You know what I just realized?

They don't have fire hydrants here!

Well...

..."no more pannini poulet for me"

Let's see...

...what did I do on my week off?

-Laundry
-Postcards
-Russian Orthodox Monk Choir at Notre Dame
-Valentine's Day Party w/ lots of wine and cheese
-Shakespeare & Co- I saw the famous old owner and his daugher!
-Pantheon and Latin Quarter
-Went to Steven Sawyer (my History of Paris teacher)'s class at ENS on the history of Chicago
-Bought a new Moleskine
-Went to Chateau de Vincennes w/ Z
With Jessica, who came up from Barcelona:
-Went to Notre Dame, walked down the Voie Triomphale and then back to the Louvre for free Friday night
-Walked around the Latin Quarter some more w/ Jes and Z, then to Rue Mouffetard, a great pedestrian walk way. We bought wine and cheese for dinner. Then on to the Musee d'Orsay, and then our cheese tasting.
-Today: Montmartre, then coffee in Beaubourg, and then Centre Georges Pompidou for some modern art. My favorite piece was Attempt to raise hell, 1974 by Dennis Oppenheim. This puppet of a man would, every two minutes, bang his head against a bell. But my favorite artist after all was Magritte. Then we went to try to find a French dinner by the Canal Saint-Martin, of Amelie fame.


So, a full week! Now it's back to classes...wish me luck!

Those French plumbers...

So I was sleeping in today (got to love 7th week off) and around noon I'm awoken by tapping on the door.
"Oui?" I said, sitting up, thinking it was someone coming to ask me to lunch. But before I could get out of bed, I hear a key in the lock and the door swings open. In walks a man in a white lab coat carying what looks like...a giant syringe. My first thought is that there having some sort of manditory vaccination against bird flu, and I just missed the memmo. For those of you who don't know, I hate getting shots. So he walks in, sort of looks at me and says "Bonjour, n'inquiet pas"....Don't worry? How am I not supposed to worry? There's some mad scientist about to inject me with a needle the size of the Eiffel Tour! (France Reference: 10 pts.) But then he just walks over and starts caulking my sink. After about 30 seconds and 3 squirts later, he turns, says "Bonjounee" and leaves. I'm not sure how often they do this, but at least I won't be getting any leaks behind my sink...or a giant shot in my arm!

Another one of those hilarious French Romanian Playwrites

Tonight, I went to see La Cantatrice chauve, by Eugene Ionesco. It was absurdist, funny play where nothing really happend, and it ended in pandimonium. So right up my ally. Anyway, I was doing some reasearch on it, and thought you might enjoy these quotes from Wikipedia:

At the age of 40 he decided to learn English using the Assimil method, conscientiously copying whole sentences in order to memorize them. Re-reading them, he began to feel that he was not learning English, rather he was discovering some astonishing truths such as the fact that there are seven days in a week, that the ceiling is up and the floor is down; things which he already knew, but which suddenly struck him as being as stupefying as they were indisputably true.
This feeling only intensified with the introduction in later lessons of the characters known as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith". To his astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, that they had a servant, Mary, who was English like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, he thought, was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth. For Ionesco, the clichés and truisms of the conversation primer disintegrated into wild caricature and parody with language itself disintegrating into disjointed fragments of words.