My Trip to Almost Germany

This past Friday I took a trip to Strasbourg. Strasbourg is in the northeast of France in the region of Alsace. It's the home to the European Council among other important European things and an amazing cathedral. My visit was a short one and it started at 6:45 am when I got a bus here in Besançon. It was about a two and a half hour drive. I spent it reading my book and somehow not getting bus-sick. I was pretty pumped about this.

We started our day off in Strasbourg by going to the European Council. The tour wasn't very long. We had to go through security to get into the building and then we waited around for 20 minutes for everyone to go use the bathrooms and stand around. A Japanese girl got stuck in one of the stalls because it wouldn't unlock. It was kind of hilarious but no one really knew what to do about it. She got out before anyone managed to find someone to come help her. We then went to the first room for the short tour. Our tour guide seemed to be one of those people who pasted on that smile to get through the day but really hated her job. The first room was a bright orange and was very 1970's. That was later explained by the building having been built in the 1970's, but this is a place where the entirety of Europe comes to meet and discuss world issues. You'd think they would have made the slightest attempt at making a little less obnoxiously 70's since, you know, its 2010 and all... maybe that's just me though... We watched a video that tried to be really hip and cool but failed starting at about the point it used bad techno versions of classical music.

From the room of monstrosities, we went to the still very '70s but much cooler room where the European Parliament meets. As you can see from the picture, it was one of those ovally rooms and actually had areas for spectators to come watch. It was kind of neat. They didn't have country tags like the UN but instead were sat in alphabetical order by last name regardless of country. We sat in the room and listened to the tour guide go on about the room and then we were done with the tour. We stood around for 20 minutes which seems to be obligatory for french field trips. They do this a lot. After boarding the bus we literally sat there for like 10-15 minutes even though everyone was on the bus and we knew where we were going. I feel like anytime there is a chance we will be on time or early they make it a point to delay. The public transportation buses do that here too. For example the two buses from Campus to Centreville will sit literally 20 yards away from the bus stop but not actually pull up to the bus stop until the time it was supposed to leave the stop. This isn't particularly annoying now, but when it was cold, it was annoying to see the bus sitting there but you weren't allowed to get on it yet. Anyway, I digress.

It was too big to get a picture of the whole thing T_T

We went into the centreville of Strasbourg where we were set loose and told to be back at the bus by 4 or we were getting left behind. We went to the Notre Dame of Strasbourg which is the most amazing cathedral I've ever seen. I took about 8 million pictures of it. The inside wasn’t quite as cool. I found it to be too bright and plain inside in comparison to the outside. From here, We found a little market and ate crèpes. They were good, but I was still hungry so I got some chicken and potatoes. I didn’t want an entire half of a chicken, but that’s how it came. It was also really good.

The boat tour was also nice. It had and audio guide who happened to be done by an Irish guy. It wasn’t terribly interesting and I didn’t pay very much attention to it at all. The scenery was really pretty and super green. We returned from the boat tour with just enough time to get ice cream! I got smurf and mango flavored. It was pretty awesome and super bright.

After that we returned home. I passed out cold for a good hour of the trip home. Nothing terribly exciting happened from that point on other than John the Savage coming to the civilized world in my book and me not getting bus sick. It pretty much won. That concludes my Strasbourg trip. ^ ^

Spring/Summer Collections

During one of my last visits to the Baby, The Stars Shine Bright shop in Paris, I was given the 2010 Spring/Summer catalogue as a "gift" for my purchase. I must say all in all, this is a rather disappointing season for me. I did see a few things that caught my eye though.

Damn it Baby! Who said you could try to put bare legs in mah Rorita again? XD

The ugly:

While I don't think that the cream puff skirt version of this design is terrible, the doll version of the JSK is downright hideous. There is just way too much going on and it reminds me of some of the more poorly designed Angelic Pretty rip offs that have been produced over the years.

The Bad:

While this set isn't even that ugly, I can't seem to help but hate it. It reminds me too much of something Mr. Yan would come up with. Bodyline releases dresses like this all the time. I suppose part of it stems from my extreme hatred of aprons, but this dress just isn't doing it for me.

This was another dress that had potential. While I kind of like the black version of this dress (It's my love of stripes, I can't help it), I feel that this print is overall just ugly. It's very plain and boring. On top of the bad print, I find the design of the actual garments to be equally as boring. While this had both the card suits and the stripes going for it, ça me laisse froid.

The Good:

While I'm once again not thrilled with the design of these dresses, I do love the print. If the design were better, this would be up there with Vampire Requiem for me. I do like that unlike Vampire Requiem, they actually released a few accessories like a tote bag purse. The wine bag give away and the brief case style purse that were available for Vampire Requiem left something to be desired. I personally would have like to have at least seen socks or something.

