I am a tourist.

I spent a lot of time today in the city. I think I saw a large majority of the tourist attractions, although I didn't participate in them since they were somewhat expensive (7 € to climb to the top of the Arc de Triomphe?).  There was a lot though, and I got to see the outside of the Louvre, the Obelisk at one end of the Champs-Elysées in the middle of La Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Panthéon, and a large majority of the Musée d'Orsay. I did get to see most (all) of it with Kim, and it was really nice to have some company around the city. Walking around you really get a feel for its enormity. It's significantly larger than the downtown of Chicago, and since none of the buildings are allowed to be built taller than 5 stories, everything which is important is also super spread out. Also walking around, I was able to see a lot of Paris's interesting but not very popular architecture. My favorite was this building which seemed to be built out of dirt whereas this bridge looked like something out of lord of the rings (minus the cars and bitter french people). There were also a few fences that had spikes positioned somewhat peculiarly as to prevent people from climbing the french from any direction.

The Musée d'Orsay was very interesting and it had a lot of 19th century artwork, both painted and sculpted. I really liked a painting whose title and painter I can't remember at the moment (go me) but it had a lot of white paint seemingly just sponged onto a black canvas. It was very simple... enough so that you could probably do it yourself, but it looked very cool. Impressionism is usually very interesting when done with still lifes and not necessarily portraits. It was overall a great experience.

Afterwards, Kim and I decided to hang out with some interesting statues outside the museum before heading back into the Quartier Latin where we found a vietnamese restaurant with an incredibly cheap menu and a great walking area. It was a lot of fun just trying to pronounce all the French names of the different places even though I don't think we got any right. Oh, and hagen-daz (sp?) has some ridiculous fondue dish that involves dunking a dozen scoops of ice cream and a whole variety of fruit into chocolate with walnuts on the side. We didn't have the money/willpower to stop and try it, but it definitely is on my to-do list. I could definitely see myself living in this area and just hanging out at night, it was really awesome just walking around.

Speaking of which, I got tired around 8-9 PM, which according to the time difference should be about mid-afternoon in the states. This doesn't really make a lot of sense in the sense of jet-lag. I think I really screwed myself over with my sleep schedule, but somehow managed to make it work in time for classes on monday. 8 AM is not a fun time to get up... I don't know whose decision that was.

-Pavel