A little bit of everything, and a lot of ham

I live! I know it has been a while, but the last month or so has been extremely busy with visitors, traveling, and a ton of schoolwork.

Rewind to the end of April, when my friend Rachel (who is studying in Bologna for the year) came up to visit me in Paris. After living in Paris for three months, I've learned to discriminate when it comes to food and culture: without refusing a cafe creme that isn't made with delicious, artery-clogging heavy cream or being picky about in which museum I prefer to view Monet's water lilies, I would be simply overwhelmed by this city's cultural bounty. The arrival of a good friend who reads food blogs and loves art, then, helped me refine my list of Paris' finest. Guided by my local knowledge and the New York Times travel section's omniscience, Rachel and I set out to be more culturally discriminating than Parisians themselves. Between strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens, museum hopping, and drooling over beautifully creamy stationery, we ate everything -- but not anything. A typical exchange went something like this:
R: Lauren. Stop. This place is famous for its macarons!
L: I don't really like macarons, though, Rach. I think I'll hold out for something at the boulangerie.
R: You'll like these. We're buying some. NOW.
Through our combined efforts, by the end of the weekend I had not only shared with Rachel the best coffee, tartlettes, cheicken, baguette, and ham in Paris, but I had also further refined my bonnes addresses for food in Paris: Laudree for macarons (which I found I do indeed like very much), and Jean-Paul Hevin for The Best Chocolate I've Ever Had -- dark chocolate raspberry ganache (nb: I realize "best chocolate" is a big claim to make, but I'm willing to make it for this bit of heaven). The total damage: fourteen pastries between two girls in five days. Apart from the food adventures, having a visitor who so appreciated a big city was lovely, because it helped me get past Paris' less favorable aspects (public urination, grey skies, the fact that nothing works properly) and appreciate everyting that makes Paris such a wonderful place to live.

About a week later, I found out that I'm going to be living the Parisian life for a month longer than I had previously anticipated: I'm going to be helping a professor from Sciences Po with some research that he is doing on the French Revolution. I'm a huge fan of the American Revolution -- how could one deny the Founding Fathers' brilliance or the underdog narrative? -- but nothing could be cooler than learning about the French Revolution in Paris. Safe to say I'm sufficiently excited. Fringe benefits? Time at the National Archives and an extra month of food in Paris...not too shabby.

Finally, last weekend I went down to visit a friend in Barcelona. After living in a beautiful, but uniformly old and overwhelmingly haussmannian city for the past few months, Barcelona was a bit shocking, and very cool. It was founded as a Roman city, but now includes modern skyscrapers and a ton of modernismo -- kindof like the Spanish version of Art Nouveau. Let me tell you: modernismo -- especially Gaudi -- is seriously trippy. Gaudi's philosophy was that nature, since created by God, is perfect, and thus architecture should use forms found in nature. This resulted in a park that is decorated with mosaics and smashed bottles and a cathedral whose towers look like melting candlesticks. But by far the coolest sight of the weekend was in fact not modernismo, but -- get ready for me to be predictable -- a super interesting history museum. The Museu d’Historia de la Ciutat is a museum of the Roman history of Barcelona. But this is no boring history lesson: the main rooms of the museum are simply Roman ruins, with glass walkways built over them. You walk around these ruins and see everything: the doorways to houses, the waiting room of the laundramat, the wine cellars... it was phenomenal that these ruins were so old, and yet walking around them gives you the feeling of being so connected to history, and so similar to the people who lived there. One last thing about Barcelona: the ham. I love the ham in Paris, but the ham in Barcelona was a horse of a different color: it was salty, uncooked, and absolutely delicious. Parisian ham wants a baguette and butter, but Spanish ham has to be eaten alone to be properly appreciated. Suffice to say that I nearly ate my weight in this stuff, it was so good.

Other than that, there's not too much going on in Paris. There was a three-week-long, day-and-night protest in favor of the Tamil Tigers (a rebel group in Sri Lanka) outside my apartment that just ended a few days ago, and I took a four-hour exam on Saturday morning (if that isn't sadistic, I really don't know what is). I have a lot of papers to write and a friend visiting from the States on Thursday, so I've gotta run... you'll hear from me soon!