As I sit on the plane flying back home, reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast, I have a feeling of disappointment.  A feeling that I didn’t make the most of my time while abroad. Like I spent too much time alone and not meeting new people and creating new and wonderful relationships.

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people, and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few who were as good as the spring itself (A Movable Feast, pg. 41)

Now I disagree strongly with Hemingway’s views of people and happiness. I think that it is our own egos that gets in the way of our own happiness. That is to say we just allow people to get us down when we don’t need to. But where he is right is there are people out there that truly are as good as the spring itself. And I think it’s not just a very few. I like to believe it is most. All this is to say that I think true happiness comes with people and relationships. I forget that often, and I feel that I forgot that too often on this trip to Paris. Of course I was extremely happy and made some amazing memories Biking through the Alsace wine region, and hiking to the top of Ben Nevis in Scotland. But what is sort of amusing that is I found more joy making small talk with the baker down the street from my apartment most mornings than I did summiting the tallest peak in the united kingdom.

I have had the time of my life on this trip and I will never forget the memories I have made and music I have heard. I just want to share that the memories that that made me happier than anything else were the ones that involved positive human interaction.

I am home now and it feels so good! But I am already starting to miss the places I’ve been on my trip. Getting up in this morning I wasn’t able to walk two blocks down the street to the nearest cafe or bakery, or another two blocks to the next nearest bakery and cafe. I wont be able to walk around Olympia at night on any given day of the week and fine wonderful live jazz being played at some random bar or cafe. Also I woke up at 5:00 this morning which is a pain. Stupid jet lag. But It is nice to have the apartment to myself this morning to be able to just sit, sip some (actually good) coffee and write my last blog post for this quarter.

Once again it has been an amazing trip and I look froward to sharing in detail all of my adventures with the class, friends and my family. And what will be even cooler over the next week will be to condense down all that I have learned over the past 6 weeks and turn it into something I can present to all of you.

Thank you all so much for reading this and and keeping in touch. And for leaving such thoughtful and thought provoking comments that helped make my trip so much better than it already was. I hope to see all of you very soon.

With lots of love,

Aaron

The Sunset from my apartment on my last might in Paris.

I just got back to my apartment in Paris from a three day trip to the Alsace wine region. I thought hiking around Scotland was cool…..  and it was but Im pretty sure nothing compares to biking the entire Alsace wine country in just a few days with the weather sunny and in the 70s. This was a truly unforgettable experience. I took a train from Paris to Strasbourg very early Monday morning with the fancy road bike i had just rented from one of the coolest guys I’ve met while abroad. His name was Sam and he owns a little bike hire/repair shop just outside Paris. And he gives tours all round the country too. So if you are ever in the area and have any desire to do some biking to see a bit of the amazing French countryside, Sam at Paris Bike Co. is your guy. I went into his shop last week to ask about his bikes and to get some advice on where to do about a 50 mile day ride. He helped me plan this three day trip to Alsace and I ended up getting over 150 miles in! And that only took us a half hour to work out. We ended up sitting and chatting for three hours. He was American so I didn’t have to worry about my terrible french.

Here is sort of the route I took. I started in Strasbourg and headed down to stay in Colmar for two night. So I spent Monday biking down to Colmar, and seeing that town once I got there as well as 5 or 6 other old mid evil villages on the way. Tuesday I biked around to half a dozen different little vineyards tasting the afternoon away. All wine tastings were free! I guess they are just looking for you to buy a bottle or two. Today I got up had breakfast and biked back to Strasbourg with enough time to eat at a nice little restaurant before I had to catch my train back to Paris.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wish that I could find some connection between this little tour and what I have been studying here in France….. But really it was just a wonderful little trip that had nothing to do with Parisian music, the Romani people, or music in general. It was purely for the pleasure of eating amazing food, drinking incredible wine, and biking through some of the most picturesque countrysides I have ever seen. Speaking of food, here is a bunch of food I have had the chance to try while here is France.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An amazing pot of fondu I got to share with Tristan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A very German meal of sauerkraut with sausage, ham, a boiled potato, and an Edelweiss served with a baguette of course. Everything here is.

There is a lot of German in influence on everything here in the Alsace region because it is right on the border of France and Germany. This area has been fought over for hundreds of years. But at the moment it is apart of France.

