Day 36- Wednesday 13 July

Yaay, Bastille Day tomorrow! Today was quite blustery as our class met in the wee hours of the middle morning at the Parc Monceau. Huddling together in the metro, our prof nonetheless pried us from our wind-sheltered corner to shuffle us along paths lined with fake ruins and points of landscape-tual interest. We looked very American this morning, not only for being led in a group but also for the two sets of girls sharing scarves to keep warm, another one sandwiching herself between two others because she was wearing a sundress, and another one, whom you may know, who resorted to jumping up and down for a bit to stay alive. But I digress. Cutting our promenade somewhat short, we then visited the museum Jacquemart-Andre, which used to be a mansion and is now, of course, a museum. The rooms and their furniture survived Revolutionary sacking and burning, somehow [now sure exactly how as our personal audioguides were in French], and themselves composed half the museum, the other half being the family's personal collection of mostly paintings, but also sculptures and random items like Egyptian religious paraphernalia [long history of that with the French, as I've mentioned].

A group of us then went to a market by Reid Hall, but it wasn't fantastic, so making plans to meet up with two others later I went back to the apartment, had lunch, and spontaneously began looking for somewhere to live this coming fall. Also, it was raining, So. Around five I walked over to MK2 to meet up with Jacky and Gretchen, and we saw Harry Potter. Anticipating the usual Harry Potter madhouse, I got there fairly early, only to find that there were 530 seats open in the salle it was being shown in, and when we went upstairs, ten minutes before the start, there were still about 490 left. I equated this to it not being anything of a big deal here, and thought that was pretty funny, until Gretchen mentioned hearing a lot of French speakers in one of the huge lines for the English versions of the movie, so apparently they like to hear the original voices, with subtitles. Heloise [the daughter of the household I'm living in], professed no interest in it at all, so who knows.

The movie was good, of course, but the best bit was actually seeing it in French, which, we all agreed later, we were really glad to have done. Turns out the French word for 'wand' is 'baguette,' which you're all familiar with, and every time they said it in the movie [a lot], the other two would snort or suppress laughter, especially when they started talking about 'magique baguette' [wand magic], and I did not think that this was funny at all until, near the end, this one line, 'la plus puissante baguette du monde,' [the most powerful baguette in the world], made me burst out laughing in the theatre. After, I walked them to their metro, because they were pretty lost, and we discussed the movie, as per usual, then wished each other a good weekend.

As I was eating quiche for dinner, Melissa rushed in, saying she was going to meet Kaitlin, an ex-student of Maria's, to go to the sapeur-pompiers bal, the firefighters ball put on by various firefighter stations throughout the city on the nights of the 13th and 14th. In the end, she, I, Heloise and Heloise's friend Alix went over pretty late to Kaitlin's tiny flat for an aperitif, then waited about an hour and a half, no lie, in rather cold weather outside the station nearby, then were screened for weapons and drugs, and then we were in, and from there, guys, it's difficult to describe, but most of the courtyard was a mosh pit, with two sides being bars, and the DJ was doing techno mixes of popular songs everyone knew, and we just danced for two hours, and it was fantastic.

walking to the museum:

some of the front of Jacquemart-Andre:

le salon, which was neat as the walls [not ones shown] could drop into the floor to make a much larger ballroom with two other rooms, and this was a good two hundred plus years ago:

awesome staircase, gorgeous:

just walking home from the movie: