Day 29- Friday 24 June

Boleeeegherghug, tiiiiired, tiredtired, tired. Ti-red, redtitiredgah. And my feet hurt. Backpackers must work themselves up for months and months if they walk so much and don't have to chop off their toes regularly. Went to class today, did fine on the exam, no comment on the seafood so I'm going to have to step it up and ERIN RULES THE WORLD! And the weather was great again. Most of the day was spent in the Louvre, actually, and after that just walking about my favorite touristy bits in the area and getting accosted by gypsies. It's because I hadn't followed my rule of threes today and looked vaguely American: A nice-ish anything counts as one, but one object that is super-nice can never count as two. Various repugnant items [mostly certain kinds of shoes, but also backpacks] immediately disqualify you from blending in, and this is when the gypsies will come and get you. So today I was wearing: Dark purple shirt that is Tori's [U-collar, plain, fitted, no big deal], jeans [dark, straight leg, no bleaching], sandals [white with multiple straps I actually picked up in the dorm kitchen, no signs of infectious diseases yet], messenger bag [black, nondescript]. So the shirt is one, pants count as one, bag is null and shoes are almost one but nothing outstanding, ergo are null, total is two= American OR French who doesn't care enough OR more likely European non-French, BUT, since I was in the Louvre/Tuileries/St Germain area= tourist, no duh= gypsies. I needed another significant clothing item to pass better, like a decent jacket or scarf, but it was hot today and it wasn't happening. I am going to have such a serious Nutella withdrawal. And Orangina. It's like soda, but with cellulose.

The Louvre was weird, but I really enjoyed their large display of sarcophagi- some of their larger objects had cute plaques dating from the early twentieth century saying that their respective items were conceded to the French government, and so on and so forth. That, plus the three thousand-year-old obelisk in Place des Concordes plus whatever's in Britain= Europeans are bloodthirsty kleptos. Back to the sarcophagi, in some of them you could see stains from where the bodies had lain, and one tourist asked a very insightful question and wondered where all the mummies were. I don't know. There was one on display, and you could get very close and see how the face was specially wrapped and fingers done individually, but that was it. And I had no idea the ancient Egyptians were so manic about mummification; in one room there were mummified cats, doi, but also ibises, crocodiles [multiple], goat heads [like, three], fish [many a fish] and whatever else I've forgotten. But fish, wow, that's just weird, and they were totally pathetic-looking, and some of them were in little fish sarcophagi, and the ibises were sealed in clay tubes some of them, and some of the cats looked like stuffed animals, their limbs wrapped individually and sticking out at odd angles. And they had a feast they found in one tomb on display, with bread and fruit, and they had a whole chapel [that was my translation] set up with partially-colored carvings and hieroglyphics that had been plundered and shipped over in pieces, and that one had a plaque, too, about benevolent bequeathence or whatever, and I had a great time in Egypt. Also saw Roman/Greek/Etruscan sculpture, ancient Iranian friezes, more Egyptian paraphernalia, and then the museum actually closed on me. The above covered maybe 30%-ish of the museum and took over four hours, scariness. Afterward, like I mentioned, I hung out in front of the pyramid and cooled my feet in the fountain, and because the metro was like a world record for the most marshmallows stuffed into one mouth I didn't go anywhere else, really, just walked around, took photos. I found out that the bank opposite the Notre Dame and a bit west is full of pet stores, a whole block of them right on the water, and I haven't seen any anywhere else in the city, and there was also a Ferris wheel set up in the Tuileries, and just things like that. This is also when the gypsies came after me.

Weird things about Paris: Quite a bit of the Louvre is underground, too, and you know that's where they keep all of their extra stuff. And I mentioned restaurants usually put their water closets underground? Still weirds me out.

Day 28- Wednesday 23 June

Weird things about France: Football. I came back to the Fondation [building where I live] today and there were about 50 National Guard lined up in front of my building because the US was playing Algeria on another continent, again. Algeria supporters are walking by in front, yet again, wearing flags, and odds are it'll go on to midnight, again.

Today: After sleeping in/recovering, had a triumphal return to class and surprise, there's an exam. Not a big deal, on past tenses and some vocab I luckily mostly knew, and I illustrated it with lobsters and tidal waves.

Afterwards, went to the Eiffel Tower because it was a great day, and who knows it that'll happen again [firework just went off in street], and NO, I did not go to the top because the line was an hour long and I was fed up with tourists, and yeah, I know I'm a tourist, whatever [police have roped off sidewalk in front of Fondation door, crowd is gathering]. And yeah, it was cool to see Paris- I could recognize all of the really large objects and there were various plaques on the first floor to help identify others, though they left out a lot. There was a bit of haze, but that might actually have just been pollution, and on the whole it was great.

Coming back to the dorm for a quick bite was when I found all of the police- I'm now writing much later and they're all gone. Talking to some of the students downstairs, they said that the game is projected at Stade Chantilly, the one right down the street, which is why we keep getting all of these seemingly-random Algerians passing by; when I tried to leave for a cooking demonstration at the Cordon Bleu that was included as part of the program I'm in [which sounds schmancy] they'd jammed up the two RER lines that run past, so I had to walk half a mile to a metro and was thirty minutes late. It would have been fun if I hadn't had somewhere to be; a large group of them swarmed the RER quai illegally and were dancing and waving flags and beating drums and packed onto the train that was stopped because half the people on it didn't have tickets, which is way above the average, and the police came down and transportation security and a voice kept saying the train was delayed, be patient, but eventually politeness broke down and the intercom said that it wouldn't move until all of the Algerians got off it, at which point I started walking to the metro because they were all still in full swing, outnumbering the police twenty to one and dancing. Irritating and hilarious. More to the point, I caught most of the cooking demonstration, initially disappointed because I'd thought we'd be cooking ourselves, but it was interesting as the chef narrated himself in French and there was a British lady translating, so the whole thing was like an oral exam. I did pick up some cooking tips, and two recipes I'm highly unlikely to try as they are for a sort of roast quail salad with wild mushrooms and a seafood risotto with a cream sauce. The chef made it look easy, but he was doing crazy stuff like poaching the quail eggs a very certain way, making whipped cream, adding dashes of this and that, dismembering these things that were either really big shrimp or really small lobster with flicks of his fingers, frying these tiny quail just so, you get the picture. The salad was actually rather gruesome: In his fancy preparation plate, he had a whole roast quail and beside it the salad, and on top were the poached quail eggs he put in their 'nest.' Tragic. And the mussels in the risotto were still alive, kept specially in treated water until they were simmered. We got a small plate of both dishes, and it was great, doi, but not what I was used to. Politically correct, fresh. When I got back to the dorm I immediately ate a frozen pizza, and it, too, was amazing.

Weird stuff about France: Anyone who's been to Europe knows this, but the cafes that are all along the roads, if they're decent at all all of the tables on the sidewalk will have chairs only on one side, even if they're round. Most of the point of eating at a cafe is to watch other people. The super-touristy places, like just opposite a big parc or on the Champs will have chairs on both sides of a table.

Days 25-27- Sunday to Tuesday

Vik and E, my faithful readers, if you remain loyal, we're going to play a game:
It is the hot or cold game, guessing where I was during this entry, so pull out your maps!

[Previous entry:
K, more like another day.]

Ye-ah.

Day 24- Saturday 19 June

Wiped. Went to Chartres today, a relatively small town an hour's train ride southwest of Paris that had the small Eure River running through it. Took an uncrowded 8am train, arrived and took a tour of a stained glass museum/workshop that was great because it had real stained glass from different periods, medieval, Renaissance, contemporary, most of which had been removed prior to their original churches getting destroyed. Our guide gave a small demonstration of the production of a window, and even with modern techniques it takes forever- you draw out your design then cut it out, then cut the glass to correspond to the shapes, then paint it if you want, then fit it together with [real] lead strips, then solder it with tin, then fire it all, and voila! But it takes a fair while to cut the glass. After the museum, we went to the Cathedral Notre Dame de Chartres, because there are many Notre Dames, and our guide told us about how it used to look; they'd done restoration on the far end of the nave, and instead of the usual dark grey-brown stone it was almost white. He also showed us traces of paint around, so apparently being really clean-looking wasn't enough, but the entire inside was brightly painted. They're going to clean the rest of the interior stone, and will be done in five-ish years, and I can't imagine what it's going to look like. People mostly come to Chartres to see the original stained glass, and our guide talked us through in brief some of the saints' stories, some Bible parables and some windows depicting guilds, and then showed us some iconography used to identify the figures of the sculptures all over the outside. Pretty great overall.

