Me and MK: BFF

Didn't I say I was checking websites for pictures of me and Mary-Kate? I found this one on htttp://leaveumalohan.blogspot.com

There is also a video at http://x17video.com/celebrity_video/marykate_olsen/x17_xclusive_the_olsen_sisters.php

So of course I'm like, ooh look at me! And I'm pausing on the parts where I'm next to MK.

Chanel Fashion Show

So this morning, I went to go stalk the Chanel fashion show! At first I went to the place where the guests were being let in. It was total mayhem (police, photographers, press, tons of guests, spectators), and it was actually a very intimidating atmosphere. So many well dressed people who all seemed quite full of themselves. Everyone glaring at one another, checking each other out, loudly wondering who was important and if you belonged.

I was dressed a little bit chic, and since I was by myself, I was texting Serena the whole time to seem busy and less awkward. I wasn't in the line of people with invitations, but I was standing in the general crowd of invitees so I think people thought I was an actual guest. A lot of people gave me free magazines! I got 2 free magazines at the YSl show, but at Chanel I got, like, 8 magazines!
Eventually, I met up with Joanne and we went to the separate entrance to take pictures of the celebrities as they arrived and left. The show itself only takes 15 minutes or so...

That's Rihanna in the purple coat, swarmed with photographers.

I was standing next to Mary-Kate Olsen for the longest time!! I am actually checking websites to see if I ended up next to her in any pictures because I was able to get so close for so long. I think because I'm young, blonde, was dressed well, and carried a gift bag of magazines, a few people thought I was her friend or part of her entourage and allowed me to get close.

I was so focused on Mary-Kate that I turned around and was like, "Oh! Ashley!" I said it so surprised, she and her friend started laughing.

Me: Kanye, I love you!

Kanye West: I love you too!

See, all the photographers were surrounding Claudia Schiffer so when Kanye walked out a second later, NOBODY noticed! A perfect opportunity for me! He was there with his wife, and to be honest, seemed a little bit confused as to why he wasn't surrounded by papparazzi. But he smiled at me and said I love you too!

See, no one around Kanye at all!

Here's Claudia Schiffer! I have about 10 shots of her hair; this is the only one with her face.

That's Irina Lazareanu, a famous model. She posed for photos with all the teenage girls. I have a photo with her, but it's on Joanne's camera, so I'll have to wait for her to email it to me. I was actually taking a picture of Joanne when Anna Wintour walked out, the editor of American Vogue, so I took pictures of her instead. Again, I was surprised I was able to get so close...

Lily Donaldson, a very famous model.

Another model...

Another model. I thought she looked pretty.

This is a picture from wireimages. Thats some french actor I think. I only took his photo because everyone else was. But you can see me, sort of, at his shoulder on the left, with my camera covering my face. I recognized my blue headband, hair, and camera.

I was planning on stalking McQueen tonight, but I'm too tired. I can do more fashion shows tomorrow.

Paris Fashion Week

I went to class today and then went to the Tuileries gardens where there were lots of tents set up for fashion week. The people who approached me all thought I was from Russia, Scandinavia, Czech Republic, eastern or central Europe, and someone told me that my English sounded British and not American. I get that a lot, that I don't have "American" features and I don't "act American." I take it as a compliment! I like looking international.

I then went to the famed Colette store because I had read on a website about some art exhibit there with big blocks of chocolate with designers names carved into them, and inside the carvings are a mixture of powdered sugar and cocaine.

The "exhibit" was pretty minimal to say the least. but the store was PACKED with fashion people.

Anyway, I went to Emily's house and we went to go stalk the YSL fashion show at grand palais. Joanne met up with us there. Emily wasn't really into it and left early, but Joanne and I stayed and ended up meeting.... Carine Roitfeld! She's the editor of French Vogue. It was pretty cool actually. Joanne is in love with her, so she was completely starstruck. We saw her come out of the show and at first we just took pictures of her.

Then when she was on the street waiting for her car, Joanne and I were like, "Should we go over there???" I led the way, and we stood next to her for a few minutes while she talked to someone, and then I was like, "Carine?" Joanne told me later that she was totally mortified when I called her Carine instead of Madame Roitfeld. But I was like, "we're such big fans! J'adore Vogue!" And she was really nice and posed for pictures with us. The Chanel show is tomorrow morning... maybe we'll stalk that one too?