Although I really hate that they modeled this on a guy in the catalogue, I really love this dress. It's obviously not lolita at all, but it's very beautiful. It reminds me of something I'd see from h.Naoto more that Alice and the Pirates. While I find it to be quite beautiful, I don't think I will be purchasing this one myself. I think the dress would sit strangely on someone with any sort of curves, which is probably why this guy is modeling it instead of Kanon Wakeshima like the rest of the dresses in the Alice and the Pirates section of the catalogue. I really like that Alice and the Pirates went for something that stands out as original in this little catalogue of recycled frills.

The Awesome:

I almost feel like I don't need to put a description here about why this is awesome. I mean, it is after all the Marie Antoinette JSK... This print has been many people's dream dress for as long as i can remember. I , myself, would love to have the blue version. I don't even know how I would coordinate it in my 90% black and white wardrobe. But I do know that I want it very badly. The other colors are amazing as well, but there is just something about the blue that gets me.

The Meh:

While I absolutely love the print for this dress, I can't help but be left unmoved by the overall designs of the dresses. While both the OP and JSK strike me as frumpy and unflattering, I'm not terribly excited to see yet another corset skirt. Perhaps my dislike of the skirt stems from my not buying the Castle of Nightmare skirt when I last saw it, but I think it stems more from how I rarely see anyone pull them off without acquiring either a boobloaf or boob shelf in the process of it all. So while this had the opportunity to wow me, it fell short, therefore the meh.

Overall, I feel like I'm seeing a lot of the same thing over and over again. I feel as if even though Baby isn't releasing the same OTT sweet designs every month like Angelic Pretty, it all feels very much like I've seen it before. Not all of it is necessarily even bad. It's just disappointing to see the same concepts being recycled so soon that didn't wow me the first time around, with the sole exception being the Marie Antoinette series, which wows me every time I look at it.

I also just saw Angelic Pretty's new Wonder Cookie Cutter print. I was also disappointed in this one as well. I really like the black version of Sugary Carnival ,the mint versions of Melty Chocolate and just about every version of Starry Night Theatre but this was just poorly executed I think. This one also has that feeling of being a recycled design, more specifically the print looks so familiar to me as a mesh of several of their older prints. I don't agree with their choice of stripes for the dress. I think it adds too much to the already busy print. While the pink and white colorway seems less busy than the others, the black colorway makes my head hurt.

Those are my current feelings on Lolita fashion. I'm looking very much forward to the Marie Antoinette rerelease and will have a very hard time resisting if I can afford it when it is released. I've always been a sucker for the blue version from the very moment I saw it. Hopefully the Fall/Winter catalogue will make me feel better about the fashion I love so much.

L'Ascension d'Eldrazi

This past Sunday, I played in the Rise of Eldrazi pre-release here in Besançon. Having not looked at the spoilers at all, everything was a surprise for me. I was extremely happy with this set. Not only was it extremely fun to play, but the promo was pretty much amazing.



I didn't really enjoy Zendikar this much although I did like the Landfall mechanic. It sort of made or broke your game. It also made getting mana screwed more frustrating than ever. I really liked little 0/1 Eldrazi tokens you could sack for mana. They made the intimidating 15 cost creatures very playable. Anyway, on to my sealed event deck list:

Creatures:
1 Gigantomancer
1 Spawnsire of Ulamog
1 Akoum Boulderfoot
1 Pelakka Wurm
1 Daggerback Basilisk
1 Emrakul's Hatcher
1 Haze Frog
1 Kozilek's Predator
1 Lavafume Invoker
1 Nest Invader
1 Ondu Giant
1 Overgrown Battlement
1 Reinforced Bulwark
2 Sporecap Spider
Ulamog's Crusher
1 Wildheart Invoker
Enchantments:
1 Awakening Zone
Instants:
1 Heat Ray
1 Staggershock
Sorceries:
1 Hellion Eruption
1 Ancient Stirrings
1 Flame Slash
1 Wrap in Flames
Lands:
8 Forests
6 Mountains

My Hellion Eruption and Awakening Zone combo is what won me like 3 games. I also had two people scoop to me when I played the Sawnspire of Ulamog. One was even at 17 life... He very well could have turned it around. Must be no one told him to play to the end because it they can always fuck up. That's what happened to him in the first game actually. He had me down to six, he could have killed me next turn but forgot to do something. I then drew what I needed to take him down.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing this set so far and I'm looking forward to the next few months of drafts when I return home. I know I'm definitely building an eldrazi deck for casual and maybe even for standard if I can manage something that works a little faster. I suppose we'll see after a few drafts eh?