Afterwards, the program director, another girl and I took a train-golf cart-thing through town and saw some more historic buildings, including houses from the seventeenth century, and the river. During the free time before the return train, I walked down by the Eure, which was pretty slow-moving and shallow but lined by houses and cafes and very picturesque; all of the houses are right by the water, and a lot used to be wash houses and have recessions where people used to take clothes down to the river. Old houses + green river + roses and everything else in bloom + not raining + no stress + swans = a nice walk. A large bit of Chartres is blocked off from cars, and this is all shopping, and today there was also a small crafts and flowers market, so I wandered in there for a while before catching a train back to Paris with the other students. Just got back from chilling in Parc Montsouris across the street, reading a bit of Dahl in French [since it's at my level], am now contemplating life.

Weird stuff about France: or sketchy: Certain money exchange places will happily take a copy of your passport, while others have told me that it's illegal. The former are mostly found on major streets. Funny stuff ... I don't know. Sorry.

Day 23- Friday 28 June

Yesterday was a bit of a letdown, but I was back in form today, and an innocent series of everyday actions were turned sinister as a housewife proceeded to

Algeria beat England in the World Cup games, so currently outside my window, large quantities of Islamic-looking men are walking by, a fair few dressed in Algerian flags, others underwear, and police in riot gear are stationed every thirty feet along the street. Some of them are running up the median in the center of the street that the trains use, others are chasing scooters, and a van just got jumped by about twenty of them. This had been happening for the past two hours. I wonder where they're all going.

Well, whatever, the housewife in class today menaced various objects in various ways that had me cracking up, and I proceeded to periodically ask how to say random words for the rest of class. The professor is pretty cool, and I can now say 'slaughterhouse.' Sadly, quite the rest of the day was spent getting the dinner I was hosting that night for the other students ready; the market at Place d'Italie shut down before I could get to it, so I ended up having to go to the smaller Mouffetard market, the Fanprix near my dorm and rue Vavin to get all of the stuff I wanted, but dinner turned out quite well. As an appetizer, three different kinds of bread I got from bakeries in olive oil seasoned with herbs from the market, then as a main course kabobs [which I'd never had/made before, very cool that it tasted fab: chicken, peppers, onion, pineapple marinated for three hours and broiled] served with fresh fruit. Dessert, we made crepes with a mix and some Nutella and watched the people outside doing various almost-illegal things in front of national guard.

Traffic has now stopped and people are jumping on cars. The police are stopping this.

Weird stuff about France: Apparently football. This match didn't even happen in the stadium down the road, or in Paris, or in Europe; it happened in South Africa, and somehow probably thousands of people are walking by. What the heck. Also, third theory about skinny Europeans: They use the saunas also known as rush hour metros to keep their weight in check.

Ah, a firetruck now, lights flashing, is surrounded by people once again jumping on cars. They are dancing. It is a good day.

Day 22- Thursday 17 June

A notable part of our test today was the listening section where we had to frantically fill in landmarks based on what a muted and apparently drunken voice told us during heavy traffic. Sadly, the stress caused my chronic dyslexia to flare up, and I promptly forgot the words for left and right, so we'll see how that turned out. Our post-test exercise was another series of pictures where we were supposed to describe things, and it was so vapidly explicit I couldn't cause anything traumatic to happen. All that, and it was raining again.

Ate beignets from my standby patisserie as a late breakfast in the petit parc that is the westernmost tip of Ile de la Cite, which was fun because all of the tourists on the bateau mouches took photos of me, and then headed off in a sort of steamy, doomed temporary sunshine to Hotel de Ville and BNV, the large department store I mentioned wa-ay earlier. What I didn't know was that it was seven stories, so it beat the bookstore, and I spent a blissful I don't know how long looking at the wildest stuff. The cooking section was especially interesting, and thank God I didn't have that much money on me, because I kept having these totally alien thoughts like 'what a cute teapot' and about every five feet I found something meriting a thought like 'you know, Tori likes eggs, she could really use this glow-in-the-dark microwavable boiled egg container shaped like the spaceship from Muppets in Space.' And it went on, and on, escargot forks, the tiniest casserole dishes I have ever seen, mugs with checkerboard borders and red roosters printed on them, pans made just for cooking fish, other pans made just for cooking asparagus and I'm not kidding, some fabulous knives, things I couldn't translate but found that I wanted anyways, I was freaking. out. And anyone who knows me-ish probably knows that I abhor shopping like synthetic sweatsuits. So yeah, BNV took a while to recover from.

Walked around, yaddah, took a shower and burnt the heck out of a pizza, but ate it anyways. Second theory on why Europeans are skinny, aside from the first obvious one about walking everywhere: Food is expensive, ergo they do not eat. I am brilliant, I have done it. And it was still raining, so I labeled photos from the past weekend for a while and was still somehow almost late to the concert I went to; it was Mozart's symphony concerto for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and [French] horn and Beethoven's ninth, and, of course, I loved it. I don't know enough to be able to properly appreciate classical music, but I do like it, if you see the difference, and it's always awesome to watch an orchestra. The seat I'd bought hadn't been that great, and I don't know anything about acoustics, but when I figured out, eventually, where my seat was [dyslexia was still in place, so I asked for directions multiple times but mostly got everywhere by luck] I was so, so happy- it was on the first balcony, and they've got it set up with a few rows to the back and one column of single seats going along the wall, all up past the front of the orchestra, and guess where I was. Right there, so I could watch everything, expressions, fingers, beads of sweat, the whole time, and that's my version of heaven. For the Mozart, the four instruments that were singled out stood up in a semi-circle in front of the conductor and bounced around for half an hour, and I don't know much about them but they were each different in tone, I think, and written into the music they played off each other the whole time. One bit that really stood out in the Beethoven was the second movement, which meant that it was probably the most mass-digestible, but whatever- it sounded like ants swarming a carousel, just like that, really fast and it looked like all of the string instruments were going to kill each other. For the last movement a choir was present, probably a hundred singers [did a rough count], and it was neat to watch them too, because all of them moved a little, which meant that the whole mass moved in random patterns, and I saw nary a microphone in the place, so I think all of the pretty loud music was au naturel [helped I was right above them, probably] and that, with the speakers I'd seen in cathedrals and in hedges in Versailles and outside cafes, made for a nice change. And because it was a single seat, no neighbors, I could do all of the American Smiling I wanted to.

Geeze, I forgot to do my homework, and I have no idea what I'm cooking for everyone tomorrow. The last lot had three different appetizers, gah.

Weird stuff about France: You can buy a whole roasted chicken off the street. Not everywhere, but often enough. Also, at the BNV, I have never seen so much egg paraphernalia in my life- I mentioned the weird-looking container you can microwave a boiled egg in, the one that glowed in the dark, but they also had many an egg cup, egg racks for your refrigerator, multiple different kinds of egg slicer, egg spoons, and whatever else I've forgotten.

Dudes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaouJ6ufLE I can't even say how much I flipped out. What a dork- my classmates are planning a July trip to Amsterdam to see Daft Punk or something.

Day 21- Wednesday 16 June

Got a bit stir-crazy in class today again, sadly: This time we were put in small groups and had to talk about two sets of before-and-after pictures we were given and use the two past tenses. My cohorts were the singer I mentioned earlier and an advocate, neither of which was especially malleable; the singer kept trying to guide me down the saner path and the advocate proved rather legal-minded about our instructions. The former held out to the end, but the latter showed a streak of genius and turned an innocent beach into an oil field with overtones of global warming and melting ice caps [which we didn't know how to say], so that, plus the fact that I managed to hold my face straight long enough to get our professor to conjugate the verb 'to drown,' on the board, made the day my victory.