Her daughter Julia is on the left here and is a socialite, known as something of a fashion icon. But... I thought she looked horrible in real life! I didn't even recognize her at first because she looked so different from in pictures!

Oh, here is the new bag I purchased earlier this week. I think the weaving is very Bottega Venetta-esque... I'm thinking of removing the gold circle from the flap in the middle though. It seems superfluous. Would it look better without it?

An Art Student in Paris...

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.”
-Ernest Hemingway


This week was so exhausting! Between midterms and babysitting, I barely had time to do anything fun

Here are some pictures I painted for painting class...

There's sort of a funny story attached with this one. I painted it a few days ago, in class on Tuesday. We had a substitute teacher; he teaches another painting class. Some of my friends are in that class so they told me stuff about him, like that he was really strange and eccentric. One of my friends said that he likes when students paint whatever they want and do really weird paintings instead of the actual things we're supposed to do.



So we were painting pictures of pink and white flowers, and he was criticizing our paintings, saying that they needed to be more "dynamic." I whispered what my friend had said to another girl in the class about how he only likes weird paintings so just for fun, she started making purple and green stripes through her painting and I painted the black and blue butterfly. And immediately he came over and started praising our paintings for being so dynamic.


This was the very first painting I did for this class.

This was the one I threw together in an hour so I could have something to turn in and always intended to paint over.

This one is based off a picture I took. I like how the background is so murky and grey and the carrousel is so bright and colorful.

The photograph I took:
It looks like a mountain. I use a lot of purple in my paintings...

This was from the day the nude model came to pose for our class. I think my picture came out really well! And more than one person has compared her expression in the painting to the Mona Lisa.

This is supposed to be Kate Moss, but I don't think it really looks like her. I based it off the picture below.

This one. I just liked the beret because it seemed so French.

Oh, these arent paintings, these are pastries I've documented!

This is Satine's house. To the left is one of the many statues.

Satine is 4, almost 5 and Jade is 3.

Julia is Satine's age, and that's her little brother Alexis.

It's already Thursday and I'm leaving for Italy on Sunday morning! Very exciting. All the arrangements have been made, everything taken care of. I think I'll have a lot of different experiences there because the first week I'm going with Emily and we're going to Rome, Florence, and Venice and we're staying in relatively nice accomodations. The second week I'm going to Rome with Serena, and we're doing the grungy hostel thing. The first 4 days we're staying near the Vatican and the last 3 days we're by the Colosseum.

I'm wondering if I should bring my laptop... Also, I need to do a little research on what to do there, what to see, what to buy. Is Rome known for it's olive oil?

Mostly Uneventful

Today was my Human Resource Management midterm! It wasn't that hard and I'm predicting an A. Most of it was essay format so hopefully being a native English speaker who happens to be good at essays will aid me well in a room full of foreigners. I'm glad it's over. Tomorrow I have to turn in a 15 page paper for Entrepreneurship class on the launch of "the Audi TV channel." I've written 10 pages so far...

So I finally met Satine's mothere, Helene, on Sunday for a few minutes. She's very pretty but she doesn't really look Asian at all. I wonder where her kids get it from... Today, I was an hour late for babysitting because I got lost! I started out from where I always start but I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere because I ended up way out of the way. I finally found a metro and took it to Avenue Breteuil.

We played cache-cache downstairs (it's becoming a tradition), which gave me an opportunity to look around. They have a sauna and a room with a massage table next to the pool-- ooh la la! And a fountain next to the jacuzzi and a bunch of exercise machines that Satine tried to use, but they were all too heavy for her.

On my way home, I stopped into that little store and bought the purse! It was a hard decision to pick which one to get because they came in 2 different styles, a bigger one and a smaller one, and 3 different colors: black, brown, and grey. I decided on the smaller brown one. I'll post pictures soon. It was this TINY little boutique in the 7th arrondisement run by this nice old woman who barely spoke any English. The store clearly gets almost no customers because for one thing, the door to get inside was locked at first and the woman came and opened it. Second of all, she didn't have enough change to break my 50 so she went next door to get some (and left me alone in the srote for a minute...) Third of all, after chatting with her for a bit in my broken French and asking her opinion on which color I should get, she took 10 euros off the price tag so it was only 35.