 

 

 

 

 

My last breakfast in Colmar before heading back to Strasbourg.

 

 

 

 

 

I couldn’t believe this was a thing so I had to get it. Its real……..

Its just a whole deep fried hunk of camembert served over roasted potatoes.

 

 

It was amazing. I can’t believe I ate a whole thing of camembert….

 

 

 

The more time I spend here is France, the more connection I make between the things that I perceive as very French. This week I am starting to see that French cuisine shares many of the same characteristics as French music. French cooking has always been known worldwide as the standard for good western cooking. It’s innovative, interesting, lively and much of it comes from such humble ingredients. And I think that most of that is true for French music as well.

Maybe French music and cuisine aren’t really that similar, but it’s been fun while I am learning about this wonderful culture to try and make connections between the things that I really love.

Paris is an amazing and inspiring place to study gypsy jazz. I found a place to buy a guitar the second day here and have been practicing every day. Which is awesome because I haven’t really had the time to do that since last summer! So the first few days in Paris I did a bunch of touristy stuff like see the Eiffel Tower, Le Champs Elysees, Le Louvre, Le Palais Royal, and many others. I’ve done tons of walking! It’s a bummer that it has been raining so much. And when it’s not raining the wind is blowing so hard! Im reminded of this video I saw a few years ago.

But nothing can really get me that bummed while in Paris! It really is a beautiful and romantic city.

So after I got being a tourist out of my system I was able to settle in an get studying and practicing. I’ve been getting up every morning and getting myself a delightful breakfast at a boulangerie or sitting down at a café and reading over un café et tartine avec un jus d’orange. C’est très français n’est pas? Then after breakfast I come home and practice for a hew hours, sitting in front of my big open window in my room (the picture below the view from my room). Not a bad pace to practice!

Every afternoon and evening I spend out in the city walking around seeing what there is to see. listening to street performers, sitting at cafés reading (but mostly people watching), and best of all, listening to gypsy jazz at wonderful little clubs, restaurants and bars. I am fully immersed in exactly what I came here to study! Im reading, listening, and practicing this incredibly style of jazz all in the city where it was born. I can think of no better way to learn the art form.

This week I have continued to read the book I read last week called Gypsy Jazz by Michael Dergni. He goes into a bit about Django Reinhardt’s life growing up and his progression as a musician. What makes the guitar style in jazz manouche so different from other form of jazz is the way Django was forced to relearn how to play guitar after is fretting hand was totally scorched when his caravan caught on fire. His ring and pinky finger were totally paralized after he recovered. So this new style of guitar playing that people musicians still learn and play even with all there fingers working, was born from Django’s terribly accident but amazing drive to still play guitar. Even though no one thought he would ever play again.

The term jazz Manouche comes from the name of the Romani people that Django was apart of. In Paris there live the Gitans, Tsiganes (or Tziganes), Manouches, Romanichels, Bohémiens, and the Sintis. In much of continental Europe, Romanis are known by names cognate to the Greek term τσιγγάνοι (tsinganoi).

The Romani (or Gypsy) culture is rich and beautiful and so full or art. I wish there was a way for me to experience more of it while here. This upcoming weekend I look forward to heading up north just outside of paris where le marche aux puces de saint-ouen is. This is the flee market where Django grew up and strummed his banjo on the streets and in the bals at night. I will be able to see where his caravan was once parked and some of the old bals where he used to play. Many of them are now turned into night clubs that bump electronic dance tunes all night which is awesome but it would have been cool to hear the valses, chansons, cabrettes, the outlawed java, and of course jazz manouche!

This week I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with Rai, her daughter Taj, and Tristan. It’s great to experience this wonderfully city with people I know. Almost every night we have been able to hear live music, and luckily for me they have been into listening to gypsy jazz! We have eaten so much good food and drank so many wonderful cocktails and glasses of wine together.

Tristan and me at a little Fondue Restaurant

 

 

 

 

 

Taj, Rai and I at Le Sacre Coure

 

 

 

 

 

Us working on our blogs together…….

 

 

 

 

Having our cinco de mayo tequila shots while listening to a Parisian jazz duo. And we had escargot! It was so good!

