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.