Day13- Tuesday 8 June

Ah, dudes, I crashed today. I woke up with blisters under my blisters, two of them, and something wrong with my foot. Didn't even make it to Saint Chapelle, and it's supposed to be architecturally more advanced and interesting than Notre Dame, with wicked stained glass. After a fun phonetics class messing around with the recorders and a grammar class where I was defeated by take-out verbs [I call them], along with everyone else, I went to a new street market and got lunch. At a small Asian place I got a Chinese quiche, it was called, and some chicken on a stick; I really liked the quiche, which was like cornbread in consistency but just tasted ... foreign, somehow, with bits of Chinese vegetables embedded in it like you find in egg rolls, really good. Forgot to mention that yesterday in St Michel I finally stopped into a south Tunisian bakery that had caught my eye last week, because who's heard of a south Tunisian bakery? They had a weird amount of untranslatable green food, but I got something I thought was some kind of ethnic cake and seriously disliked it- I have never had anything like it, made of some kind of small round stuff with bits of almonds, yerch, ate most of it anyways but NEVER AGAIN. I probably would have been better off with something green, and will most likely go back. Actually fell asleep on the banks of the Seine in a park [which really tells me my body's feeling all of the walking] after the market, toured a bookstore, went back to the dorm and fell asleep again on a pleather couch beaten into itself, took a shower, isn't it fun hearing about the teensiest things? I felt like I should be DOING SOMETHING, but was so, so dead, and that's okay, and it rained anyways. Tomorrow, if I'm up for it, I'll go to Saint Dennis Basilica where they have buried over a millenium of French kings, if you can imagine, and if not, it'll be Church Day II.

Fun stuff about France: They have a lot of weird yogurt, and that's not just me not noticing yogurt in the US; I got two kinds for fun, pomme vert kiwi [green apple kiwi] and noix de coco [coconut], and they had bits of the fruit/nut in them and were really good. Also, the cheese absolutely stinks, which is probably a mark of it being good, fresh cheese, but yikes; I was sitting, waiting for the metro a while back and smelled something awful radiating from my right. There was a guy sitting there, and I thought it might have been his fault, and it was, but when I looked it was because he'd opened a cheese and was eating it. Both kinds that I've gotten so far for sandwiches and eggs and have stank up my room, even from inside the mini-fridge.

Can't believe I haven't mentioned this yet, either: Easily the huge majority of roads don't have lanes, and I'm not talking about all of the dinky winding one-way rues that are everywhere, I mean pretty packed two lane each way avenues along the Seine, and very notably the seven lane-ish-around street circling the Arc de Triomphe [I've got some video of this- the rule of the cule is that anything on the right has right-of-way, which is fantastic for crazy parking and buses needing to turn, but means that at the Arc, something can shoot off from a side street, pull into traffic, cut across all six, seven or eight lanes that are existing at the moment and join the other people who tend to park illegally along the side of the monument, and this is okay]. Apparently one of the bigger things the president has done is to make the city more bike-friendly by creating bike lanes, but I'm not wickedly impressed as this seems to mean, for the most part, painting a lane onto a street that didn't have one to begin with, and motorcycles use them anyways, and one sure bet you can make is the winner of a motorcycle-versus-leisure bike battle. Jaywalking is a very exciting art in Paris.

Also, people, get ready, I'm almost ready to do my massive postcard sending.