Day 22- Wednesday 29 June

Class was earlier than usual today, but the reading was interesting, a complementary piece to the Mercier we'd been perusing about the various vile aspects of Paris in the eighteenth century, and at the end we took the metro together and walked the streets that we'd read about, and saw two houses left from that period [because the rest had fallen/burnt down], and a few old palais, and ended on the easternmost end of Ile St Louis, in a parc that had been Restif's, the author's, Thinking Place. Going our separate ways, I went back to the apartment, first stopping by a supermarket for a few necessities [Nutella among them, of course], made lunch, then out for a bit of cadeaux-shopping and short-spotting, [though the lines were too mad to try anything on [but I have needed a pair of shorts, since April, eurgh]], then explored Parc de la Villette, wending my way through the Cite des Sciences et d'Insustries [it's a museum, like a really big MOSH [for you Jacksonvillians] complete with a planetarium and what they call the Geode, like a mirrored sphere with one of those wraparound movie screens inside it] and their free aquarium [a lot of brown fish, but still cute, I lovelovelove aquariums] and then out through the parc, which had bridges and these things called folies and bamboo and people on wide stretches of grass along the canal [that continues down to Bassin de la Villette and then through the Saint Martin area, which is on my To-Explore list] then through to a fountain where I sat and read for French tomorrow for a while then to the metro to Place de la Republique, notable for a large Liberty-esque statue commemorating the hundredth anniversary of their revolution, then back to the apartment to clean myself and hopefully we're going to eat soon because I. Am. Starving [later edit, we had spaghetti, and I had two servings, miraculous][OH, and I have to amend The Salad Rules AGAIN because you can apparently eat salad with spaghetti if you want to].

a certain shout-out .... there were a lot of Russians at the aquarium today, but I haven't bespied many other groups at all, ergo probably why this place is closed ....

the end of Ile de la Cite and two filles in my class

the temporary park in front of Hotel de Ville that sprung up while I was away, complete with shrubberies, mind you, another part of Paris celebrating 2011 as the Year of Forests

a bit of the museum, and the Geode, very pretty today, it hardly rained at all

this bridge was actually a boat that rotated to let other boats go by

a folie that was also a bar

a folie epitomizing folie-ness [they were great, the first aid station had a waterwheel, and almost all of them have human-sized staircases to nowhere in particular]

Place de la Republique, just for the record, you know

Weird things about France: I inadvertently deeply insulted Heloise, the resident daughter, by licking my knife while looking at her. At the time I was eating Nutella. Yup. So I had to explain that this was completely normal aux Etats-Unis [is it? nobody seemed to care before, unless it was a really sharp one] for several minutes and get the backup of the other resident American.