Walked around the nineteenth and twentieth arrondisements today, and they proved to be definitely not touristy [aka not a postcard in sight] and I saw more real shops, like small bookstores, less higher-class supermarkets, epiceries, electronics stores, immobiliers, cafes, etc. Didn't feel entirely comfortable, but it was still a nice walk, and it wasn't raining. Tried to go to the Pere Lachaise Cemetary, but it closed at a weird time, and walked to the nearby Buttes Chaumont parc. This one was different in that the area was hilly, and there were multiple small, steep hills in the parc, very different from the rest of Paris, with people sunbathing on the grass and an awful lot of joggers. What made this one special, aside from the hills, was the artificial bluff-island-thing that was built in the middle of a shallow artificial lake full of fish and ducks that you accessed via suspension bridge and could climb to a small round pavilion called a belvedere. From here, you could see Sacre Couer and bits of miscellaneous buildings- it wasn't a 360 view because of the cliffs and hills and so forth. There were also several fun artificial running stream-waterfall deals, and a larger waterfall on one side of an artificial cave that had fake real-looking stalactites, and people on the grass everywhere, like I said, and I just sat down, too, for a bit, and read and did homework.

Also walked around Parc Montsouris today, which is right across from my dorm- crazy that I hadn't been there yet, it's great and has areas where you can actually sit on the grass, which is pretty unusual [so yeah, another factor that made Buttes Chaumont awesome]. It has a lake with fish and ducks and joggers, but isn't quite as dramatic as the parc I'd visited earlier. Also, had a new kind of pastry today, an allumette, which was basically a flaky tube with a thin strip of chocolate running through it, not bad but not extraordinary. I've had fun trying the five different patisseries on my twenty-minute route between classes.

Weird stuff about France: Shoot, though of something really obvious and forgot it. Maybe you've guessed, but I've been running a bit low on ideas here. I haven't mentioned that I walked into a Monoprix, which sells everything from duck liver to cheap clothing, and found the biggest supermarket yet and guess where it is? Underground. I walked in, because I knew they sold food, wandered around the shirts and makeup and shampoo for a bit and found the escalator, and it was fairly big, but the ceiling was low and the aisles were still all narrow, and Paris is just weird about underground stuff. All of the parking you don't see [I think most of it] is underground, too- haven't gone down there yet.

Day 20- Tuesday 15 June

Went to class in something of a daze and knew I was tired when we had a writing assignment to describe a person's day, and she gave us a small sheet of pictures to guide us [think brushing teeth, eating food, walking to school, rollerblading] and the only verbs that came to my mind were to assassinate, to explode, to set on fire, to cut one's throat, to fall to one's death, etc, so my picture-person had a very surprising day. This sort of thing has happened before. Had my first Real chocolate eclair, breaking from my fave feuilletes, got groceries, picked up room, whatever. The real exciting bit was this evening, though now I'm Seriously Tired: I went to Les Miserables [in English] and loved. it. Thought the ending was a bit weak, but the set design was fantastic and there weren't any noticeably weak singers to stick out and it was funny in the right bits and I loved it! Something I hadn't seen before was a movie-projector backdrop that occasionally switched to video, as opposed to scenes and dramatic lighting, so they had effects with that and fog that gave a good illusion of people moving through sewers, or through the streets, and with the lighting they could do great transitions that I can't really explain, and I thought that the barricade battles were fantastic and hilarious, because they were having a completely believable one-sided battle, and I usually get lost in movies and mix up people but had only one issue and thought that the transitions of time [because the beginning happens in stages with two ten year gaps] were done very clearly. Had an impulse buy-moment and got the CD, so Tori's not going to be too happy on our drive to Maine coming up, but she can deal because it was great and I'm super-tired but really happy :)

Days 18 & 19, written on the latter, Monday 15 June

The best time to visit France has absolutely got to be June. Tourist season has only just begun, temperatures are very moderate and everything, everything is in bloom. Plus, you can do last-minute stuff without having to worry too much. Real life example: On Saturday, a bit after midnight, I decided that I would go to le Mont Saint Michel, and less than eight hours later I did. All I had was a reserved seat on a TGV, literally 'very big fast' [train], some basic supplies, my guidebook and food for two days [aka a bottle of water, 10 granola bars and a can of soup], and I was off! They were possibly the best two days together I've ever had so far, like, in my life- I invited two fellow students along with me, but they were tired after Amboise on Saturday, so all I had to worry about was myself. Total transportation time to le Mont was probably about four and a half hours, but everything worked out and on the bus I was the first to see it- a blue mound rising in the distance, and you could just make out the roof line. It was pretty much another Disneyland for adults [if you remember my earlier comment about Marie Antoinette's fake village], and very touristy, but absolutely freaking gorgeous- it is a city built on a hill and, at high tide, surrounded by water. The first church was established in the seventh century, I believe, on the Mont, which was originally a hill-island taller than the ones in the area. It was gradually built up and refined with the town growing around it, until you have today's version complete with earth causeway access and large parking lot. That was sad, but the mont is taller than anything around, and on top of the abbey you can see the delta silt spreading for miles to the north, a sparsely populated marsh-and-farmland mix of coast to the east and west full of sheep, more farmland and RV's behind, and in the far distance just the thinnest strip of azure sea. Coming in on the train it had been blustery, with spats of rain, but with my luck as soon as I got to the mont it became beautiful, I can't even tell you. The one other really good day I've had was the one I randomly decided to go to Montmartre and Sacre Couer, which had a spectacular view.

Of course at le Mont St Michel I visited the abbey, and got a handheld audioguide to explain things to me [you can get them at pretty much every major and semi-major thing to see in France]; the biggest point of architectural interest was the fact that the abbey had been built over several centuries, and you could see the division between medieval and Gothic styles; I got insanely turned around, because the monks [who still lived there] had built into and above and out from the rock for three stories that they let tourists through, but I saw staircases going lower and the place was an absolute maze; one bit I really liked was a staircase over a thousand years old [which was strange to think about, being ephemeral, you know], and another was the cloisters, aka, a square jardin with a roofed walkway going around it that was actually on the third floor of the abbey, so you know it was high up, and the terrace that the monks kept for that purpose when the building that originally stood on it burnt [the mont is, according to the guide, a marvel of planning, and I agree, but with that much history there's hardly any part of it that hasn't burnt to the ground or fallen down] that had the best view and the fact that the gift shop and ticket counters were in the lower part of the abbey traditionally used to give hospitality to the common people and the poor.

The weather stayed good, too, which was great- I walked on the marsh for a bit with a group led by a bay guide; I tried to blend, but then figured out that I was the youngest by a good twenty-five years and was Discovered and told to go back due to [insert something in French]. I thought they were going to the smaller island nearby, just to check it out, but they were actually just the advance guard for a group of easily five hundred people who all, led by guides, walked onto the marsh and off into the distance. At the time I mostly thought about how environmentalist-people would throw a huge fit in the United States if that many people walked across a delta probably every day for three months, but I realize now that I have no idea where they all went. Looking on a map, there was nowhere for them to go, no town, no hotel near big enough, but I have photos of this huge tide of people getting filthy in the slime, all migrating east. Weirdest thing.

This mini-tour was done around two periods of exploring the mont, which really only took the day to master; pretty much anything with a slope less than +/- 60 degrees was habited, which meant the inland-facing, picturesque, scenic side looked just like a city on a small mountain rising out of the delta and river water, topped by a Gothic-style abbey whose bell tower had a statue of an angel on it [except the causeway and its parking interrupted it a bit]. So I did my wandering all over the city, down narrow cobblestone chemins and around the city walls and up a lot of stairs, and had a great time.

