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.