Cliché

Hello, everyone. I know, it's saturday night and I'm staying in doing homework because I'm cool, but I'll have you know that I haven't just been idly letting the wonders of the city slip through my fingers. Oh no!

First of all, Thursday evening was the first time that my group met up at a cafe in the gayer (literally more homosexual) part of town to chat and have a few drinks. It was interesting to learn a bunch about the french colloquialisms that I'm sure we also have in English but never really realize we're using. It becomes apparent when we need to translate phrases like "to run into" someone, but overall our discussion friend/leader/person was very nice about the whole procedure. On top of speaking french for a good two hours without having anyone resort to anglais, I found a new beer that's absolutely fantastic. I don't know if it exists in the US, but if anyone finds a beer that goes by the name Adelscott, please don't hesitate to tell me where so that I can buy it by the barrel. Other than this wonderful discovery, the consequent adventure into boys town really required me to stick close to the two other girls in my group. We actually walked down a block where out of about 200 people I counted about three women.

After realizing that we probably weren't going to find anything that we wanted there we decided to venture over to the Eiffel Tower just to walk around and absorb the city. After somewhat orienting ourselves in the right direction from boys town we came across a street that caught me pleasantly by surprise. If any of you have seen that M&M's commercial it was a very "He does exist!" moment. In order to satiate our hunger, on the way to the tower we found a few sandwiches that only cost us 4€ each, which is pretty good for France, so we got our dinner along the way. If any of you have ever been to France you'll know that the Eiffel Tower is simply magnificent although taking pictures of things that emit light at night without a tripod is somewhat difficult, so you'll have to bear with me. Another thing that I didn't know is that every hour the tower decides to sparkle with a bunch of camera-flash-esque bulbs that go off at once. It makes for a fireworks show every hour without all the smoke and annoying things. Apparently that's where people go to propose to their girlfriends, and I don't blame them, it's very pretty. We ended up just sitting at a bench with a bottle of wine chilling and wondering how we ended up under la tour d'eiffel. 

The following day after getting a disorienting 13 hours of sleep, I met up with one of my new friends Paul (who's super cool by the way) to go downtown and check out one of the jazz clubs close to an area in the Latin Quarter. There was a great band that we weren't really able to see very well because of the venue was packed tighter than calories in a Big Mac. We got there before the band actually started playing, but since they wouldn't let us down to the music area we decided to go walk around a bit and come back, but by the time we came back it was full. Go figure. There were some interesting rules, however, and overall it was a good experience. Not only that but the neighborhood that we got to walk around had a lot of street vendors and general night life which made it pleasant to walk around in. Not to mention we got to watch a group of street performers do some ridiculous break dancing. The group of 5 policemen watching made it kind of disconcerting though...

Today (that's saturday if you're keeping track), Paul and I went to go see the Musée d'Orsay. I'd already been, but I didn't mind going again since this time we were able to get in for free since I changed my major to something that appeases the government of France. Along with that I got to find that painting that I liked but forgot the name of. It turns out it's Vitrine - Rue de Sévigné (2005) Impression jet d'encre sur toile by Bertrand Lavier. It looked like something that I could make myself... basically just white paint smeared interestingly over a black canvas, but there was something about it that just struck me as really cool. I don't really know what...

Anyway, after a while we realized that we were kind of hungry so since the café in the museum was closed (bastards) we couldn't buy the famous chocolate waffle. Instead we went downtown to walk around and look at the local shops and restaurants ultimately finding a pizzeria where I was at long last reunited with my lost love: the Pizza Regina. It was every bit as wonderful as I remembered and the house wine was also cheap (6€ for 50 cl) and pretty quality. As the day turned out to be a lot nicer that evening than it did at its onset we decided to walk the rest of the way home, which only took us about an hour. It's ridiculous how large the city is since it takes a good amount of time to walk from one part to the other even though the entire city is lined with cafés and boulangeries and everything you could ever need. I bought myself a baguette on the way home and it's proven to be a great investment overall.

Now the rest of the weekend I will be punished by my procrastination over the past week. =(

A bientot.

-Pavel