I spent the night at a campground about a mile south of the mont, and it only cost nine euro to get a cot in a dorm that I had to myself. I had my soup with a great view of the mont and walked down the causeway again during the sunset; it wasn't a great one, but the town and abbey lit up at night white and yellow, and I finally got some real sleep.

Checkout the next morning was easy, and after getting some pastry I caught two buses no problem to get to St Malo, about a fifty minute trip total. The weather was less great, with rain clouds and a strong north wind, but after just a short time in the area the wind blew it all away and it became just as gorgeous as yesterday. Before going into the old part of town, which was walled like le Mont St Michel [but on less of a hill], I walked to the gare and got a ticket for a TGV that evening; the old part of the town and the more recent bit are split by a sort of inland port that mostly seemed to ship wood, which was strange, and meant that any photos of the picturesque walled bit of town were interrupted by the masts of sailboats. The very exciting thing about St Malo was the scenery- the city is on a part of the France called the Emerald Coast and the bay was pretty shallow, which meant that it looked like the Caribbean. Between mini-peninsula-bluffs that were rocky and had houses on them was pure beach, real beach, not like the mud at le Mont St Michel, and there were sailboats everywhere and small islands and again, absolutely gorgeous. What I found very exciting were the tidepools on the one rocky bit of beach- I'd never seen any before, and had a great time poking in them and being a total nerd. There were a lot of sea snails and clams, and I found crab shells and the occasional [I think they were] krill.

By this point, the tide was low enough that I could walk out to the island that was pretty close- it was less than an acre large and rose fairly high, and had a better view than the city walls of the bay, surrounding village, other islands, beaches, lighthouses, boats, everything, and I spent quite a while just walking around it soaking up the sun. It was a Monday, and there weren't swarms of tourists [though it was definitely a tourist place], and I just felt very peaceful. I also walked along the beach, of course, and went into a place and asked about renting a sailboat, but they would only let me have a catamaran [which I've only piloted once, and I could have managed, but it would've been tragic to lose my backpack]. Farther down, there was a specific area of the beach designated for windsurfing and kiteboarding, and it was amazing to watch; the wind never let up all throughout the day, and it was insane how fast they were all going. Some of the better kitesurfers were getting at least ten feet of air [as in, ten feet between their board and the ocean, so that's huge], and spinning around, and crashing, and zooming around the rocky areas. At the peak point there were ten kitesurfers and four windsurfers.

Walked back along the beach with some clouds rolling in and went through the town a bit, looking into shops and different restaurants, going through mini-squares and having a scary experience with a public restroom which, unlike the rather feeble-looking ones in Paris that gave you hope of being able to break through if you got trapped, was indoors and made of stone and tiled, and the metal door clicked when it shut and I had visions of myself like a scuba diver lost in an underwater cave running out of air, only not quite as bad. Sadly, at this point it didn't stop raining until I reached Paris- I walked around the town walls for a last look at everything between showers before going back to the gare. Nothing to note about the trip except for I got back to the dorm around 11.30 and probably stank.

Weird stuff about France: The tune in train stations just before an announcement is made is done a capella and sounds like it's straight out of Glee.

Day 17- Saturday 12 June

I mentioned that France is hilly, right? Our group went on a tour led by the program director of the small town Amboise today, which is in the Loire Valley, two hours by train south-west-west of Paris; I hadn't been on a train since grandma took Tori and I to Boston, years ago, so the novelty of that combined with going through French countryside PLUS seeing wind turbine-things everywhere made it two hours of awesomeness. I asked the director, Tawna, and she said yep, that France is pretty much like what I saw all the way through- there were spots of woods, but the rest was rural houses, mini-villages and fields and fields and wind turbines, which is crazy different from Florida because there were people EVERYWHERE. France is so old, nevermind its churches.

More relevantly- Amboise has apparently 12 000 residents devoted primarily to the tourist industry; we walked from the gare, train station, to the Chateau in maybe fifteen minutes and saw a bit more Real France, where not every single building has crenelations and wrought iron window grids and stuff like Paris, and then the centreville, the center of the town, which was very narrow-street cutesy-touristy, and where they were having a small craft fair. The Chateau Royal d'Amboise was primarily used in the early sixteenth century, and of what original furniture remained you could see [with the help of the pamphlet] the mixing of Gothic and Renaissance styles in the architecture and especially in some of the furniture. Probably the best bit about it was the view; it's on a cliff that the kings of France sort of sheared and built upon and down into; it wasn't really defensive, but built in a defensible position, which meant that there were great views of the Loire river, the town of Amboise on both sides of the river, the touristy bit with its fair and peoples' backyards. We had lunch together, and most of us got pizza- mine had 'lettuce' in the description and came with a salad on it [seriously], and another kid ended up with a raw egg on top of his. Still have not tried foi gras, going to give it another few days, though I see shelves of it the supermarkets [anything in large quantities is worth noting in Paris].

When de Vinci decided to move to France because he was getting a hard time about dissecting corpses in Italy, Francois I gave him a manor that was very close to the chateau, and they actually dug a tunnel beneath the two; we visited the house and its grounds after eating our weird pizzas. I hung onto a tour of the house, which I later ended up regretting slightly because it meant I didn't explore the gardens really, but still enjoyed the novelty of for once understanding almost everything that the French guide said. Apparently in his day de Vinci was most known as a party planner. In the basement were small models of some of his inventions, and apparently he both invented everything and was clairvoyant enough to predict cars, submarine warfare and various other contemporary miscellanea. A fairly biased presentation that managed to say almost nothing about his personal life, but it was still neat to see the models of a bridge designed to swing and let ships pass and another that was self-suspending and only supported by flat rolling platforms on opposite sides of a riverbank. These were mini- others were large and scattered through the grounds, but again I didn't leave myself time to explore, sigh. Instead we went to the river for a bit, where I and another group member really wanted to go down to the bank; today was the first time I've run anywhere since the fifty six gates in the Detroit airport, and I've actually missed it and playing frisbee a lot. No wonder Parisians don't like people; they've got all of this pent-up energy converting itself into emotional rage driving them nuts. Also, today, for whatever reason [good weather, sort-of impending rain with a cool breeze, fantastic], I had an insane amount of energy and probably drove the other students crazy [and I'd had two pieces of bread for breakfast, no chocolate at all]. Anyways, went wading in the Loire with all of the fab scenery, rolling hills, chateau on a cliff and petit village hugging the banks and spreading itself out under the sort of sky God uses in paintings to damn the masses, and I really enjoyed myself.

Our train back was considerably less crowded and we shared a compartment that had me very excited because it was a lot like the one in Harry Potter [except it was plastic and had synthetic cloth and was a sort of aqua green with curtains that looked like an old comforter of mine, but whatever], and we watched scenery again, with more of those great wind turbines all of the way.

Unexpected things about France: I've always, always heard that you get smaller portions in France, and so far in my experience this is not so, not even vaguely. I think it was my second or third day I ordered a sandwich and it was a foot long, and whenever you get a pizza off the streets you get a whole pizza, equivalent to a small at Domino's, easily ten inches in diameter, though it's not like I had a ruler on me, and they're described as serving one person. The individual salads served before the pizza were also at least equivalent to American standards, too. Maybe I'm going to the wrong kind of restaurants ....

Also, I mentioned the chateau d'Amboise was built on a cliff- the cliff continues a bit as a sort of shear hill, hard to describe, but there are houses carved into it, with windows with shutters and flower boxes that you could see through the narrow alleys separating the houses.

