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.