 

On my last night in Scotland I decided I have to have an authentic Scottish meal before I head to Paris. So naturally I went to the local whisky bar (called the Whisky Bar) and ordered a plate of haggis and a glass of 12 year Cragganmore Scottish whisky. The haggis was really good despite what it is made from. And the whisky was wonderful as always. I really like this pub. It’s very authentic and has live traditional music every night although I wasn’t able to hear it because it doesn’t start till after 9 and I decided to go see more jazz at the Jazz Bar down the street.

This week I’ve been reading “Gypsy Jazz” by Michael Darengi. What a well written book! It is getting me so excited to be in Paris. Not only is it exactly what I wanted for studying Gypsy Jazz and the culture behind it but It talks a lot about places in paris where the music came from so I know exactly where to go to see the music when I am there and the places to go where Django Reinhardt grew up and played. Darengi talks about his trip to Paris to discover all he could about Django and his culture. So he walks you through his whole trip and the history behind each place he went. A great look into old world Paris. It has been really great to read this back to back with “Making Jazz French”. So many connections between the two that are creating a strong base for my studies in Paris.

On the first page of Gypsy Jazz Darengi gives a wonderful description of this style of jazz.

This jazz is joy made song. Alive and iridescent, it swings with effortless intensity, transcending the everyday world. Yet it’s also infused with bittersweet spirit, nostalgic, melancholic, something nameless and impossible to articulate in anything but music. Within the melodies and strophes of improvisations resound an emblem of people. An emblem, and a history. Here is the legend of the Romani in music, leading back a millennium, stretching across continents. These melodies are fully modern, yet ancient and ageless (pg. 7).

Darengi had me hooked from page one, describing everything I felt but didn’t understand in this beautiful music. And then he goes deep into the culture behind it, giving the reader a greater insight as to why gypsy jazz sounds the way it does and makes you fall in love with it even more. I am so looking forward to visiting the outskirts of Paris to find where this music originated. To be able to listen to gypsy jazz in the same cafes and dance halls where it was born. What an incredible experience!

I flew into Pais this afternoon from Edinburgh and wow….. It is so good to be here but I am so stressed out! I totally underestimated my ability to speak French! Buying a loaf of bread was a whole crazy and difficult experience in itself and now I get to spend three weeks here. I know I will adapt but for right now I will have to trudge through town doing my best to break down this barrier of language in front of me. Not that the language barrier overshadows the awesomeness of Paris of course!

My suitemate here at the are BnB is great! I think he is from Spain, but I’m non sure. I haven’t asked yet but Spanish is definitely his first language. He greeted me at the door and showed me around this tinny apartment, then told me a bit about the area. Let me know where the nearest grocarie store, cafe, and bar were and got me all settled in. I am looking forward to getting to now more locals. The French I have met around town seem to be pretty cold but I think that’s just because I come off immediately as a stupid American. But I hope to change that as soon I get comfortable here. I know they aren’t all cold people because I met some really wonderful French people in Scotland. Very willing to make great conversation and share with me their time.

While I was in Scotland I had the opportunity to go on possibly the cooled hike I’ve ever been on! It was on Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the UK. I saw the most amazing views and met some great people.

I cant seem to get any photos to upload but I’ll figure out what is going on soon hopefully. But you can see a bunch of them on Flicker.

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Until next week!

Well…… This might be the coolest thing I have ever done. It’s only been one week and I have already experienced so much and met so many wonderful people! This is going to be a very memorable time.

Hmmmm…. where to start….

Ireland is an amazingly beautiful country filled with some of the most friendly people I have ever met. And It was sunny for my flight in! I got to see the whole county from the sky!

After Landing in Dublin I took a bus to the city center and walked to my hostel where I dropped off my bags and then went and grabbed a cup of coffee at a cute little spot called Cafe Sunrise. I soon learned that there really isn’t good coffee in Dublin… But that’s okay I guess. They make up for that with their fish and chips and whisky. It turns out a friend of mine names Ada that I wasn’t suppose to be able to see because she was headed back to the states the day I was flying in, ended up extending her stay in Ireland for a few extra weeks. So we were able to spend my first few days in Dublin together! This is my fist time ever traveling outside the states, so it was really nice for me to have someone there that I really knew to welcome me to first international travel experience.