I made my own crepe sucre canelle today and it was yummy! Now, I need to get back to that paper.

Strangeness...

I think it's a bit weird how I've been to Satine's house 3 times, and babysat her and Jade twice, and I still haven't even met their mother! I've spoken to her on the phone and emailed her, but that's it. Obviously, she knows I'm Julia's babysitter, so she must trust Oriane's judgment (Oriane is Julia's mom), but I still think it's weird how the parents trusted me with their kids before they even met me and the mother already wants to set up a schedule for me to babysit, like, until I leave Paris!

Today I met yet ANOTHER housekeeper/nanny. The third one. At first I assumed it was the girls' mother, so I was like, "I'm happy to finally meet you!" but then she said she worked there every weekend. I met the gardener today as well. I'm wondering, who's next? There is more hired help than members of the actual family...

And I think they also have another babysitter who comes in after me, bcause we were playing cache-cache (hide and go seek) and I saw my name written in a day planner, and it said there was another babysitter later that day. I think the parents work all the time and are sort of absent. Maybe they do something with art, since they seem to be such art fanatics?

Today I briefly met the girls' father, Olivier, but he quickly left the house. He didn't even know I had been there yesterday... I'm not surprised because from my experience, it's always the mother who coordinates everything with the babysitter. I've never met Julia's father. I prefer Oriane as an employer because she pays me at the end of each day. Since I haven't met Satine's mother, I haven't been paid yet for the 2 days I already worked. Maybe I'll meet her tomorrow...

When I was walking home, I found a purse I want! I've been looking around for a nice big leather bag, that's cute and has a long strap and is well-priced. I think I finally found what I've been looking for. I didn't have enough cash on me at the time, and the store probably won't be open tomorrow because it's Sunday, so I can keep looking, just in case I find something better.

Oh, I went with some friends yesterday night to a club called Le Showcase underneath a bridge along the Seine. I initially went with 5 other people, but 2 of the girls werent let in for whatever reason, so most people left to go somewhere else. But since Serena and I already paid for coat check, we decided to stay. It was a very classy, upscale place, and we got there early because it was free before midnight. I didn't bring a camera, but it was decorated nice inside and the bathroom sinks were really awesome-looking and hard to describe. Drinks were outrageously priced, everyone looked really chic, lot of people dressed up. It was a good place to people watch, but that's about it. Not many people were dancing, nobody was mingling, people looked bored. It was a pretentious place where Parisians seemed to go just to show off their outfits and talk to their friends. Definitely not a place to meet people. I'll have to try someplace else.

Babysitting

My burn is continuing to heal, which is a relief. It should be gone soon, I hope.

So I babysat Julia and her little friend Satine this morning. Today I felt like I discovered the secret to babysitting! Remember those cootie catchers we folded out of paper when we were little? They had never seen them before; apparently, it's not a French thing, so when I made some for the girls, they were totally into it and spent the whole time making/playing with them.

I will be babysitting (excusez moi, *teaching English to*) Satine this Friday and possibly Saturday, so I went home with Satine and her nanny so I could see how to get to her apartment. I thought Julia's family was rich, but Satine's is crazy rich! I had some indication she came from money when I saw her little shoes were Marc Jacobs and her coat was Christian Dior. We got into the car, at first I thought it was Satine's father driving the car, but Vilma, the nanny, introduced him as their driver. We went to an apartment a short distance away where I was introduced to another housekeeper.

When I walked in, the first thing I said to Vilma was that it looked just like a museum. And it did; there were statues and huge paintings and weird art everywhere. She started laughing when I told her that, and repeated what I had said to the other woman. She was like, "wait until you see downstairs!" She showed me downstairs and there was a bunch of art, a home gym, a jacuzzi, and she opened another door and there was an indoor swimming pool! I ate lunch with the 2 housekeepers, the housekeeper's daughter, Satine, and her 2 little sisters. They are cute and kind of shy; they seem well behaved thankfully, not like little monsters. They vaguely remind me of me, Kimbo, Vanessa, and Marissa when we were little.

My French presentation went well today. I had a lot of colorful pictures of macaroons which distracted the class as I struggled through my pronunciation. And tomorrow for Human Resource Management I have to dress up in nice business attire because we're doing a role playing game simulating recruiters and candidates. I'm playing one of the recruiters for a consulting firm who is interviewing 4 potential candidates.

