Day 27- Monday 4 July

This morning was occupied with just more reading [seeing a pattern?] and most of the day with class-things. I did a short presentation on a section of our roman [novel], and then we spent a happy few hours figuring out what the heck was going on, because what one person might think is a mysterious personnage opening a secret drawer in a table by using a pulley is actually the same mysterious personnage twisting a metal plate into a bar with his bare hands [guess who thought that]. Minor details, yep. Today's notable single-word mix-up, because they're the same, was thinking the text read 'flowers' [as in a bouquet] every time it actually read 'boot,' which happened more than you might think, okay?

Right, then we had a bit of a break where I walked through the Tuileries [another pattern?] before our group re-coalesced at the Louvre, stunningly deserted compared to Sunday, where we looked at things in textbooks and talked until they herded us out, and just had a good class. Then we had another, longer, break, where the group split into two, and one half went to the Opera Garnier to check it out and the other, that I joined, went for burgers and milkshakes at a fake-American Parisian resto for the sake of their country of birth, though none of us were Native Americans. Under-portioned and overpriced, the burgers were still good, as they seemed to use actual, quality beef, like, from their neighbour's cow, and I had a nice conversation about things people had done in Paris and water polo.

Walking together through Luxembourg and a bit of the Montparnasse area, we returned back to Reid Hall to watch together a Marie Antoinette movie, and I braced myself for a docu-drama only to discover its principal was Mary Jane [from Spiderman] and what followed was two hours of almost more chick-flick than I could quite handle, but our prof brought us macaroons, it seemed to be filmed fairly well and she told us in advance that the social customs were reasonably accurate, so you could think your way through it and it was interesting. We got out around ten, I took the bus back, I just fixed last weekend, and can't write my paper because the Louvre is clooosed on Tuesdays ....

Forgot to post from yesterday the Pont des Artes photos, because I don't think I've showed you yet, so here's a close-up of some of the locks:

and here's a bit more context, thought I could have done better. The bridge is great, the whole length of it glitters gold from a distance when it's this sunny :) which totally deserves a happy face

this is Doctor Bloom, in charge of us Advanced Frenchies, unwrapping various pastries that she brought in today as a petite degustation before our class, because some of us were hesitant to get the exotic-looking ones. She then passed them onto Gretchen to cut in half, because she didn't want to mutilate and dismember the delicate ones herself, which was funny, and we each got two halves of things:

see the two at the top? one was like a mini-lemon gel-custard pie, and the other called an opera, and those are the two I tried [and loved the lemon, WOW], and beside it are two eclairs, one choco, one cafe [coffee], and then there's a macaroon-bedecked chocolate mousse contraption [brown one] and those red ones with the strawberries on top like fancy strawberry shortcake with cream in between and there was raspberry mousse inside the cake shells of the other two, great way to start class:

one more thing in life I will never do:

shiny:

just our class being the last out of the Richelieu wing:

what our classroom looks like, lots of fantastic natural light that pwns [defeats, utterly washes out] the projector, that sends our history prof into paroxysms of mental anguish:

just waiting for the bus, typical rue, if I'm posting too many mundane pictures let me know, I figure they're probably just interesting:

Also, Flavia, I wasn't going to forgive you, but I should have made my request before you got your bus ticket, not your fault, but if you can just stop by one just to make sure, I'd like a double, cheese, mayomustardketchup are all fine but no vegetables, thanks.