Ada met me at the cafe I was at and we walked around to find some fish and chips and my first real draught Guinness! The fish was amazing! And the Guinness was a Guinness….. Not my favorite beer but fun to drink while in Ireland. After talking to some locals later on in the week we learned that Guinness extra stout that comes in a bottle is better than what you can get on tap. I did like that much better.

After lunch we decided to just walk around the city and see what there was to see. At one point we were looking around this little memorial in a park somewhere in the old Dublin area near the Dublin castle. An older Irish gentleman approached us and asked if we knew what we were looking at. We didn’t, so this man named Girard gave us a whole history of this memorial and then waked us around the park and showing us everything.

This was the place in the park for the best photos according to Girard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We ended up spending the whole rest of the day with this guy. He was awesome! He gave us a great tour of the whole city center. Girard was full of facts and knew the history of just about every building. It was really impressive. Then we took him out for a drink and some food at the oldest pub in Dublin.

I couldn’t have asked for a better first day in Dublin. Even though I was up for 34 hours! Great food, friends, and whisky!

 

I guess Im really not sure how this whole blog thing is suppose to work. There is no way I can explain all of the things I have done since I’ve been here in a 750 word post. So I’ll just try and sum up the rest of the week for you all.

I spend most of my mornings and afternoons walking around the city or sitting in pubs and cafes journaling or reading. One afternoon I took about an hour bus ride to a small fishing town called Howth and went for a little hike along the cliff looking out over the Irish sea. After my hike I got the best fish and chips of my life at shop called Beshoff Bros. SO GOOD! The fish was so fresh! Then I grabbed a pint and chatted with an old ship captain at the pub next door. The Irish are so friendly and willing to talk to travelers.

 

 

The cliffs of Howth

 

 

 

 

Monday morning I got up at 3 am and got on a bus to the airport to catch my 6:35 flight to Edinburgh. Edinburgh is so gorgeous. The old architecture is incredible! I spend the whole day walking around the old town and in the evening I got to hear awesome jazz and Funk at a place called The Jazz Bar. I also drank scotch all day…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Morning I got up and was on a train to Glasgow by 10. I Have not done much here today. Just enjoying the beautiful weather. It hasn’t rained a drop since I left Seattle. Which is almost unheard of in both Ireland and Scotland! I walked around the botanical gardens, drank some wonderful coffee (finally) and ate great food. I just got back from a pretty great comedy club. It was open mic night so it only cost 2 pounds. But honestly I didn’t get many of the jokes because of the thick Scottish accents. I just couldn’t under stand them!

It’s been an amazing first week of my trip and I know the rest will be just as good. Im headed to Fort William tomorrow for some hiking!

Until next week,

 

Cheers!

This week I have been slowly adding and checking things off my list of to-dos. It feels as though no matter how hard I try to prepare everything for this trip, there will be something very important I will forget to do…. But I’m starting to realize that It probably won’t matter. If I can get into and out of the country and am able to access money while abroad, I will probably be just fine.

In this weeks reading of Alain De Botton’s The art of Travel, I was interested in the bit that focused on beauty, as that is something that has come up frequently over the course of my studies in Musical Cities. De Botton writes about John Ruskin in chapter 8 and his views on beauty.

“Ruskin’s interest in beauty and in its possession led him to five central conclusions. First, beauty is the result of a number of complex factors that affected the mind both psychologically and visually” (217).

As travelers who will be writing about our time in a city that is new to us, or is a place we have yet to look at as critically as we are about to, we must not pull only from the visual side of beauty but also the psychological side. This is crucial to what Ruskin calls word painting, which he thinks we are all capable of. From what I understand, word painting is just a written form of the beauty one sees in something. Our failure to word paint a result of our not asking ourselves enough questions and not being precise enough in analysing what we have seen and felt.

“Second, humans had an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Third, there are many lower expressions of this desire for possession (including, as we have seen, buying souvenirs and carpets, carving one’s name on a pillar and taking photographs). Fourth, there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. And last, the most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so” (217).

I think Ruskin’s last point is the most important to me as an artist who often struggles with the thought that my work isn’t good enough to share with others. Or that I’m not painting with my words clearly enough for others to see the beauty I see in a landscape or an object. But thinking like that misses the point entirely. What Ruskin desires for us all is that through drawing and writing (and making music), whether we are traveling or not, we gain a better understanding of beauty and are better able to see critically.

