Rights
Meghan & Mike visit
Papers
Cizor's haircuts
Laurent and the server
Sarnowskis visit
Madeleine the MPA baby
Accepted to the UN
Papers
Matt G visit
Bridget visit
Paul, Melissa, Jennie visit
Brittany & Normandy trip
Italy with Erin
Moving to Geneve
Meeting friends for life
Dasha bike trips
Deirdre dinners
Italy with Dasha
Bicycle accident
Goth night with Gerrit & Agathe & Caroline
Carte de sejour
Boulangerie sandwiches
March for Transsexual Rights
New fridge
Daylight savings time
Obama!
Papers
Global Public Policy Network Student Conference
London with Caroline, Anne, Patricia
Bahrain
Amanda & Leo visit
Capstone awesomeness
Thanksgiving expat style
Dasha visit
Drinks with Anand
Gotan Project
Christmas dinner expat style
Phone calls with Josh
Friends getting married
Friends having babies
Friends' birthdays
New friends, old friends

...All of this because of my wonderfully supportive family.

Wishing you a New Year that exceeds what you deserve and is better than you imagined!!!

A bientôt 2009!

Some views of holiday around Paris these days

Happy holidays!!!!!

(click to enlarge or visit the Flickr site for more)


Paul & Joe store front



Santa at the pawn shop



Picking a tree



Cassina store in white and silver foxes



Trees in my neighborhood



Lights on rue Lepic, Montmartre



Lights near Beaubourg (aka Centre Pompidou)



NOEL - I couldn't tell what this whole street art on the metro said, but something related to Noel 2008 Biento 2009 (ie, "à bientôt" = see you soon)

Holidays in Paris

(click the images to enlarge)

Dasha arrives at Gare du Nord - yay!



Thanksgiving party with ex-pats, French friends, and other EU folks

I decided to go with what I've traditionally brought to Thanksgiving for the past five years (inspired by Bowen and enjoyed by my family), which ironically is getting only better now that I'm in Paris: cheese and bread!


photo © Dasha


Stopped by my local "cave" man. "Cave" means something like wine cellar in French. Gilles hooks me up with lovely vin rouge or blanche or champagne. He's great. Visit him at Terroir et Nature on the corner of rue de Douai and rue Fontaine.


photo © Dasha


so. much. good. bread.

photo © Dasha


Dasha models the heavy bread bag, the heavier cheese bag, the wine



The fromage guy wrote each name and type of cheese for us - so nice!!



The beginning of the feast - great: cooking, cheese, bread, friends, wine, and more and more food (batteries weak, no flash)


I was at the little kids' table, there were 27 of us

photo © Kenny

The big kids' table

photo © Kenny

Dancing ensued at the end (had to find a way to work off all that pie!) and then champagne came out

photo © Kenny

And then, there were crazy antics (yes, that's me being hoisted)

photo © Kenny

All in all, a fabulous way to spend Thanksgiving when not with family back home. Thankful for all these great friends.

Happy Birthday January!

There are a ton of my favorite people celebrating birthdays in January. I haven't made the post office deadline of 2 weeks ago to mail you all fun French cards, so I take this moment to wish you all a wonderful new year in your life. I hope you can look back on this past year with a feeling of accomplishment, joy, strength, and love. May the next year be all that and more for each of you.

Happy birthday to Jennie P, Emily C, Bridget H, Karla S, Jennifer O, Sara F, Bill D, Josh L, Mom, Will C, Simone H, and Dad!!

I wanted to give you a birthday cake, but




it's been hard to find a French birthday cake.



When you search for "birthday cake" on Google images you get a ton of options.

Have yourself a harvest cake!













For the sportslover:












You can even eat your own face!













So I thought I might be able to find a cake shop in Paris, but got this instead -- and I refuse to wish you this kind of cake.













