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.