Day 16- Friday 11 June

So I woke up today .... and it was raining .... but then it stopped, and it was Friday and so everyone was a bit stir-crazy, especially me because my phonetics teacher caught me going through the window onto the roof, but turns out she had colored chalk and I'd drawn some flowers and it was all good. Walking between classes, talked to some other students and one started telling us about what she does- she's a tetralingual [sp? anyways, four languages down already] soprano who's getting a higher education degree at Yale in sacred music, translation: At the end of this month she's singing in the Protestant cathedral/church of Paris [there's really only one], and you can imagine how beyond cool that is. After class, finally went to St Denis [and it occurred to me- I went to my first funeral yesterday, how weird] and it took a while on the metro, which was weirdly packed for 2pm, and I walked to the cathedral through what somehow turned out to be the stagehands' entrance and was BAM hit with this weird singing, because I'd walked into a concert practice, and the orchestra started up and it was a very cool first impression. Found the right entrance, went in, walked around and it was so worth the trip, dudes, there were sarcophagi everywhere, and the best bit was the actual dried heart of one of the later Louis [not the fourteenth] in a display case, and there were many a Louis, and many a second brother Jean or Philippe just lying about with queens and princesses, with little plaques telling you who was a king or a dauphin or whatnot, and then the back altar had the [presumed] bones of three, three saints enshrined, and there was fantastic stained glass, some of which was eight hundred years old, and a dead guy from the fourth century and a lot more from the seventh, and I was seriously impressed. From what I could derive from the French, an abbot in the twelfth century got a serious case of kleptomania and rebuilt the church into how it looks today to house the bodies of France's kings, which was appropriate as already possessed St Denis, who is, again, the patron saint of France. After walking around a fair bit, reading name signs, I sat and watched the rehearsal for a bit, which by that time I had realized was very strange. Best description: Contemporary chamber music, complete with a DJ and a mandolin, but it sounded cool, and was a great backdrop to my visit.

Afterwards, I wanted to walk around the neighborhood a bit, at least to the second-or third-closest metro, but was getting wa-ay too much attention: I was pretty much the only female my age not wearing some kind of head covering AND dress, so I left and hung out in St Michel for a bit, because let's face it, it's awesome. Just before that, though, I got off at the Louvre metro stop, and it was like a flashback to yesterday because again, it came out into the mall [gotta wonder how many things I'm missing because they're underground], only this mall turned out to be the mini-one adjacent to the museum that I'd never heard about. Taking the prime spot just in front of the museum entrance with the inverted pyramid was, of course, an Apple store, where I played with an iPad [that I could see the finger grease on from ten feet away] for the first time, and they had maybe thirty of them out. There was also a chocolate store, a tea store, a book/music/movies store, yaddah yaddah and a hall with statues in it promoting the Louvre. All of that, who knew. Tomorrow, we're going on a program trip to Amboise to see a chateau and a manor that was given to da Vinci and has life size recreations of some of his inventions that I'm thinking they let people play with.

Weird stuff about France: Underground malls. Also, on some of the larger metro stops, underground patisseries; it's already a bit gross, usually pretty picked-up, but still caked with grime and sweat from millions of people- who want to eat pastry that's just soaking all of that up? Also, a fairly popular French soda, for those who don't know, is Orangina which, unsurprisingly, tastes of oranges. Unlike its American counterpoints, however, it has pulp, and I almost threw out my first can because I thought something was seriously wrong with it.

Day 15- Thursday 10 June

So it was raining today too, only with wind, and it was a bit difficult to get around, unfortunately- the metro turns stuffy and sticky and just plain ick and the wind will invert your umbrella and most people are just not happy. There was a break in the middle of the day where I thought it would turn fantastic, with sunshine drying the benches, nice clouds, sopping wet pigeons picking themselves up off the streets, but the wind blew that away and it is still raining, actually, as I write this. Well, whatever, tomorrow is St Denis. Today I hung out in a park during the brief sunny bit and did my homework, and then took refuge in St Sulpice for a fair while when the sunny bit was over. I call it a cathedral, because it's pretty huge, but their translation of it is just 'church,' so it might be a perspective thing, like calling hills in Maine mountains, which I still do, only churches are cathedrals because I'm a history-starved American. BUT, to my family, I think I mentioned this: While I was away I moved us to Canada, and it might be permanent. Tried to get into St Chapelle, but you have to get a ticket and there was a line a block long, so that merits more reading, walked around a bit because the blisters are much better and went to Mouffetard instead for some fruit. Had dinner at fellow Abroadco students' apartment, and it's my turn next week, and that'll be interesting because I currently possess: one (1) plate, one (1) bowl, one (1) glass, one (1) knife, one (1) spoon and one (1) fork. The pans are communal to the floor kitchen, and there is no soap, and actually the dishes aren't even mine, I'm borrowing them from one of the apartments [leaving them down to two bowls and one knife, slim pickings]. No worries. And believe it or not, that was my day. It just takes chunks traveling everywhere, and showering before going over to someone's place, and getting food, and I haven't even done any laundry yet.

Weird stuff about France: Maybe you can tell I'm having a bit of a down day, but Paris really is not friendly. Sometimes the shop people are nice and will talk in French, but, of course, they're salespeople. I don't think the other students have noticed it so much when we've eaten out, but the waiters hate us. I don't feel like I can trust anyone; I've talked to the other students and they've had crazies come up and talk to them, too, but even fairly normal people, like one woman I met on a tour, I don't tell anything. It's just really strange. On a vaguely lighter side, I saw the homeless man with the rabbit again today. Also, ladybugs here are black with red spots.

Day 14- Wednesday 9 June

Bit of a rest day today, as well, which I'm just going to have to get used to, because the blisters are awful. After class, I had some beignets from a patisserie [one chocolate, one apple, one strawberry, and guess which one was my favorite] which I'd been dying to try, and they were super-good, like the best bready-doughnut you've ever had with stuff in it IN Paris [!], and then had a more real lunch back at the dorm room because the class books were killing me and it was pouring. It didn't really stop raining, so I went out anyways to St. Eustache cathedral, which I found on a top ten list of Paris, but was severely distracted when the metro [Chatelet-Les Halles] came out into the middle of a mall, a huge mall, big, which I hadn't noticed before because it's underground and, oh yeah, there's a park on top of it, and it's amazing, not sticky despite the rain [which made the metro NO fun], and lots of stores, and it's underground, all of it- one big square bit of it has a center-courtyard thing that's actually three stories below ground, but is open to the air, and there are walkways and escalators and tons of people and a place with girls lined up two hundred feet doing free makeovers and piercings and a store that sold nothing but thematic kids furniture and another that was just like Ikea, just, only it had one, just one, of everything and could fit into my Gainesville apartment, and a patisserie and fruit place and a cinema and more stores with smelly stuff and FNAC, which does comic books and computers and had a row of iPads and more people lined up to play with those and it was all under a park, for two blocks, gaaaah! And outside it was still raining, and turns out that St. Eustache was literally across the street from the exit I randomly chose, so I went in and of course they were having a funeral, and I caught the end of it, and they packed it up pretty quickly and there were still people crying in a transept when the tourists crept back in with their cameras and workers climbed back onto the scaffolding set up on one half and started making a huge echoing racket, and it was really weird, but had an absolutely fantastic ceiling. Then I went back to the mall.

After a bit, made my way to some fellow Abroadco students' apartment, where we were all meeting up to go to dinner and celebrate a birthday, and picked up some feuilletes and beignets along the way. We went to a good, decently-priced Japanese place where you used lacquered chopsticks and got a hot damp towel to wipe your hands with; the two guys got literally a boat of sushi, which I'd only seen in menu pictures before, and I ordered squid [because that's how I roll] and lost a water chugging contest and we all had fun rubbing one girl's semi-gold ring on our faces to figure out if we had an iron deficiency [something, something happens and you can, on some people, see a faint or dark grey line left, the iron in their blood, really weird], and then we went back to the apartment, ate beignets and talked about drugs, suicide, gay bars and religion. I had about five milliliters of white wine and have a serious headache now, and mere, I love you, but sometimes your genes suck. It was gross anyways.

Inconvenient stuff about France: Food. Is. Expensive. It costs almost the same to eat street sandwiches and pastries every day as it does to get your food from grocery stores, which is insane. Also, to those who have not visited a Paris, an ordinary sandwich, let's take ham as our example, is constructed thus: on a baguette [about a foot long] place ham and tomato. And that is all. You can make it more complicated, but you have to be really specific, and only Americans use mayonnaise. Also, I went to an epicerie today just to pick up a few small things, and I got rabbit in a can- no lie.