Volcanoes, Strikes, and Lolita

As it stands, two of my three classes are cancelled tomorrow. I am very much okay with this. Thanks to both the volcano in Iceland keeping people from flying in and out of Europe and the SNCF strike, the only train company in France, travel has pretty much come to a halt. While this would be annoying any time of year, Europe is supposed to be on vacation. Actually, vacation ended Sunday... They are supposed to be back to the daily grind of school and work by now. Many people are stuck in other countries or other cities with no way out unless they leg it. And like many of the students at the CLA here in Besançon, they have cancelled classes. It's kind of like a snow day... just cooler because it's a volcano day.

This had minor effects on my travel home from London. I luckily had my Eurostar tickets from London to Paris booked several weeks in advance. I may have been typing this from London had I not. Every Eurostar train going anywhere from London was sold out. This meant a very crowded train station, a lot of angry people, and a very full train to Paris. I got to France to find out that there was in fact an ongoing strike of the SNCF that started the day after I left Paris for Brussels. I found one of the workers with the lists of cancelled trains and lucked out that my train from Paris to Dijon had not been cancelled. This was in fact quite lucky since 2 out 3 trains were cancelled and all the trains going towards Besançon were completely sold out.

I had 5 hours before my train left and the Gare de Lyon is just a short few blocks away from my biggest weakness, Baby, The Stars Shine Bright. The stock over the past few weeks has diminished quite a bit but I think they are waiting on a lot of the spring and summer stock to actually be released. I wandered the little store for a bit and couldn't really find a whole lot that I wanted, aside from the Castle of Nightmare JSK in red. At a whopping 345 euros though, I couldn't afford to buy it. I then noticed something that wasn't there the last two times I went...

I tried it on and loved it. It was also on clearance for around half price. It fit so well I couldn't say no. It's made of a nice velvety fabric. I like that it isn't an over the top childish print, but still screams that it was made by Baby... I'm such a brand whore XD. I also bought a pair of socks.

I'm hoping that they match my Cherries in Syrup skirt well enough to coordinate an outfit.

The store owner asked me if I was going home or if I was stuck since I had my huge ass suitcase with me. I explained to him that I had train tickets, but I wasn't sure how far they were going to take me. He acknowledged that the strike was a real pain and ran off into the stock room hurriedly. I assumed he had forgotten to do something important. The shop girl continued to wrap up my purchase in tissue paper like they always do. He suddenly came back out with a small pink bag of Japanese candy. He put them into my shopping bag and told me that they were for my long journey ahead. It was really nice of him and quite adorable. And they were super good! I'm hoping I can find a store in the US that sells them when I get back home.

I went back to the train station where I decided to wait in line in hopes of changing my tickets to Dijon and the Besançon for a ticket that went directly to Besançon. No such luck as everything was pretty much sold out here too. I went to the waiting room where I managed to grap one of the like eight chairs for an entire train station of people. Eventually, the coolest little old lady ever sat down next to me. She definitely surprised me with her views on religion and her rather liberal political opinions. She was super nice and a blast to talk to. My train then showed up so I had to go. I got to Dijon five minutes late, which meant I had less than six minutes to get to my connecting train. I quickly found out that there would be no connecting train since it had been cancelled. I somehow lucked out again though. Another train was due to show up 20 minutes later. It was running a half hour late in addition to that, but it was another train to Besançon regardless. I had avoided spending the night in Dijon. I finally arrived back in Besançon only 45 minutes later than originally planned. However, after that fiasco along with my trouble from Amsterdam to London, I officially hate trains. This bullshit better be over by the time I need to get home. I'm gonna have to kick the SNCF in the balls if they try to make me miss my precious plane home.

In Europe part 3: London

Getting to London was a bit of a task. I started from Amsterdam Centraal. I got on my train with no issues but something seemed off. It said it would not be going to the airport because of an accident. It did however tell me it was still going to Brussels Midi, which where I was catching my connection to London. 45 minutes into the trip they informed us that this train would not in fact be going to Brussels. It was going to stop in Rosendaal where we needed to get on a bus, drive three cities away to where we would get on a different train that would then go to Brussels -_-'''. The best news was that this was added about an hour on to our trip. Good think I had exactly an hour in Brussels... Long story short, I missed my train to London. Luckily, there was another Eurostar train to London only an hour later and it had spots available. I got on that train and arrived in London 2 hours later.

