A Paris: Day 14- Tuesday 21 June

OMG, TWO WEEKS.

This morning, when Maria caught me ovening a pizza at nine in the morning, I told her with a dead straight face This pizza is not for breakfast. She doesn't know me well enough yet.

Everyone who shows up to class tomorrow is going to be a wreck, so I may as well start this now: Today, the twenty-first of June, was Fete de la Musique, the festival of music, which, though technically goes on all day, really mostly goes on at night, so before that I: Rested at the apartment, doing homework, still sick but not too bad, then went to class, which was held at Musee Carnavalet again today as we did a more detailed lecture-walking tour that covered the last century of the monarchy, relevant to our history class, and also the French revolution [the first one], relevant to our being in Paris. Functioning more fully today, I was able to far better appreciate Everything in General, though, you know, the weather was still just not that great. We got ice cream as a class and then moved on to the Palais Royal, where we discussed our readings in the garden [mostly the changing position of females in society way before, just before, during and after the [first] revolution, I guess not wickedly relevant to my life but it's interesting ....]. That actually took up a fair while, and we did a mini-walking tour of the surrounding area afterwards, and went into le Louvre des Antiquaires, basically an only-antiques mall full of crazy things like vases and fans and pieces of fabric from the fourteenth century and gilt furniture and tons of jewellery and almost nothing had a price tag and the ceilings were low and the stores absolutely tiny and fun to window shop, and I failed to buy Erin a pipe or walking stick, and Tori was once again denied gold-plated dinner sets and a suit of Chinese armor. Completing our tour, I agreed to meet up with a group of people for la Fete after recuperating at our respective domiciles.

A lot of culminative miscellaneous hindering Things meant that I missed the rendez-vous with the group and went on to enjoy the Fete on my own. Bypassing a mediocre rock-thing on the corner, I went up a block and watched for a bit another rock-thing in front of la Sorbonne, then was attracted to a band doing covers of popular songs, which included cryptic French pop stuff that had people singing along as well as White Stripes and U2, so I was happy, and other people seemed to be happy at this one, too, and were dancing, and then I just kept moving up the Boulevard Saint Michel, pausing at other bands, going onto side streets as I felt like it, listening to a few, cramming down the narrow old pedestrian streets of the heart of the Latin quarter, getting a gyro and fries from a hugely harried, alcohol-swigging man at a Greek resto, walking on down to Notre Dame just because, seeing people lining the lower quais of the Seine, and it was absolutely indescribable, fries all over the stairs, a hundred new people every time you blinked, rock, screaming music, Italian music, Caribbean music, pop, DJs, clubs carried into the streets with speakers, everyone holding beer or wine or champagne or liquor bottles or cups of drinks or just sodas, smoking, most people dressed absolutely normally but tens of thousands, unknowable amounts of people on the streets on a Tuesday night, crazy cool, though I should mention the police everywhere, ambulances, people vomiting, official-looking people with large dogs in muzzles on the metro, so on. Moving on, I went to the Eiffel Tower, because I am a tourist, and the first band I saw there seemed to be legit Indians of some kind, and it was a nice contrast, and I just stopped there and sat on the lawn for a while, looking at the sparkle lights and salespeople throwing LED helicopter things into the air, other people selling alcohol, other people sitting on the grass or walking around, flash photography on the uppermost level of the Tower, but it was slightly cold and eventually did start to rain, and I made my way back to the apartment.

le Louvre des Antiquaires, a corridor