This past Wednesday (April 29), NYU in France celebrated its 40th anniversary, as well as its founder’s (Tom Bishop) 80th birthday. Going all out for the event, the school canceled afternoon classes to finish putting up the tents and preparing the caterers for the many guests invited! Rumor has it that President Sarkozy was invited to the event, but he graciously declined the invitation.

When 5PM rolled on by, the courtyard filled itself up with alumni, students, professors, and other influential figures, such as NYU president John Sexton and Liberal Studies dean Fred Schwarzbach. The invitation had originally read, “hors d’oeuvres to be served,” but I found not only such, but also an actual meal. To clarify, there were indeed fabulous hors d’oeuvres, ranging from cups of smoked salmon and cheese to skewered fruit to miniature sandwiches, as well as a chef freshly preparing Asian dishes (i.e. noodles) in his woks. The well anticipated rain did arrive, but thank goodness for the tents that covered most of the premises.

Even though the cocktail stopped at about 7PM, buses were lined up to take guests to the operatic premiere of Eugène Ionesco’s La Cantatrice Chauve at Théâtre-Athénée Louis-Jouvet. Given that I had no idea what the opera was about, I was quite amused and confused when the play began. Despite my confusion, there were several points in the opera, which left me thoroughly entertained.

Serving Champagne

Linfei, Angela, Beth Haymaker, Myself, and Jordan

Théâtre Athénée Louis-Jouvet: Premiere of La Cantatrice Chauve

Barb :: May.03.2009 :: Culture, Life :: No Comments »

If you have seen this webpage before, you’ll notice that a lot has changed. I’ve rid myself of many of all my past entries and of my layout. Reverting to a simple template that I’m gradually tweaking, I have yet to figure out what it is I want to use this for.

But why get rid of everything?

Well, this past summer I have been working in an office (aside from working my food and beverage jobs) where I first redesigned logos to developing and designing websites. But of course, it’s not all fun and games where I can simply slap some codes together and pray for Google’s bots to crawl onto the webpage. I wound up having to do intensive research on the topic of search engine optimization to hopefully generate more hits for the company. What I wound up realizing was that I was going about my way of SEO (search engine optimization) all wrong – in fact, I hadn’t even heard of the term until this summer!

Scratching my whole webpage, I’ve decided to make this one more efficient and run everything from Wordpress. However, I haven’t scrapped the domain name because age of a domain also plays in as a factor for being searched – I’ll worry about that later. Getting hits isn’t all that important to me, it has just been irking me that I could’ve been doing this (which I can’t even define myself) a more efficient way.

Aside from website related things, I have started university at New York University. I’m on a first year exchange and living in Paris, France. It’s a pretty interesting experience given that there’s incredibly few people in our program – it’s basically gifted program version 2.0 with some quirks. With regards to the city, Paris is incredibly different from Toronto. I can’t pick out one thing at this moment to discuss, but there are plenty of ways in which the cities differ.

Barb :: Sep.23.2008 :: Life :: 3 Comments »