Day13- Tuesday 8 June

Ah, dudes, I crashed today. I woke up with blisters under my blisters, two of them, and something wrong with my foot. Didn't even make it to Saint Chapelle, and it's supposed to be architecturally more advanced and interesting than Notre Dame, with wicked stained glass. After a fun phonetics class messing around with the recorders and a grammar class where I was defeated by take-out verbs [I call them], along with everyone else, I went to a new street market and got lunch. At a small Asian place I got a Chinese quiche, it was called, and some chicken on a stick; I really liked the quiche, which was like cornbread in consistency but just tasted ... foreign, somehow, with bits of Chinese vegetables embedded in it like you find in egg rolls, really good. Forgot to mention that yesterday in St Michel I finally stopped into a south Tunisian bakery that had caught my eye last week, because who's heard of a south Tunisian bakery? They had a weird amount of untranslatable green food, but I got something I thought was some kind of ethnic cake and seriously disliked it- I have never had anything like it, made of some kind of small round stuff with bits of almonds, yerch, ate most of it anyways but NEVER AGAIN. I probably would have been better off with something green, and will most likely go back. Actually fell asleep on the banks of the Seine in a park [which really tells me my body's feeling all of the walking] after the market, toured a bookstore, went back to the dorm and fell asleep again on a pleather couch beaten into itself, took a shower, isn't it fun hearing about the teensiest things? I felt like I should be DOING SOMETHING, but was so, so dead, and that's okay, and it rained anyways. Tomorrow, if I'm up for it, I'll go to Saint Dennis Basilica where they have buried over a millenium of French kings, if you can imagine, and if not, it'll be Church Day II.

Fun stuff about France: They have a lot of weird yogurt, and that's not just me not noticing yogurt in the US; I got two kinds for fun, pomme vert kiwi [green apple kiwi] and noix de coco [coconut], and they had bits of the fruit/nut in them and were really good. Also, the cheese absolutely stinks, which is probably a mark of it being good, fresh cheese, but yikes; I was sitting, waiting for the metro a while back and smelled something awful radiating from my right. There was a guy sitting there, and I thought it might have been his fault, and it was, but when I looked it was because he'd opened a cheese and was eating it. Both kinds that I've gotten so far for sandwiches and eggs and have stank up my room, even from inside the mini-fridge.

Can't believe I haven't mentioned this yet, either: Easily the huge majority of roads don't have lanes, and I'm not talking about all of the dinky winding one-way rues that are everywhere, I mean pretty packed two lane each way avenues along the Seine, and very notably the seven lane-ish-around street circling the Arc de Triomphe [I've got some video of this- the rule of the cule is that anything on the right has right-of-way, which is fantastic for crazy parking and buses needing to turn, but means that at the Arc, something can shoot off from a side street, pull into traffic, cut across all six, seven or eight lanes that are existing at the moment and join the other people who tend to park illegally along the side of the monument, and this is okay]. Apparently one of the bigger things the president has done is to make the city more bike-friendly by creating bike lanes, but I'm not wickedly impressed as this seems to mean, for the most part, painting a lane onto a street that didn't have one to begin with, and motorcycles use them anyways, and one sure bet you can make is the winner of a motorcycle-versus-leisure bike battle. Jaywalking is a very exciting art in Paris.

Also, people, get ready, I'm almost ready to do my massive postcard sending.

Day 12- Monday 7 June

So today was Montmartre Day [it's a neighborhood], and so that's where I went [after class. I actually got a new one today, in addition to the grammar, phonetics, where we spend half the class carefully watching the teacher's lips and the other half in the lab two floors down, where we put on headsets with microphones, repeat what the professor is saying and then listen to ourselves and do it again, only better. So that's rather schmancy, and we didn't get a lot done today because everyone was excited about the headsets, but tomorrow'll be better]. So first I went to the flea market, because I felt like I should, and was wa-ay too uncomfortable [though in a different sitch there were some decent sundress-things which I might get into one day. Basically, picture stalls along streets and packed into a small square, all selling usually a lot of one thing, with a repeating pattern of what is being sold: belts, sunglasses, shoes, dresses, tourist shirts, jewelry, African masks, socks, scarves, jeans, perfume, purses and then it repeats, for maybe three streets and two squares. A lot]. After the flea market, wandered and eventually made it to Sacre Couer from the behind [which was interesting, because it's less cutesy-tourist back there, and there were a whole lot of differently-dressed types of, I don't know, probably ethnic North Africans, and odd food stores half in Arabic and places selling similar clothing and so on].

Forgot to mention: Today was the first truly excellent day we've had yet- cool breeze, mild day in middle seventies [still haven't gone over to Celsius], nice sun with puffball clouds with just the right touch of imminent rain that added drama to the whole setting, and walking between classes I just wanted to run because it was such spectacular alive weather, so of course this was the day I went up Sacre Coeur's dome [which gives you a 50 km radius]. Up there, realized how many churches I still didn't know, so tomorrow is going to be a church day, but I did very easily recognize yesterday's museum, among other prominent buildings, and the view was great, even saw Charles de Gaulle airport because there was zero haze, first time yet. Stayed up there maybe an hour, and it was really great. The people who did the initial walking tour [day three or something] also offered one of Montmartre, so I did that and saw Moulin Rouge, the last real windmill [preserved only because its owners defended it and were hung on it by the invading Germans as examples to the other millers not to try to stop them burning the windmills] and last mini-vineyard in Paris [bottles sold at 3 000 euro each for charity, and reputedly taste awful], a statue of St. Denis [patron saint of France, very cool guy who, after being beheaded, picked up his head, rinsed it off and walked 5 000 paces south-west-ish until falling, and there they built a basilica and have been burying kings for over two millennia, which is craziness], Picasso's restaurant hang out, van Gogh's Parisian residence [actually his brother's], Sacre Coeur again [this time with commentary about the stone, travertine, which, when wet, apparently somehow exudes the grime and pollution it has built up and can be accurately described as self-cleaning. The places that don't get wet stay grimy, aka black, and I got the chance to touch it up on the dome and even chipping with a fingernail it does not come off. Our guide said that at night it makes the building appear to be flattened, since it is pretty much black and white, but even in the daytime some bits of it look more like they're painted than carved out of stone, really odd, but cool], etc. Fair bit of walking up inclines, because Montmartre is a hill, and Sacre Coeur is on top of it [thus the great view], but that meant lots of picturesque staircases and views of the city from the straight streets, all in a really nice day.

Weird stuff in Paris: Can't believe I haven't mentioned this yet- if you need to use the restroom you are doomed, like, in the archaic sense of the word where supernatural forces are working against you. Restaurants hide their restrooms and won't tell you where they are, McDonalds and Starbucks are well-known, easily accessible places, with unsurprising consequences, and there are public toilets but you need a sort of sixth sense to find them, and then there's a 50% chance it's broken, and then there will be a line if it's too near anything major, which it will be, because that's why they're there, but they're still hidden despite that. To Vik and E, who have not been to Europe: they have a grooved metal floor, one metal button, a porcelain throne and the rest is plastic. There are an inordinate number of plastic buttons. A voice will tell you, in French, that if you need help to press a certain button. If you are from Asia you are doomed to rely on your common sense and your continent's push towards minimalistic design. The sink is automated thus: put hand under the soap image, get soap, put hand under faucet image, get water, put hand under difficult to decipher box image and get hot air. Leave with a vague feeling of panic, toilet unflushed, door shuts and inside of plastic public restroom rinses itself entirely, leaving it legally clean and slightly humid, ready to serve the nation.

