Well, that was depressing

Today was really depressing, not gonna lie. Not only did I get ditched again by Amber, with no reason as to why she couldn't come, I went to le Memorial de la Shoah. Memorial de la Shoah is a Holocaust museum in the 4th (le marais) which has become my favorite district in Paris. I learned that "Holocaust" is used in English speaking countries, but in France they use "Shoah," meaning catastrophe. I believe it means the same thing in Hebrew. The museum wasn't that hard to find, I just got a little lost. I saw a sign that pointed in the direction of the museum but the sign was really misleading and I ended up going a few blocks in the wrong direction. Good thing I had my indispensable (my map of Paris by each neighborhood). After I studied this for a little while I found the museum. If anyone is coming to Paris to study or just to travel, pick one of these up from the newspaper stand. Mine was only 7.50 and it has a metro map, a bus map, the RER map, and a map of each neighborhood. It also has an index of all the streets in Paris so if you're ever lost you just need to look up the street name and it shows you where it is on the map and you can then find the closest metro or whatever you want. Plus, many Parisians carry these around...I thought I was going to look like an uber tourist, but the tourists have the maps from the metro, not the indispensable.

Anyways, I found the museum and it's locked down like a fort, literally. You had to push a button to have someone open the door for you and if someone was getting their things x-rayed you had to wait until they were done. The best thing about the museum is it's FREE!!! Once you get through the x-ray thing you go outside and there is this giant green thing in the middle of this court yard. It had all the names of the concentration camps on it, and after reading the description, it is a replica of a smoke stack that was used at the concentration camps. There was also this huge wall with the Star of David on it and something written in French and Hebrew. I'm not exactly sure what it said. In the 4th there is a very large Jewish population so I think that might be why they put the memorial here. You go down a level, still outside, and there are white marble walls that have the names of all the French Jews that were deported and sent to concentration camps. They are broken down into the years from 1942-1945 and then are broken down alphabetically.

After looking at the walls for a while, I went inside to the actual museum. The museum is broken up into sections, where the French Jews came from, who they are, the start of the war, deportation, camps, and then post war. There was so much information in all of the sections. I was going a little nuts reading it all. I really liked the pictures that they had. Underneath them there were descriptions in French and English so you knew what the picture was. There were also a lot of artifacts like a suitcase, a pinstriped shirt that they were forced to wear, a matching hat, bowls, spoons, Star of David patches, clothes, a blanket that was knit with human hair from the camps...that was really gross. You could actually see that some of the hairs were coming out of the blanket. There were a lot of passports and marriage licenses which was pretty cool. There were a lot of videos that were being played. They all were in French so it was really hard to understand some of them. The last part of the artifacts room was a room that had walls that were back lit and they had over 3,000 pictures of French Jewish kids that were deported and died in the concentration camps. I don't remember the exact number of French Jews that died, I want to say 76,000 but I might be wrong, but I do know that over 11,000 kids were killed. It was really sad looking at all their pictures. The children, elderly, pregnant women, and really anyone who didn't look fit was not even given the chance to work. They were immediately sent off to die. After I left the room with all the kids pictures, which was beyond depressing, I went into this room called the crypt. There was a staircase that lead down to a giant Star of David that had a flame in the middle of it. From reading the packet I picked up, when they built the museum they got some of the ashes from those who died in the concentration camps along with soil from Israel and placed them both in the center of the Star of David. There's obviously no way of knowing who's ashes they were but it was a really somber room. It gave me the chills.

I went into their bookstore but everything was overpriced and all of the books were in French. I left the museum and then went to this boulangerie to get an incredibly overpriced sandwich and coke because I was starving. I ate at the little cafe because didn't feel like walking around with the huge sandwich. After that I went and bought a crepe and took a walk. I saw this store that sells foie gras. I'm thinking about buying some if I go back, which I'm sure I will because it's a cool area. The only thing is, it was really expensive and I don't know if it will get confiscated when I come back to America. I might have to ask Renee or something. But she's never been to America so I doubt she'll know what I'm even talking about.

I had planned on going to the Louvre today but after the memorial de la Shoah I was really depressed and tired because I was in there for over 2 hours just looking around and reading. So maybe I'll go to the Louvre on Friday because I don't have any plans for Friday yet. I don't think I'm going to go to Euro Disney this week...it's probably really expensive anyways.

Renee is cooking dinner tonight and I hope it's a lot better than what she made of Monday. That was just horrible. Last night I was bored so I decided that I would watch and episode of True Blood. The show is on HBO so I've never seen it. But OMG....it was so good. So the episode ended and I was like great, here's another show I'm going to be addicted to. But that's alright, it's only on it's second season. I was supposed to get my new Windows 7 disk today but my package didn't come. Hopefully it comes tomorrow. The rest of the night I'm just gonna chill, probably watch some True Blood and maybe a movie or something. Tomorrow I'm planning on going to l'arc de triompe and walking down the champs elysees. Hopefully I don't spend too much money.

A bientot