“A Dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to hold onto it, to possess it and give it weight in ones life. There is an urge to say, “I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.” (214) So in most cases when traveling we take photos to preserve the beauty we see. But Ruskin thinks that if we are not looking critically at whatever it is and are just taking snapshots and moving on, that really isn’t a good to way to preserve the beauty in things. It allows us to become lazy in our seeing. So instead of the camera taking the place of our critical seeing when traveling, use it as a tool to enhance our ability to see and to capture even a small part of that beauty in the moment.

A wonderful Definition of beauty we came across in conversation this year in class:

-Beauty is to recognize your existence in something.

 

There are a million thing I need to do to get ready for this trip, and one of them (one that I think is the most important to me getting the most out of my travels and really growing from this trip) is to prepare myself mentally for what is to come. Alain de Botton does a wonderful job in his book, The art of Travel of reminding me that it’s not necessarily the place I’m going to that will have such a great impact on my life but the way I treat the trip itself. While preparing myself for a trip to Paris, It’s been hard not to create these huge expectations of what it will be like and how this incredibly romantic city will change my life forever just because it is the romantic city that it is. I have dreamed of this for years and built up in my mind what it will be like to walk the old cobblestone streets and experience the Parisian culture. How romantic it will be and how much it will change me. But unless I am in the right state of mind while i’m actually there, I won’t take hardly anything away from this trip and I could possibly have a pretty lame time. De Botton gives us in each chapter of The art of Travel, tools for helping us truly see and feel the spaces we inhabit as we travel.

Expectation is the bane of all travel, and the downfall of all relationships really. (And what are we put of this earth for if not to build beautiful relationships with other human beings? So we better figure out how to make them work.) Expectation is what allows our ego to overshadow love and understanding. If I expect Paris to be a certain way, and when I get there and it’s not that way, I will be disappointed because my ego won’t allow for any understanding of why Paris isn’t that way. But If I just desire for Paris to be a certain way without any expectation of it fulfilling my every desire I will be able to just be present and just enjoy the way things are. I’ll allow for differences in what way I viewed the city before I’m actually there to become something much more beautiful.

My biggest expectation at this moment is that everything will be perfect and beautiful in Paris and I will never have a moment of let down or unhappiness. That just isn’t a realistic view of anyplace in the world. No matter how beautiful or romantic. “We are sad at home and blame the weather or the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own either underwrite our joy or condemn us to misery. This explains why people are happy even in Winnipeg and unhappy even in Tahiti” (The art of Travel). It’s not the city itself that will make me happy, but the way I interact with the city. If I chose to not interact with the city and not allow it to teach me I could find myself with a “strong wish to remain in bed and take the next flight home” (The art of Travel).

Looking forward to this trip I hope to allow this journey to open me up to some wonderful internal conversation. De Botton says in his book, “Journeys are the midwives of thought. A great desire of mine is to be sitting at some quaint cafe on a Parisian street corner and have a new and wonderful thought or idea pop into my head. Weather that be an interesting melody or chord progression to use in my music, or some philosophical idea I am reading about in one of my texts to just make sense. What would be really great is that though my travels I would be able to understand or come up with something I would be able to share with you through this blog and though my life and relationships when I get home. I am traveling to this city to try and better understand what makes it’s music unique. Sure I could do a bunch of reading and listening here in my bedroom in Olympia and gain a good understanding of what makes the sound of Paris so unique. But I believe, as well as De Botton, that it’s the journey and the experience of actually being in that place that will stimulate my mind to help me better understand Parisian music.

 

Things I need to do before I leave this spring:

Book flights

• I’ve booked all the flights I need to get to my destinations and get back home.

 

1. Seattle – Dublin
2. Dublin – Edinburgh
3. Edinburgh – Paris
4. Paris – Dublin
5. Dubllin – Seattle

 

Find Lodging

• I’ve booked a great hostel in Dublin right near all the action called Isaac’s! And they have guitars you can borrow to practice with!

• And so far I have two of the seven nights in Scotland. In Edinburgh I booked at this little backpackers hostel in the downtown area called the High Street Hostel.