As far as London goes, I really enjoyed it. That first night I went to the Wellcome Museum to see their exhibit on Identity since it appealed to the linguistic-anthropologist in me. I was disappointed to learn that the website had posted the wrong dates for this exhibit. It had in fact ended a week earlier. I was happy however to see that the permanent exhibit was a small medical museum. This pleased the future doctor in me. The museum had two parts, one was a medical history museum and the other was a medical art museum. The medical art museum had a few neat items. They had a huge bookshelf packed full of a set of books that contained the complete human genome supposedly. It was pretty neat. I, myself, enjoyed the historical part more. I was especially intrigued by some of the non-medical objects they had such as the Chinese foot binding shoes. I knew that they were small but I didn't think that they were quite that small. I can't believe they could even fit a baby's foot into them.

The second day I went to the Camdem Markets. I really enjoyed this as it was pretty much a little city of alternative fashion. I bought two necklaces, a belt, and a bunch of panda stuff. I went to Cyberdog and was sad that I couldn't afford anything that I was in love with. It's pretty much a raver or cyber goth's dream store. I also found a few lolita stores. There was of course SaiSai and another smaller store that was a branch of SaiSai. I also saw a store called Angel Pretty (lol). I didn't actually go in though since at this point in time I had seen all the GLP products there were to see and was tired of being harrassed by store owners about any item I appeared to be mildly interested in. I just looking at it damnit! Let me shop in peace! Seriously though, I wish store owners at places like this would learn that this kind of behavior deters customers. They do it at cons too. It makes the customer uncomfortable and then they leave without buying stuff. Go ahead and greet them but it's much better to let them look and they will ask you if they need any help.

I also went to a lot of the tourist attractions in London. I visited Buckingham Palace, St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of London. I was disappointed by Buckingham Palace for the sole reason that the guards weren't in red nor wearing a furry black beehive hat. That's really the only reason I went there... St. Paul's Cathedral was probably interesting but I personally didn't feel like spending the 12.50 pounds to go inside. The outside was pretty but the tiny bit of the inside looked similar enough to the Notre Dame of Paris to feel like I was missing much. I did enjoy the Tower of London. It was easy to spend a few hours in it. While there wasn't anything that really stood out about it, it was nice to see a castle that wasn't over the top like the Palace of Versailles and the Louvre.

Assemble there everyone!

While the touristy things I did didn't really stand out in my trip, I did have a few interesting things happen. I did manage to find a pub called The Dolphin Bar about 5 minutes walk from my hotel. It was a little Irish pub with scrawny British guys serving beers at the bar. It was also a Thai food restaurant though. It had two or three Thai kids about my age running around bringing people their curry and satay. It was quite a shocking mix. The Thai food was good enough for me to eat there twice during my 6 day stay. The other thing that stood out in my trip was much less pleasant. While I was en route to Buckingham Palace, some British guy started talking to me. The fact that he walked up to me while I was walking stuck me as strange to begin with. He didn't come off as super creepy until about a minute later though. He asked if I would "take some time to go with him." I naively thought he meant he wanted to have a drink somewhere. I declined and added I was meeting friends that night and have stuff planned until I leave London. He asked if I "really won't get with him tonight" Still thinking he was talking about drinks, I said no, I really can't. He then asked if I was really that loyal to my boyfriend that I wouldn't get with him at least once. At that point I finally caught on to what he was insinuating. I angrily told him that I was definitely loyal to my boyfriend. He then said that he'd leave me be on my way. I was quite glad because if anything other than that had come out of his mouth, I would have gone into Bitchy American Mode (TM).

My lolita coordinate for the day ^ ^

My favorite thing I did in London wasn't actually in London at all. I took a bus trip out to Stonehenge. It was pretty amazing. The bus trip was about an hour and a half and made me quite sick, but it was very much worth it. Stonehenge itself is a tiny bit smaller than I had expected it to be. I had also expected the "busy highway" that ran next to it to be more than a two lane road. Our bus driver was also rather entertaining. He was constantly muttering about how he'd like to squash all the cars and pedestrians that stupidly run in front of his bus. He also was really good about pointing out points of interest during the drive such as the building where all of the dinner scenes in Harry Potter were filmed and Mary Poppins' House.

All in all London was great. I really enjoyed it despite it's tourist attractions not holding up to the awesomeness of Paris and Amstedam's. It's somewhere I'd really like to go back to .

