Day 3- Friday 10 June

Having stayed up rather early doing my online class [yeah], I got an abnormally late start today. Today's first success was finding the Nutella on my own, and first challenge was taking a shower. One day I'm going to take pictures of all of the rooms in their apartment and post them: The shower is a bathtub, and you hold this shower head-thing yourself and there's no curtain or any sort of barrier to prevent you from trying to, say, rinse off your arm, but missing and typhooning the sugar ants on the tile instead [but I managed not to], and it was reaaaaally cold, and this is apparently normal.

I went to the BHV first and got a watch, because, again, I didn't have one, and previously I'd been checking the time by computer as I have found four clocks in the house but none of them have the right time. In the days of my timepieceness I'd determined the bird clock in the kitchen was the right hour usually and the digital one in the hall closest to the right minute, but that the grandfather and radio clocks were not to be trusted, and I didn't want to mess with any of them because I'm not allowed to flush the toilet past eleven at night.

Impromptu stop in a church, then on to the bookstore, where I got two novels for class that have me thinking I really should start reading ahead [tomorrow] and dallied for a bit, then it rained and I took sanctuary in another, different church, then went to Luxembourg and hung out there for a bit. There was a seemingly-random concert going on, which is completely normal; yesterday at a metro station there was a ten piece string orchestra, and I can usually count on seeing some one-man musical act every other time I take the metro. Add to that random dance acts and accordionists but no magicians doing things for pocket change in the tres tourist areas and Paris is a fun, sporadically musical place to be.

Walking a fair ways to the Eglise du Dome, wherein lies Napoleon, and the Hotel des Invalides, which I had no clue about then but now know is part veteran's retirement home and hospital, as per its original purpose, and larger part museum [like almost absolutely every other large building in Paris, craziness] actually took up the rest of the time that I had until my scheduled dinner hour [salad and I think quiche]. Now I'm working on my final for my online class in the Gare de Lyon, just because :) It takes a long time to walk places, but it's fun to window shop, pretty different from what I'm used to, places selling one thing, which I'm sure there is a lot of in the US but I just don't bother to find out.

Weird things about France: The shower counts, def, also you'll note the escalators in the bookstore? If you are handicapped in Paris, you can walk, because I haven't seen a wheelchair-friendly place anywhere, not in the bathrooms of the train station, not in the train station itself, definitely not the trains, none of the metro stops, not on the buses, the airport has an elevator for luggage but there are still stairs in places, and it goes on. I think I've seen one homeless person in a wheelchair, but that's it, everyone else uses crutches.

Cute tourists shops, and a velib' station, where, if you have a FRENCH credit card, you can rent a bike

See the toilette line? this is at Note Dame

Inside the bookstore, note the conformity, due to there being only a few major publishers, I think

Escalators up, stairs down

Jardin du Luxembourg

tennis in the jardin

Eglise du Dome, Napoleon inside

a random coin, corner [also, I learned how to say coin today, piece]

the Hotel des Invalides, and Tour Montparnasse to the left

Pont [bridge] Alexandre IX [thing with the columns and gold] and le Grand Palais [large ambiguous glass building] opposite the Hotel