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.