Day 11- Sunday 6 June

Right, so I woke up with five blisters and did NOT do the Louvre, didn't actually really feel like moving but it was free museum day, so I had to, obviously, and instead tried to go to the Picasso-only museum, because that dude founded at least four mini-art movements and we are talking about RESPECT here. It is closed until 2012, who knew, so went instead to the Museum of Modern Art in the Centre [Georges] Pompidou, figured I'd do a bit of the Louvre afterwards since it was close enough. You'd probably recognize the Centre with a picture- it's the seven story building whose backside [though I thought it was the front and made a heartfelt attempt to get in through an emergency exit] is covered in red, yellow, green and blue pipes and you can imagine the hullabaloo that caused- the front has a cobblestone square and zigzag escalator deal going up the face. Yes, so in summery, the weirdest things I saw: Lord of the Rings stained glass; a dress made of meat [in the eighties, nicely dessicated now, impressively even stitching all things considered]; a video of women embroidering the safety net of some scaffolding; another video of a woman eating beans [and after two minutes, because my feet hurt and there was a bench in front of it; putting beans into her hair and down her dress]; a setup of a tiny cylindrical room, maybe seven feet across, black, dark, with a video projection in the middle of one of those tiny cameras going down someone's throat [very cool]; and a female tourist whose hair to the right of her part was maybe an inch long and to the left past her shoulders. Saw tons more, took photos [doi], but that's my pick of the lot, and that took over four hours, and after that I was so done. To hell with free museum day.

[Sorry I forgot to do yesterday's edition of] Weird Things About Paris: 1 and 2 cent pieces are functionally close to useless: The smaller stores that you go to for things, pharmacies, the markets, the copy store we got paper from, mark their prices in multiples of 10 [I've checked]. Vending machines don't accept them. If you get fruit from an epicerie or something, they do price by the kilo, but will willingly round down to the closest five to avoid the small change. If you go somewhere to get something big [clothing, hypothetically] you'll most likely use credit, because you don't want to get mugged on the metro carrying too much cash. You get 1 and 2 cent coins when you change money and go to the bigger places [for me, so far, the Fanprix grocery store], but how often does that happen? Might be able to start a thing, though, euro coin bracelets .... More weird stuff: I'd read about these two things while doing clothing research on Paris, neither of which I quite believed, but have seen: The first, more probable, is pointy shoes. Business-dressed guys I have seen fairly commonly wear point-toed work shoes, the shiny leather kind. Maybe this is a normal trend in the US, too, I don't know, but it was a bit of a shock for me. The second is drop-crotch pants [look it up, seriously]. It's a girl thing, and you have to be VERY cool to pull it off, but the people I have seen wearing them have done it well. And maybe this is normal, too.

Day 10- Saturday 5 June

No transportation strike = went to Versailles = [seriously] 9 hours of standing/walking = can't be bothered to eat.

So Versailles isn't a skyscraper, but it's still huge, and the parts they don't let you into are probably, what, x4 what you do see? I've got the map and could look, but it's five feet away, too far. Got there fairly early, felt totally in my element surrounded by tourists, white tennis shoes, flip flops, crocs and all, and it turns out it's all pretty much by audioguide now. There are tours you can attach yourself to, and I saw at least 3 German ones, 2 Asian [something] ones, a Spanish one, but no English [and French too, doi, I listened in on those a bit][because I'm slower than the tour-herds]. So, too big to describe, took about 300 photos, but the interesting bit was thinking about it- no wonder the gardens are so big, they must have been freaking bored all of the time. A basic apartment was a study/library, bedchamber, washroom and general hanging-out salle, and it's all well and good if you're a prince or a general or prince-general and have something to do, but what about the princesses? They were just meat until they could be married off, and it's difficult to tell from paintings but I don't think the inbreeding really helped them. And I've never seen so much marble in my life, never really thought about it, but the audio-voice talked about different quarries it'd been imported from, so that's a whole entire world I know nothing about, where good marble comes from.

I'm rambling, sorry, again, tired, and still planning on doing the Louvre and maybe d'Orsay tomorrow. Aie. Didn't explore all of the gardens because I wanted to do a good round of Petit Trianon and M. Antoinette's hameau, hamlet, which she had built so she could pretend to be a peasant. I really liked that place, it was like a Disneyworld for adults, with a mini-farm, cutesy buildings with flowers blooming in terracotta pots and roses climbing the walls that you explored with different intimate gravel paths, little kitchen gardens you stumbled upon everywhere, a lake with fish in the middle of it all, you get the idea. Then there was a mini-wheat field, and mules, and another pond full of goldfish with a fake sort of bluff with a room on top overlooking the kingdom, you know, it was awesome. Back to the formal gardens, though; when I got my ticket to go in, the lady told me it included the fountain concert, and I had no idea what she was talking about but just smiled and moved on. I wander, hear music, go towards it and it's a recording hidden in the hedge, a preview to the concert, mebbe? Not sure. In a different mini-garden, same thing, different hedge. In the King's Garden, same thing, no big deal, only this time I notice that there's a fountain at the other end going haywire, and THAT is a fountain concert. Got some on film so that I can show everyone- they orchestrate [it's not a fountain with a centerpiece but] a series of water jets to correspond to music, and I hadn't seen that before.

Actually stayed so long in the Trianon area that they locked me in and I had to jump a wall, which was funny, and walked back along the main pool, and it's another great place where the Real French chill; there were families with kids, groups of people, older couples on benches, and the neat bit was when some school or independent team got to the lake and started crew practice. I'm not sure where the boats came from, but there were about a dozen put into the water within the half hour I sat down, zooming about, coaches screaming in French, with the sun getting lower in a sort of haze. It gets fully dark around 10.20-ish. And that was just one chateau, oh geeze.

Day 9- 4 June

Alright, gotta go to bed soon because tomorrow I'm doing Versailles, because if you're in France you gotta do Versailles. Then I plan on making Sunday a museum day, because the first Sunday of every month almost all of the museums will let you in for free, and this includes the one with the Mona Lisa. Tres cool. Monday will be Montmartre, because the flea market is open then, with a visit to the very famous Sacre Coeur and a walking tour.

Whew. Today was a walking around day, touring the Jardin du Luxembourg more extensively, and notably visiting Bois du Boulogne again. I went specifically to go into the greenhouses, which were closed last time, and I was not disappointed; there were pretty much no other people in them, and they were really neat. The most attention-grabbing was one filled with cacti, and the greenhouses are made so that there's a path you can walk around in a loop and have plants on both sides, very neat. I think that they're slowly renovating them [there are 3 buildings and a total of fifteen or so individual greenhouses], because two on the far end had more contemporary, wandering paths and newer signs, but I would think it'd be difficult to change the cactus greenhouse much; you know how slowly they grow, and some of these things were huge! Another greenhouse contained nothing but different types of fig trees from at least three continents. The bigger greenhouse was a two-part replication of rain forest, one more tropical than the other, and these were my favorites; both had fish ponds, one with huge koi [so cute!] and another with cichlids and fish I recognized from Amazon aquariums [aka really big]. Took lots of photos, saw tons of bizarre stuff, and very little of it came from the United States. Hung with fellow Abroadco students for a bit, tried some new French food, and then they went drinking and I came back here, because I'm going to Versailles tomorrow, and they're all going to have hangovers.

Today's edition of weird stuff about France: People living on the street will occasionally have pets, like dogs, which you would expect. What you would not expect is for a guy to have a rabbit. Also, I'm pretty sure that anyone who's polite to you on the metro is foreign.

Day 8- 3 June

[Keeping in mind my first post:] Apparently the odds of there being a protest in the square outside my hotel on my first day were better than you'd think- I ran into another one today going sloooowly through St Michel. The first indication, though I didn't know it then, was the sudden appearance of vans loaded with men in riot gear. Then the police started closing off streets, and heads started turning as the tourists with the sharper ears heard it coming, like a wave .... and the Frenchie French mostly paid no attention. This one was not about retirement age, but concerned both French involvement in the Middle East and the imprisonment of a soldier over there, and was a lot smaller- the police probably outnumbered the protesters. I also saw vans marked, I don't know, something to the effect that there exists a division of the police that protects citizens. So there were police protecting the protesters, other police making sure the protesters didn't start a thang, and still other police redirecting traffic. Just .... really strange.

