Keep Off the Grass

Well, if nothing else, I am certainly getting some exercise here. I literally get lost at least once on my way to anywhere, so I finally bought a map yesterday and that has really cut down on the wandering. At one point, I got so lost after getting off the metro that I had to get back on it at another stop and go back and try again! I honestly don't even remember what I did yesterday, other than end up in an entirely different arrondissement than the one I was looking for. I guess I went to school and then came home and had dinner. Oh, and I tried to watch a movie with my host family and only made it through about a half hour (with approximately zero comprehension) before the effort was too much and I had to go to bed.

Today I built some time into my day for walking aimlessly, though: I didn't have class until 3:00 (this schedule ROCKS) and there is an incredible park down the street from my school, so I arrived an hour early so I could eat ice cream and explore. Every path in the Jardin de Luxembourg is lined with trees, so as pretty as it is now, it's going to be out of this world when the leaves change. The grass is also lush and green and perfect, in large part because it is illegal to stand or walk on it. There are police officers whose sole job is to blow their whistles at and then start walking menacingly toward offenders until they return to the designated pathways. There is one stretch of lawn that is not "interdit" (forbidden), but I'm pretty sure it's meant for kids and you need to be able to produce a child to sit on it. Today was warm and breezy and gorgeous, for only the second time in over a week, so the park--and especially that area--was packed. I also got to see the original model of the Statue of Liberty, which is on display there! You can totally tell who the Americans are because they all take pictures of themselves in front of it.

Then I went to my class, which is ostensibly French Language, and we talked about Marcel Proust's "Questionnaire," just like I have in every other French class ever. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically a survey that Proust used to hand out with questions that range from "What is your favorite color?" to "Who are your favorite authors?" to "What character flaw can you most tolerate?" It's also something that every American student of French has studied and no actual French student has studied, according to my host family, who laughed when I told them about it. A bunch of us walked around the Quartier Latin after class looking for some tea shop one of them had heard of. I really hope I end up taking my real classes at the Sorbonne, which is in that area, because it is so cool--it's like a college town in the middle of a big city. Really great location.

I finished tonight with a lovely stroll down the the Champs-Elysees with a new friend, Clare, who plays water polo at Princeton and understands what it is like to be in withdrawal from a team. We tried another milkshake, with similarly poor results. I will just have to keep trying. Or buy a blender and do it myself.

Also, I managed to put pictures up.

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