Oh, in painting class on Tuesday, we painted our first nude figure. For some reason, a bunch of people were absent that day, so there were only 7 other students in the class, which made for a nice, intimate atmosphere. The teacher hadn't told us we would be painting a figure today, so it was a little unnerving at first to see some naked girl standing in the classroom, but after 3 hours of painting, it was no big deal. And I like the way my painting came out! Yesterday, I painted a picture of a carrousel. I'll post my pictures on the blog sometime.

Hmmm, I was browsing online with Serena and we found a flight to Madrid for a weekend in April for only 15 euros. But the airport is 50 miles away from Paris, so the shuttle to and from the airport will add an extra 26 euros. And we can do hostels for around 20 euros a night. We're considering booking the flight, but not sure if we'll have enough time there. We'd be departing Saturday night and flying back Monday morning.

This is the car I want when I grow up...

On my way to school this morning, I saw this Ratatouille car! Ratatouille is a really big movie in France; I see merchandise for it everywhere. That reminds me; when I was babysitting Julia last week, her mom had bought all these American dvds, so we watched part of High School Musical.

I wish I could update my blog even more, but I haven't been doing very much interesting stuff lately. I walked on the Champs Elysees late at night with Serena the other day. I ate lunch with Rachel. I've finalized my spring break plans!

On Saturday, I went to class and then met up with my group members at a cafe to go over a project for Human Resource Management.

I need to prepare a presentation for French class on Wednesday. I have to speak in French for 5 minutes about anything I want. I decided to talk about macaroons!

On Sunday, I went by myself to a cemetery I had read about. It's on the outskirts of Paris, and the interesting thing about it is that it's a pet cemetery, for cats and dogs. All the graves were really elegant and elaborate, good enough for people.

There is supposedly an animal shelter attached to the cemetery, so there were lots of cats sunning themselves on the graves. To be honest, the whole afternoon was a bit... morbid.

There was one cat who looked a little bit ike Precious who was so friendly. It wasn't scared of me at all. It climbed right onto my lap and I pet it for a while.

So I've booked the tickets and made official Spring Break plans. I'm spending the whole time in Italy. For the first week of March, the morning of the 2nd til the 8th, I'm traveling with Emily to Rome, Venice, and Florence. I think maybe Pisa also, but I can't remember. We kind of wanted to go to Milan too, but I don't think we'll get to. For the second week of March, Emily is flying back to Paris on the morning of the 8th, Serena is flying to Rome the evening of the 7th. From March 8th to the 15th we're staying with my UCR friends who are studying at the UC Center in Rome. We're flying back to Paris the morning of the 15th. AUP classes begin again on the 17th.

I like the fact that I'll be in Rome for over a week. I'd rather spend a week in one city than a week in 7 cities. I just need to learn some Italian phrases. All I know so far is ciaio or "chow."

I can finally relax!

Happy Birthday Dad!

It feels so nice just sitting here resting after a long and stressful week. My feet hurt too from all the running around I've been doing. Next week I'll have a ton of work to do also, so I'll try to get as much done as possible over the weekend.

My entrepreneurship presentation went really well today! Better than expected actually! It was interesting and engaging and I think the class was into it. I was pretty calm and the voice-shaking was kept to a minimum. I think I got an A.

When I babysat on Wednesday, Julia and I painted our nails with her little nail kit. I did the french flag...


Yesterday, on Valentine's Day, I went to dinner with Nilo, Tina, Jamie, and Paget. I got a cheeseburger and it was yummy. It was a little funny when as soon as the waitress brought our plates, the other girls immediately dug into their purses and got out the cameras. Apparantly, they have some sort of tradition to take a million pictures of themselves with their food before they eat.

Afterward, we bought a bottle of wine and some chocolate from a grocery store. We stopped back at school, and then Nilo and Paget and I decided to go to the Eiffel Tower. It was FREEZING cold and incredibly foggy, so we decided it wouldn't be a good time to go up.

Notice how the top of the Eiffel Tower seems to fade away and disappear? It was a cool effect of the fog. It was funny because I can usually see the tower from a window in the apartment but yesterday it was too foggy; I couldn't see it at all! I could see the buildings in front of it, though, so for a second I was like, "Wait, where did it GO???"

The fog was intense... The city actually looked like this, brown and foggy, but prettier.



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