Today was a lazy window shopping day, because my feet hurt, and the most notable places were a seven-story bookstore and a small district just north of Notre Dame that had multiple small shops selling plants. The first one I went into was awesome- it was a rare plants place, and I'd never seen easily 3/4 of the plants there, and for me that's saying something [just because I pay more attention to that stuff than other stuff, you know]. Makes me wonder what kind of restrictions France has [or doesn't have] on foreign plants, and what geography has to do them, because some of these things were awesome! There was this dome of bark that looked ancient and had a dinky vine coming out of it, and I think that was the whole plant, and an exotic sort of ruffled cactus, and crazy cool flowers, and a lot of different kinds of bonsai and a palm tree and so, so much more. The other plant stalls/small stores were less overwhelming awesome, but I'd still never seen variegated roses before and quite a few of the other plants. There was also a nice place that only did orchids, and another packed with hydrangeas. The funny bit was that easily half of the plants that I'd seen in the United States cost over 15 euro, and the most expensive, I forget what but something pretty cheap in Florida, was 50 euro. One place was selling Spanish moss, the stuff that UF pulls out of trees by the truckload and burns, for 15 euro. It was like the other day, when I was in Jardin des Plantes, I recognized some and went up to them, and yup, they were weeds from they United States, and they were being cultivated.

Weird stuff about France for the day: Protests. Also, in the bookstore in the French literature section, probably 90% of the books had white spines. The covers would be different, some with pictures, but again, most of the covers were mostly white, too, and the brightly-colored ones with covers over their covers [you know what I mean] I looked under and THEY were white. And they don't seem to do hardback. And so there were rows of shelves of just blank titles, and little stands in front showing select books or ones they're trying to get rid of, all brightly colored, but underneath they were all white, too, and it was we-eird ....

Day 7- 2 June AAAAH A WEEK ALREADY!!!!!

Somehow, in some way, google knows that I am in France, and yet my computer does not [just got the internet on today, apologies]. I’m sure this has … huge, just huge implications. That aside, tried to make a croque madame for breakfast [egg on bread with cheese and ham] in a variation of the past almost-ham sandwiches, and, appropriately, it almost-worked. Then went to class and got beaten down with prepositions, and went exploring. Park Andre Citroen was neat, and contained multiple mini thematic gardens within its grounds, and aside from the official paths had lots of others people had made, so it was a great place to explore. Many French Frenchies, few tourists, chilling on the grass, kids running about and people kissing everywhere [and I always thought it was an exaggeration. Maybe it’s a totally normal frequency, but now I just expect to notice it and do? But I mean everywhere, like on the metro escalator, jaywalking, any bench totally regardless of scenic value, etc]. Then I walked across the Seine to Bois de Boulogne, and really liked that- fairly natural forest that reminded me a fair bit of Maine, only thing maple trees instead of evergreens. There were official and non-official paths everywhere and joggers, again not too many tourists, and I saw a whole lot of rabbits. Because it’s spring, the flowers are in bloom everywhere, from dinky ones in woodland clearings and along the paths to the more cultivated beds, and the ducks on the lake all had ducklings, and I saw swans and cygnets! Swans are huge, which I knew, but didn’t know, you know? and these guys were pretty used to people and I got really close. They didn’t mind me, probably because I saw four people feeding waterfowl on other parts of the lake, but they hissed at all of the dogs that went by. Sounded just like a cat. Doesn't sound like much for one day, I know, but that was five hours of pretty much straight walking.

Weird stuff about France for the day: Their keyboards are different enough to disable Americans. The biggest, weirdest bit is switching the q and the a, but the z is in a crazy spot and on the bottom row they've got extra punctuation marks taking up space and I don’t remember what else. I also think that there’s some kind of secret scarf code going on.

Day 6- 1 June [written on the 2nd]

So, in summary, had my first day of class and I really like my teacher- she’s very nice and wickedly French accent-wise, so I’ve been listening pretty closely [not that I wouldn’t, but you know what I mean]. It’s different from other French classes I’ve had in that she just KNOWS, man- before whenever someone had a tricky question before, a really fine line one, we would all either consult a book or take the break in class to text, whichever, and it would come down to ‘do what your heart tells you and I won’t count off’ [weird sitch where my teachers before have all either been American or from North Africa]. But this lady, she KNOWS. Explored Jardin des Plantes, and made a mental to research whether or not their menagerie and Museum of Natural History are good, and then went to the Pantheon, which is right by my school. It’s a neoclassical building that looks like a Greek temple, commissioned by Napoleon III to honor St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, and included in the entry fee is a tour up it; like all cathedrals or large fake temples, the walls aren’t solid, and there are doors in them with tight, tight spiral staircases. We went to three different levels, up as high as the base of the dome, and it was really exciting to see how many places I recognized. I’m now saving the Eiffel Tower until the end of my stay, and hopefully it’ll mean a lot more then. Also went to a mall right by Hotel de Ville, where the French Open celebration was going on with more gusto than ever, and checked it out. Food for today, in order: Cereal bar, honey crepe, 3 gaufres nappees a parfum cacao [chocolate-covered waffles], another weird almost-ham sandwich and something that looked like ravioli but tasted like an egg and had weeeeeird crunchy bits in it.

More stuff that throws me off: Sometimes the toilet paper is pink. All doors have handles, and few have tirez/poussez [pull, push] signs, so I find it difficult both to enter and exit places, and you can imagine how this looks. Motorcycles drive on the sidewalks.

Day 5- 31 May

Lately, I have been eating some weird shit, and dudes, you all know that I save cursing pretty much for special occasions. Today was mostly a day of logistics and running about- we checked out of the hotel and into our lodgings. I was woken up around 5am by my temporary roommate hurling into the toilet. Up until this point I had been utterly unsympathetic with her being sick [and getting molested, hell of a first time in Paris, right?], but this was pretty convincing. After packing, we went as a mostly-group to the ecole where we took our French placement tests. Between the excessive urinating and hurling I’d gotten about four hours of sleep [sorry for being vaguely graphic], so we’ll see how I did, but afterwards was the fun part: I checked into the dorm where I’m staying, and I lovelovelove my room! It’s a corner one, so I have two windows, and the second thing I did was rearrange all of the furniture, and the first was dance around a bit. I met up and checked out the other two apartments of our group- one that was three small rooms above a jazz bar, and another that was a continuous room with a small bathroom. Both had a kitchenette, a dinky table to eat at and two twins, and the second had a tv. I still like mine the best, though, even though I don’t seem to have any dishes [probably will borrow some from the others], because I’m closer to the metro and train and seriously RIGHT ACROSS from a park, and three minutes’ walk from a [for Paris] big supermarket and I have two windows, yay.

The supermarket, now that was interesting. I mostly went by pictures for some canned food, and got some kind of egg thing in tomato sauce, some kind of cheese, stuff, weird stuff, and the cashier ran everything through and I bagged it myself and there were at least eight types of jelly I couldn’t even guess at, even with pictures, and fish sticks and cow guts and dude, it was weird. Got back to the room and crashed, don’t even feel like exploring the jardin across the street, starting to get a callus on the inside of my second toe. But really happy, even though I’m now a bit afraid of jelly, really, really happy.

List of the things I have eaten today, in order: One (1) Swiss chocolate [rectangular folded-over pastry, insides of butter and melted chocolate chips, served hot (SO GOOD)], one (1) cup of hot chocolate [it was actually hot cream, with the chocolate at the bottom, and you had to stir it, and took me a third of the cup to figure out], about two point five (2.5 approx) kilograms of cherries [fresh, cheap, awesome and filling that I found while just a bit lost and shared walking around with the other students today and a guy on the subway], one (1) cup of citron presse [or pressed citrus, as far as I could tell, pure fresh lemon juice that we figure you dilute with water and add sugar to], one (1) sandwich [of some kind of grain bread, something I think is ham, some kind of almost-mayonnaise and that cheese, no idea what it is], three (3) fingers of Nutella [again, no silverware, but it tastes better this way]. This place is awesome.