Tag: covid-19

March 8, 2020 – Luxembourgeois (OOTD #619)

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It wasn’t until my second day in Luxembourg that I actually visited Luxembourg City.

Luxembourg is a somewhat confusing place — it’s the name of both a country and a city. The city, Luxembourg, is sometimes called Luxembourg City to distinguish it from the country, but more often, it’s just called Luxembourg. I suppose it’s something like New York City versus New York State in that you could call either just “New York” and, depending on context, people would understand you to mean either the city or the state.

Because Emma and I spent most of our first day in Luxembourg in Vianden, a town about an hour outside of Luxembourg City, it wasn’t until our second and final day that we actually made it into the city to explore.

Luxembourg City has much fewer things to see than a city like, say, Paris or London. If you ever visit (the country or the city), I would probably only devote two or three days, with only one of those days for Luxembourg City itself.

It’s possible as well that my opinion is swayed by the fact that we were there on a Sunday, when relatively little was open. I’m not necessarily sure I would’ve gone into very many shops or restaurants or museums even if they were, but it did feel very quiet in town as we were walking around, even for a Sunday morning.

We visited the Grand Ducal Palace, the official residence of the Grand Duke and the royal family, which, to us, as visitors on a Sunday morning when nothing was open, was ultimately just a cool work of architecture to look at from the outside. There was also a Notre-Dame Cathedral (yes, another one — I really ought to start keeping a list of all of the Notre Dames I’ve been to) that we poked our heads into for minute or two.

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I think the best part of Luxembourg City was the giant Adolphe Bridge across the Pétrusse valley. Luxembourg, like many cities, is a city in parts, with a bridge connecting the different sections. Most cities, like Budapest or Paris, have massive rivers running through them, sectioning off each partition. Luxembourg, on the other hand, is split not so much by a big river (though it does have one), but by a big valley.

It’s like Luxembourg is a city of two massive hills, with a deep chasm in-between the two. That’s where Adolphe Bridge comes through, which allows you to walk between the two halves. You can also take the stairs and venture down into the valley, which is home to both a lovely park and a small neighborhood of expensive-looking homes. It was something of a hike to get down into the valley, but I would say it’s absolutely worth it. It’s quite something to look up at the bridge towering above you with the two halves of the city on either side.

Luxembourg ended up being my last excursion while I was in Paris. Just a few days later, I got the email informing me that I was being sent home by my university. I think Emma and I both saw it coming, though of course, we didn’t want to believe it could be true. I thought for sure I would at least have a few more weeks — I definitely didn’t see it coming so soon.

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life during my semester abroad in the Paris, France. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest,Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Coat: Thrifted (Free’p’star Paris)

Skirt: Thrifted (Free’p’star Paris)

Blouse: Express

March 7, 2020 – Castles and Countrysides (OOTD #618)

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My last weekend living in Paris, I didn’t even spend in Paris.

My friend, Emma (the one whom I visited in Toledo), and I were supposed to spend the weekend together in Paris the weekend after I visited her, but, because of the rising concern over coronavirus after the outbreaks in Venice, she decided not to actually come. I was a little sad about it, because I was planning on using her visit to Paris as an excuse to do some of the tourist-y things that I’d been putting off — like going to the top of the Eiffel Tower — but I completely understood. We didn’t really comprehend the severity of what COVID-19 would become at the time, so I thought she was being a little over-cautious, but it turns out her caution was absolutely warranted.

A major component of our concern was air travel, so I wasn’t sure if the trip we’d planned for the next weekend, Luxembourg, was still on. We discussed it over the course of the week, though, and we decided to go for it. We’d already booked the bus tickets and the hotel, and it was becoming increasingly uncertain whether or not we’d be able to reschedule for a later date. Either we went now or we didn’t go at all.

I left my Paris apartment early Saturday morning with the intent of taking the city bus to one of the main international bus stations, as the ligne 4, the metro line I lived on, which I usually used to get to the bus station, was closed for maintenance. I waited and waited and waited at the stop and the bus never came. I’d never had bad luck with the buses in Paris running late, so I’m not sure if the bus I wanted was down or I’d read the schedule wrong or what, but it wasn’t there when it said it would be, and I was becoming increasingly worried that I was going to miss my Flixbus to Luxembourg. I ended up having to call and Uber, which got me there in 15 minutes, in comparison to the hour I’d been planning on for my transit. It’s what I should’ve done all along.

