Adventures on the Metro

I don't mean to keep harping on this authorized/unauthorized grass thing, but I have procured further evidence of this madness.

Anyway, it has been a very good week. At one point (I don't remember what day), a bunch of the kids in my program and I went to the Jardin de Luxembourg and had a picnic on the authorized grass. Pretty soon after we arrived, a couple showed up and sat down next to us. They spread out their blanket and sat down for what we assumed to be a romantic picnic. As it turned out, the man's hair was a little too long for the woman to focus on her food, so they pulled out a towel and a pair of scissors and she gave him a quick haircut before they returned to their regularly-scheduled programming. Half an hour later, at 7:12 on the dot, the police started blowing their whistles and screaming at everyone because the park was closed. Good thing they were there to enforce the traditional 7:12 park-closing time.

There has also been a major breakthrough in the language department: I can now tell jokes in French. They are not always well-received (which I'm sure is a shock for anyone familiar with my unparalleled sense of humor in English), since I often lose something in translation, but it is a start. And my host parents are also starting to make jokes with me, which is great. Even when I have no idea what they are saying, they start to smile before the joke is over and I realize that I am supposed to laugh. So if nothing else, I am getting to be great at reading faces.

My host parents also took me to a huge antique show on Wednesday night. I grabbed my wallet, thinking that I would buy my dad a decanter if I saw a nice (and fairly cheap) one for Christmas. Well, as it turns out, they were selling Picassos there. Needless to say, my dad will have to settle for a card or an Eiffel Tower keychain or something.

Tonight I met up with some kids in my program by Notre Dame and we walked around the Latin Quarter. We meant for it to be a girls' night, but some of the boys showed up, so I guess we didn't communicate that too well. I got a crepe Nutella at the beginning of the night, and after we walked around for a few hours, I got another one just before we got on the Metro. But everyone else was having French fries and that meat-sicle stuff you get at falafel places, and I really wanted that too, so I got one and double-fisted dinner and dessert. It was almost 1:30 by this point, and the Metro closes around 1:45, which would have been fine except that I had to change trains and I ended up missing the last train at the connection point. So I wandered all over Creation (actually back and forth on the same block since I didn't know the neighboorhood and I was afraid to walk away from the lights by the Metro) until I saw someone getting out of a cab, and I deftly swooped in. The cabdriver thought I was Spanish (so I guess Amory and I are descended from the same stock), but other than that, the ride home was uneventful and way more comfortable than the Metro would have been.

Tomorrow we are going to the Marais, which is the Jewish Quarter. It doesn't make much sense to me that we are going there tomorrow, when everything will be closed, rather than Sunday, when everything will be open, but maybe they don't want us shopping on their time. Also my daddy is coming to see me!

Pictures of the haircut and more are at http://picasaweb.google.com/stephanie.apstein/Paris2008.

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