Without spending too much time procrastinating or digging for real French cakes, I found this "French wedding cake" which reminds me of our Norwegian Kranzkuchen:





Which even came with its own Norwegian couple in the Google images section:






Now, I know I'm poking fun. There are amazing bakeries in France and incredible chefs/bakers and the best designers in the world so I _know_ that there are good birthday cakes out there. I just don't have the time to look hard right now, and kind of want to joke around. So, don't take offense, but this came up under "birthday cake french" and looks like it really means "I don't wish you well on your birthday, instead, maybe you should consider choking to death."














So, in the end I guess I'll wish you with a galette des rois, which is still being sold in the boulangeries but I think it's like blue-light special now since the day of celebration was January 6th. The US Embassy explains and offers a recipe which basically boils down to eat a stick of butter with an egg on top. (Although this English-translated French recipe is the real truth of the baking.) At our gallete des rois school party, determined to be the 'queen' of the party, I got a huge slice and almost passed out from an overdose of sugar. No, honest. My eyes started kind of spinning and I got such a head rush. If I'd had a bat and piñata I would have gone to town. Instead, I tempered it with a bit of white wine, remained calm, got crowned and gave our director my fève (strange collection).




Or, please choose from any of these lovely traditional French pasteries like the élair (which means lightning, too).





Just please try to have a better time celebrating your birthdays than this woman, listed as "Yummy parisian cake"


um, yeah....







If I missed your birthday, I sincerely apologize. Please send me your date and I promise to toast you with equally as much sugar and love as I did the other folks.

the mad dash

A lot of people don't understand when I tell them I spent New Years working on a paper, trolling the 'net, drinking champagne, and then climbed up to my roof to watch fireworks. It was nice and mellow. I think some misunderstood reputation of partying precedes me. Heh. Well, it's not the entirely unfounded. I have been known to go to some wild New Years parties and stay up until dawn. But I've also been known to - and fondly remember - go up into the woods of backland Wisconsin and stay in a cabin, putting logs on the fire, drinking champagne and howling to Jeff Buckley - while remaining terrified all the while that some wolves would eat me.

I had invitations. My good pals Sarah and Wilfried invited me to dinner and drinks at their place. My cool landlord Fabien invited me to his place where he and his girlfriend were hosting a few people. A colleague called to invite me out with others who were in town. Friends of Rod's invited me previously to join them up north. So many wonderful people concerned that I wouldn't have a good place to be. But I did find one. Hanging out with me!

I made a little video up on the roof but I need to go back and look at it. I was a bit toasted at the time and not sure of the quality now. Although I was thrilled to be filming over the rooftops just when the clock struck and the Eiffel went from drab, uniform lights to sparkling, dashing, debonair lighting. And then the big booming fireworks started all across the horizon.

So, between my early return to school - it's just less distracting there for all the papers I'm to write - and cooking dinner and just living, I'm trying to get old photos up on flickr and the digifilms up on youtube. Please check them when you're bored as they're changing quite a bit.

Oh, yeah, and speaking of the youtube, how cool is this?

A film with Radiohead in it made for New Year's Eve, 2007. Features every song on their new album IN RAINBOWS




Happy 2008 to you all!

The season

Well, Sarkozy is off kissing the Pope's hand. I didn't think twice-divorced people could do that. I guess even the Pope can be flexible.

Bush is denying denying denying.

The Middle East is exploding.

Former Guantanamo 'prisoners' are freed after 4 years (oh, the stories they'll tell to the world, I hope I hope I hope).

Elizabeth II outlasts the other ones and Victoria. (Cheers to health care!)

New Orleans is coming down, but not without protest.

Candidates are jabbing and smearing.


.....

