Les Passages Couverts Paris

The Saturday before last I went with my Rotary club to see les Passages Couverts in Paris.  I know this post is a bit late coming, but I forgot my camera that day, so I had to wait for lovely people from the Rotary club to send me their pictures before I could post.  Thank you to Micheline for sharing the pictures I've posted here.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with les passages (as I was before I saw them), they are basically shop-lined streets covered by glass roofs and (of course, since this is Paris) decorated with beautiful art.  The tour guide of course said everything in French, which I couldn't understand because she spoke very fast, but the Rotarians were very helpful in doing their best to translate for me, and with their pretty good English and my very little French, I was able to learn some interesting things.  However, the most interesting part of the day was by far the beautiful art, so, without further ado, here are the pictures!

gqhhh; AZERTY

Trying to type on qn AZERTY keyboqrd is one of the ,ost frustrqting things I hqve ever done:  I've been battling the AZERTY transition up until now, but I've decided that as long as I'm in France, I might as well learn the keyboard layout so I can work on computers other than my own without taking five minutes to find the comma.  Since my computer obviously has the keys marked for QUERTY, this transition is rather difficult because I have to keep an AZERTY keyboard diagram constantly open in another tab and refer to it whenever I don't know where something is.

As I'm currently using AZERTY, this post has taken an inordinate amount amount of time to create, so I'm going to sign off now, but not before putting this out there...If any of my friends or family in the United States wants an idea for an easily mailable gift, next time there is an occasion for gift giving please send me AZERTY keyboard stickers!

Now, just for fun, I'm going to write a secret message by typing as if I was on a QWERTY keyboard but using AZERTY:

Thereùs q very zeird Qustrqliqn exchqnge student in ,y clqss qt school:  Her nq,e is Qnnie; she zill be in Frqnce for six ,onths; qnd this is q shout out to her1

Best zishes to qll fro, Frqnce;
Sophia

Maison Van Gogh

 Okay, this is going to be a quick post with mostly pictures, because I really need to clean my room.  So basically, the day before we visited Paris my host mom and sister took me to Van Gogh's house, which is about 20 minutes from my house.  This is the house he lived in for the last 60 days of his life, where he did his best work and also where he died.  It was an incredible thing to be standing in the room where Van Gogh died.  I almost cried.  It was very intense.  We also walked around the village, Auvers-sur-Oise, which is quite gorgeous.  So, without further ado, here's the pictures!

Lovely corner of Auvers-sur-Oise...

Me, standing on a stairway in said lovely corner....

And Van Gogh's painting of said lovely corner!

The Hotel de Ville of Auvers-sur-Oise....

And Van Gogh's take on the Hotel de Ville of Auvers-sur-Oise!

Me in front of the Auberge Ravoux, where Van Gogh rented a room for the last 60 days of his life.  He lived in a small room upstairs.  

 I have a lot more pictures which I think I will post as I get the chance...Pictures just take so long to upload, and it's hard to sit for an hour on the computer to make a blog post when I could be doing so many other things here!