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I got into Luxembourg around early afternoon, which, admittedly, was later in the day than I wish I had been able to get there. I’d actually initially hoped to get there Friday night, but with my class schedule, I wouldn’t have been able to make the last evening bus from Paris to Luxembourg. In order to make the most of our time, Emma met me at the station when my bus came in, having arrived the previous afternoon from Spain, so we could get started on our sightseeing immediately.

We’d hoped to take a train from the Luxembourg city center station out to Vianden, a small town about an hour away, but for some reason, the train wasn’t running — I guess I wasn’t having much luck with transport that day. Thankfully, though, there was a bus route we were able to take — and for free! Luxembourg had just begun a nationwide free public transport initiative a few months before we visited, and it was a beautiful thing. I think all public transport should be free, like public libraries and public schools and public safety.

Because we had to take the bus, it took us about two hours to get into Vianden, and so it was mid-afternoon by the time we actually arrived. Most of the shops and restaurants in this sleepy town seemed to be closed at this point in the day (seriously, I was getting Vienna vibes), so we hiked our way straight up to Vianden’s main attraction — the castle.

I love a good European castle. I think I’ve talked about my thoughts about castles on this blog before. They’re just not a thing we have in the US — we don’t even really have any castle-adjacent structures — so I love visiting them when I’m in Europe. It feels so foreign and fantastical. More so than exotic cuisines or languages or fashions, castles really make me feel like I’m in a different world.

And I’m always so shocked with how common they are! It’s like every city, no matter how small, has its own castle. I should start a tag on this blog for “castles” to document how many I’ve visited over the years. Castles are the European equivalent of like, Kentucky horse farms. I’m sure they’re boring and commonplace for people who live near them, like horse farms are to me, but to an outsider, they’re unique and fascinating.

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After we were done in the castle, we didn’t have much time to hang out in Vianden before the last bus, sadly, so we hiked back down the hill to travel two hours back to Luxembourg City. By then, it was too late to do anything but eat and head back to our hotel room to relax before bed.

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That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life during my semester abroad in the Paris, France. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest,Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Coat: Thrifted (Free’p’star Paris)

Shirt: The LOFT

Skirt: Forever21

March 5, 2020 – Meilin’s Day Off (OOTD #617)

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You ever have your classes cancelled because of a massive strike taking place outside your school’s main classroom building?

I hadn’t either, until this year. In truth, I don’t even know what the strike was about — as much as I could gather, it wasn’t actually connected to the transport strike that was going on when I first arrived in Paris. I think it may have had something to do with Sciences Po’s student government?

At any rate, when I woke up on March 5, I found an email in my inbox from Sciences Po announcing that classes had been cancelled for the day. I hadn’t been planning on doing anything that day (other than school), so I was pleasantly surprised to have a day to myself.

At this point, I’d been in Paris for going on two months, but I still didn’t feel as though I’d really had time to explore the city, at least since January. Most of February was spent trying to get accustomed to life as a Sciences Po student and the rest of my time was spent backpacking through Central Europe, so I hadn’t had a chance to simply hang out in Paris.

I texted my friends to see if they wanted to hang out, since we hadn’t really had a chance to see each other since our winter break trip. We had become so close during our travels, but we mostly didn’t really have classes together, so this day off was exactly what we needed in order to catch up.

We decided to visit the Musée de l’Orangerie, one of Paris’s many famous art museums. It’s not the Louvre, and it’s not the Musée d’Orsay, so if you only have a few days in Paris, I can understand why you’d skip it. In terms of famous, well-known pieces, it really only has a few of Monet’s “Water Lilies.” In fact, while we were there, it was free admission for everyone because they were doing construction on half of the building, and “Water Lilies” was literally the only exhibit that was open.

After the museum, we stopped into the Angelina pâtisserie, one of the famous pastry shops of Paris. I’ll admit — I hadn’t really made any effort to try out very many pastry or bakery shops while I was in Paris, even though I knew that’s one of the most famous elements of French cuisine and culture. For one, I’m just not really much of a fan of bakery goods, like cakes or breads. And secondly, I thought — like I thought about many things I hadn’t seen in Paris in early March — that I had two months still in Paris. If I hadn’t yet tried every famous pastry shop according to TripAdvisor, I figured I had time.