I hope to pull some time tonight to post a bunch of photos I've taken over the past month. You'll be able to see Paris - the real city of lights - at the holiday season. While some neighbors have coma-inducing lights blinking up and down the street and major shopping thoroughfares have tightropes of Santa faces or miniature trees, there's no snow to make me really think it's winter or Christmas. I am not complaining - PERIOD. But I don't feel any nostalgia or wistfulness or emptiness like I would have thought. Christmas is such a family-focused holiday for me. Snow rolls in around late Oct / early Nov, the temperature drops, the TV turns up its bombardment of commercialism, lights lights up everywhere, the capitol showcases the tallest tree in the world, I feel the pressure of time to come up with the most perfect gift for friends and family and Secret Non-Secular Santa at the office, mom sends a chocolate advent calendar, I pick my days off from work, I rent the car, I agonize about the drive up to the parents because I know blizzards and ice, I drive white-knuckled up the highway with all the distracted laissez-faire drivers, mom jokes about dragging the Christmas tree out (but I know she secretly likes challenging her Martha Stewart sensibilities), dad tells us the schedule for visiting grandma and the other relatives out at the farm, my sister and I have wine and tell stories about our lives lately to catch everyone up, we still get 1 present on Christmas Eve, mom still pretends Santa drops off our stocking gifts on our section of the couches, she also still pretends we can't see them for the bed sheets she lays over them (surprise is key!), someone wakes me up in the morning because I'm lazy now, they make fun of me being grumpy before my coffee, they make me crawl to the tree and hand out the first round of gifts because I'm still the youngest, we each take turns opening and "ooooh" and "aaaah"ing over things we had on our list, we use dad's Swiss Army knife for opening the tightly taped, we toss the gift wrap into recycling, dad asks if we'd like another cup of coffee, mom asks if we want some kind of toasted fruit bread with jam, we finally finish the glutonous high of indulgence, take naps or play with our new toys, dress, head out to the farm, hugs and kisses for all the family there, wistful thoughts for those who couldn't make it, grandma gets smaller and more frail every year and her hugs are tiny and bony but man is she still alive and twinkling, we mingle in the various rooms with the various extended family, the ladies keep the food cooking (it's a matriarchy, trust me), we serve ourselves, we sit at our randomly assigned seats at the long family table (although secretly this is planned out very well by one of the younger cousins in accordance with who they want sitting next to them and then down the line), we give the Norweigen blessing, we toast with the German white wine my dad brings or someone else's wine, we eat and laugh and laugh and debate and discuss and get seconds and hug and feel full in our bellies and full in our hearts and stronger in our minds, and then we dissapate slowly with some going home or some staying (or some cousins bucking all trends and finding a downtown bar to have coctails - or maybe that's Xmas Eve only), hugs and kisses and remembering schedules as to when we'll come back out to the farm for lunch or sledding down the hill or board games or future rendezvous in other cities for those who have to leave right away.

It's sunny outside my apartment. Sunny and 39F. Not a trace of snow to inspire me to feel seasonal, although I do - now - feel a bit wistful.

Well. I've got a paper to send off to the professor today. Once we've turned it in, I'll send out the link to it on google docs. It's a group project for our Managing Innovation in the Globalising Learning Economy: "Investment in Social Capital and Cultural Industry - An Argument for Advancing Policy to Enhance Economies of Metropoles." Sounds big, feels big, but really is just a 3-part paper to look at how better petri dishes attract better bacteria to make better colonies. IE, better cities -> creative people -> stronger economy. I'm in charge of theory - UGH! - the two boys did case studies on their respective cities (Berlin, Seoul) and we 3 sent out a survey to MPA students (and you all, thank you, although you won't be taken into consideration until next semester - we're continuing with the project beyond the class even!). We were hoping to run a regression on the data we had from the survey but frankly we're just not advanced in stats enough yet to be able to set up our own data set to run it. Maybe next semester. Yeah, so I have to finish my section and do the editing on the whole thing. Hm, English as a First Language = disadvantage here.

Tomorrow, I'm off to Madrid through the 26th to hang out with a friend there. I haven't been in 10 years so I'm psyched to see how the city has changed. I don't think there will be time to sneak down to Toledo (where I studied in undergraduate) but that's okay for now. I have no idea what to expect with this trip or this holiday. It's an adventure. Fun! Of course this means I will be nose to the grind when I get back - and NOW.

So, off I go.

A very happy merry few days to you and yours. I love my friends and family. I hope you all got your gifts - my small contribution to capitalism and my very small token to show you how much you are loved and thought about abroad. To new friends, cheers and fond thoughts in your direction!

See you when I get back - before the New Year no doubt.