In Europe Part 1: Paris & Brussels

I've been wandering around a few major cities in Europe this past week and a half. I started off with Paris. I have been to Paris a few times before however, this time was particularly awesome since my Dad was with me. We visited all the important sites: Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Versailles, Arc de Triomphe, and Notre Dame. We also made our way to a few other sites like Baby The Stars Shine Bright, Jim Morrison's grave, and The American Legion in Paris. Sadly our first few days there were rainy. I naturally used this as an excuse to buy myself a BTSSB umbrella... I also grabbed myself a pair of socks and a little bag.



Once the lack of umbrella problem was fixed, it stopped raining. I'm certainly not complaining about that. While there was a lot of new things discovered for my Dad in his first days in Europe, Paris provided me with no new culture shocking experiences other than French Pizza not being all terrible. I suppose the one thing that really did surprise me the gigantic crowd around the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.



Across from the Mona Lisa is a huge painting probably 100 times the size of the Mona Lisa. It was strange to see so many people flocking around such a small painting while behind them there was a great painting that most people wouldn't even be able to fit in their homes. While the paintings were great and all, I really prefered the statues and the basement where you could see some of the original infrastructure of the building dating back to 1100 AD if I remember correctly.


How Shocking!

From Paris we went to Brussels. I was rather surprised at how small the place was. We saw just about everything in one afternoon. The Grand Place was very beautiful, especially at night.



Brussels is also home to the best ice cream I have ever had. I had Speculoos, vanilla, and straciatella ice cream. While the vanilla was amazing, the fact that Speculoos ice cream had Speculoos in it made it my favorite. While straciatella is one of my favorite candies, I was disappointed by the ice cream because while it was still great, it just didn't compare to the other two ice creams or actually eating straciatella. We also made our way to the Manneken Pis which was sadly not dressed up. I heard a tour guide telling its group that when it is dressed up it pees beer instead of water as usual.



While in Brussels, we also went to Autoworld. While I'm not a big car person, it was a really neat little museum. Everything was in chronological order. As someone who alphabetizes anything with text, I appreciate order. They also had prototypes and working models of several more recent cars such as those adorable little smart cars you see everywhere (at least in Europe). They also had a few old carriages such as Napoleon's wedding carriage. It was quite an impressive collection of cars and motorcycles (among a few other vehicles). My personal favorite was the Amphibicar from the 1970's that you could actually use as a boat in addition to driving it on the road. I've seen the tour bus/boats that do this too, but I think the idea that this car being available to the general public was really neat. I wonder if you needed a boating license to go cruising in the water with it...



As someone who doesn't eat mussels or drink beer, I was quite fond of Brussels despite it not having a whole lot to do outside of bars and museums. It's a nice little place although the variety of languages being spoke can be confusing. I, myself, was never sure whether to speak to people in English or in French. I did get to see a man that was too drunk to move sleep in the middle of a somewhat busy street. I thought he was dead at first... Then the driver got out of his car and moved the drunk man to the sidewalk and continued on his way. I loved how none of this seemed to be anything but commonplace here. In part 2, I'll be talking about the second half of my trip through Europe to both Amsterdam and London.

1600 Pandas Manifestation in Besançon, France

One of the coolest things I've seen while here in France surprisingly took place right in the very town I'm staying in. I'm talking about the 1600 Pandas Manifestation that is taking place this year throughout France. As I'm sure we all know, the French love to go on strike. Everyone loves Pandas. Leave it to France to combine the two. On April 1st 2010, La Place de Revolution in Besak was the home of 1600 little panda statues and I loved it.



So many pandas!

The "Panda Strike" is meant to raise awareness for wildlife preservation. The 1600 pandas, which were all hand made with paper maché and sponge painted (also by hand), represent the estimated 1600 pandas remaining in the world today. This campaign is being put on all throughout France, obviously including the city of Besançon where I am living right now. It was definitely quite the sight to see.




Panda Love!

You were also able to buy the pandas at 50 euros each. While I really wanted to take home a panda, I really was curious if they had extra pandas to replace the ones that were bought... Now I didn't count them, but if someone buys one you don't have 1600 pandas anymore...I suppose we will never know. While I didn't buy a panda (I'm not even sure I'd have been able to return to the USA with it) I did buy a t shirt and a "I Panda my Planet" bracelet. Sadly, the bracelet is really just a ribbon, but it still claims to "panda" its planet.



These guards are the real reason I don't have a panda statue in my life right now.

In actuality, I really wanted to pull the "cute American girl" card to get a panda to take home. I never actually tried although I did get them to let Amy, another American girl, and I to take pictures in with the pandas. And while I'm currently writing from Brussels, and have spent the last three days in Paris, this event still stands out as one of the very best I've seen in my time here.



Come to the USA for me sometime little Pandas!

Il ne reste que 1600 pandas dans le monde. Moi inclus!