Perhaps ironically, one of the main subjects of discussion among my friends and I while we were enjoying our cakes at the Angelina was COVID-19. At this point, the first outbreaks in Italy had made their way into the news. We all remarked on how lucky we were to have visited Venice during Carnevale, where the first outbreak in Europe had occurred, and that none of us had gotten sick. We shared theories that perhaps the bad cold that a few of us had come down with after we got home was really coronavirus, before laughing it off and agreeing that it was probably just exhaustion.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was actually the second-to-last time I went out in Paris and took pictures for my blog. That’s right — there’s only one more Paris post to go (and a few posts about a short weekend trip) to Luxembourg. A little over a week later from this little outing with my friends to the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Angelina, I received the email from my university president that I was being evacuated and sent home — but that’s another story.

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life during my semester abroad in the Paris, France. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest,Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Dress: Thrifted (A Buffalo Exchange in Washington DC)

March 3, 2020 – Chez Moi (OOTD #616)

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It sure felt good to be back in Paris after traveling Europe for a week.

It was definitely weird to have only gone to school for about a week (two, if you count the Welcome Programme as “school”) before going on vacation. In total, I’d been in Europe for well over a month at this point, but I’d actually only attended classes for a small fraction at that point. I figured, though, I would have 2-3 months still to get into a routine of going to class and coming home and maybe going out sometimes or traveling during the weekends. Even if my life up until early March hadn’t been terribly “normal” I thought it soon would be. Jokes on me, I guess.

By March, coronavirus had become a relatively big story in both Europe and the US, and I was beginning to consider the possibility of getting sent home. Still, it seemed like a pretty far-fetched option at that point. Worst case scenario, I thought maybe I’d get stuck in Paris and be unable to travel on the weekends anymore.

Early March (or at least what was left of March until I eventually got sent home) was devoted to getting accustomed to life in Paris. Despite having lived in my apartment there on the 14e arrondissement, it hadn’t felt like I’d actually spent much time there.

So I set about trying to fix that. One day, after class, I took the reading I’d been assigned for school with me to a small park about a five minute walk from my apartment. It was late afternoon, so the light began fading earlier than I might’ve liked, but it was nice to study somewhere other than my apartment or the cramped Sciences Po library (never thought I’d miss Hesburgh Library) for a little while. The weather was mild enough that I was comfortable in just this light leather jacket.

As I was leaving to go home for dinner, I had what I think might’ve been my first instance of coronavirus-related racism. There was a (white) woman who’d parked herself at the entrance of the park and was asking people for money as they left, and as I was packing up, I dreaded having to walk by and ignore her. Weirdly though, as I approached, she took one look at me and crossed to the opposite end of the street. I distinctly remember making eye contact with her before she did so.

Microaggressions are stupid and awful for many reasons, but one of the worst is that you can never really know if what just happened actually had anything to do with race. It’s like being gaslit by yourself. By March, I’d already heard stories about Asian people being mistreated because of coronavirus-related fears, and I felt as though I got a few lingering glances on the metro when I coughed, so that’s what I wondered immediately had been going through the woman’s mind — but I’ll never know.

Turtleneck: Express

Skirt: Thrifted (Poshmark)

Jacket: Thrifted (Free’p’star Paris)

Tuesday Musings – February 2020 Bullet Journal Spread

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I promise, I’m really making an effort to get caught up on these blog posts.

It’s pretty difficult actually trying to wrack my brain to remember how I was thinking/feeling months ago. February 2020 was a vastly different world from December 2020. For context, in case you’re reading this later, in February 2020 the coronavirus was mostly just a far-off news story from China, and in December 2020, the first batches of the coronavirus vaccine have just started being distributed in the US. Lots has changed.

I’m really quite happy with how my February bullet journal spread turned out. Can you believe I actually brought it (and my art supplies — including a small pouch of markers and my erasable pens) along with me all through my winter break travels? I probably didn’t need to do that — in truth, I likely only worked on it once in my AirBnB in Prague. Mostly, it was just extra weight I lugged around.

Unfortunately, I’m at home right now, and I left the bullet journal which contains February, March, and April’s spreads back at my apartment at school, and I have no pictures of my February spread saved. I thought I was smart — I’d learnt my lesson from having unnecessarily carried around my mostly-unused bullet journal through 8 countries! I guess I misjudged again.

I debated whether I should make this post or not without pictures, but having my blog in chronological order is pretty important to me (which is part of the reason why I’m writing about February in December). I figured I’d rather have something incomplete go live in the correct order than wait a month until I’m able to go back to my apartment and then write this blog, messing up the chronological nature of my site.

I’ll go back and add pictures of my February spread later, when I’m able to photograph it, but for now, I’ll describe it: since February 2020 for me was mostly characterized by my Sciences Po winter break travels, I themed it after the places I visited: Frankfurt, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Ljubljana, Venice, and Toledo. Ironically, what visually ties each of these cities together on my title page — and I never once took a train during my travels! We pretty much only took buses, with some Ubers and shuttles and a plane ride or two thrown in. I guess if you count metros or cable cars as trains, then I rode in a few trains?

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life studying abroad in Paris. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Bullet Journal Supplies (with Amazon links)

Bullet journal: The Scribbles that Matter Pro, A5, 

Pens: Pilot Frixion 

Markers:Prismacolor Brush Tip  and Copic Brush Tip

February 21, 2020 – Venetian Carnevale (OOTD #614)

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Sciences Po winter break: day 7

On my final day with my Sciences Po travel crew, we woke up in an AirBnB apartment in Venice, Italy during Carnevale season.

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Of all the places I visited on our week-long whirlwind tour of Central Europe, Venice was easily the most visually unique. I mean, it’s arguably one of the most visually unique cities in the world — there’s a reason it’s a popular tourist destination. Each city we visited had its own style in some way — for example, Frankfurt had the charm of both old town Germany and a modern city of skyscrapers and Ljubljana had the most beautiful scenery with mountains in the distance. But at the same time, to some extent, they all ran together in my mind.

Venice, on the other hand, was completely different. You could never confuse Venice for Budapest or Prague or Vienna.

I think being there during Carnevale season also helped its case. Not that I’ve ever been to Venice at any other time of the year, but if I had to suggest a time to visit, I would definitely suggest Carnevale. The weather is perfect, for one: Italy during the wintertime is still fairly mild, and there are fewer tourists than there are in the summer. Apparently the canals can get somewhat smelly in the summer as well, which was not an issue I noticed at all when I was there in February.

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Carnevale season is meant for partying — and even if you’re not a party person (or, if you were like my friends and me, you were too tired for partying after six days of night buses and walking tours), you can enjoy watching the partygoers in their elaborate costumes and masks.

I did my best to replicate the Carnevale style of fashion with my purchased masquerade mask and my vintage velvet coat, but what I was wearing was nothing in comparison to the elaborate ball gowns and hats and coats that I saw people wearing. If our only destination was Venice, and if I’d been planning this trip for more than a few weeks, I would’ve bought myself a costume.

I suppose the elephant in the room is that while we were there, Carnevale weekend, was when the first COVID-19 outbreak in Europe occurred. We left on Saturday, just a few days before the first cases began being reported, so we had no clue what was ahead of us in the coming weeks and months. At that time, COVID-19 was still a news story for Asia, not Europe. That was probably one of the last times I was in a large crowd with strangers, and one of the last times I existed in a world where COVID-19 wasn’t on my mind.

I had one more destination ahead of me than my friends, so I bid them all farewell in the afternoon to catch a plain off to Madrid, Spain. Madrid, however, wasn’t actually my actual destination: Toledo, a smaller town about an hour bus ride away from Madrid, was. Toledo was where my friend, Emma, was studying abroad and living with a host family.

I left Venice shortly after lunch, and I ended up getting into Madrid past sundown. From there, I had to take the metro for an hour, from essentially one end of the city to another. Then, it was another hour to find my bus and wait for it to arrive, and then yet another hour to actually get into Toledo.

Emma and one of her friends met me there, and we walked back to her host family’s house. It was dark, about 10 pm, so I couldn’t see clearly, but even in the dark I got the sense that Toledo was yet another visually distinct town. For one, there were more hills than I had seen in any of the other cities I’d visited in the past week. It was quite a hike.

At that point, I wouldn’t have minded to have just taken a shower and gone to bed, but Emma had made plans with some of her Notre Dame friends to go bar hopping, and I couldn’t resist the invitation to go out in a new country.

I thought 11pm-ish was somewhat late to be heading out for the night, but according to Emma, for Spanish people, it was early. She and some of her friends remarked that one of the clubs we went to wasn’t as energetic as it usually was, which they figured was due to it being too early.

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For me though, by around 1am, I was feeling dead on my feet, and I suppose Emma was starting to notice, so we said our goodbyes to her friends and headed home. At that point, I’d been backpacking for a whole week, sleeping on buses and walking all day, and within 24 hours I’d celebrated Carnevale in Italy, flown to Spain, rode a train from one end of Madrid to another, and taken a bus to Toledo. With one mixed drink and a shot of vodka in my system, my body was ready to sleep.

Dress: Express

Turtleneck: FreePeople

Coat: A vintage shop in Budapest  (thrifted)