Moni's Blog

"Enivrez-vous..."

So it's the weekend, which is beautiful. I may have to make having no class on Friday a priority for the rest of my educational career. Last night, to celebrate the completion of our first week of classes, a VERY large group of us went to a bar, where Paula, who lived here over the summer, is friends with the owner. He's Peruvian, so they play lots of latin music, which is very hip in Paris right now. The bar was too expensive to drink a lot, but we had a great time dancing. We were pretty much the floor show for the rest of the clientele, which consisted of a few Latin American friends of the owner, and a large group of Irish soccer fans in town for tomorrow's World Cup qualifier between Ireland and France. Apparently there are 40,000 Irish people coming to the match...St. Michel was crawling with them last night. The group that were at our bar had extra tickets to the match, and i almost bought them, but by that time we were trying to leave...i regret it a little, i really want to go to a professional football match before i leave.
Today i got up and took the Metro up to the Jardins Luxembourg, a huge beautiful park that surrounds the French Senate building. The Senate meets in this gorgeous old palace that was built by Marie de Medici (wife of Henry IV and mother of Louis XIII) after her husband died. The Jardins are absolutely lovely...i had a great time just walking around, watching all the tourists and all the french people, looking at all the cool statues - there's a small lake in front of the Senate building and it's surrounded by statues of great women in French history...we need something like that in the States! There's a path that goes around the entire circumference of the park that is a favourite of French joggers, and along which are busts of great figures in the arts and men of the Academie. Adam Gopnik has this wonderful line about how the bust of Baudelaire seems to frown kindly down at the joggers as if to say, "Why are you doing that? Stop it, go get drunk!"
I bought lunch at a nearby cafe - a salad, my first green vegetables since the three green beans i forced down on the plane coming here - and returned to the park to eat it by the lake, where i could watch children chasing pigeons and listen to the tourists. One interesting thing...when i returned to the park with my lunch, the gate from which i had left was closed, as were several others near by, and one was open, but had police preventing people from entering. In continuing to walk around the walls of the gardens, i found an open gate, but later i passed many more gendarmes, and four men in suits with walkie-talkies looking very carefully around the statuary. I believe there may have been some concern about the security of the Senate after the bombing of the Indonesian Embassy here this morning. I'm actually rather amazed that this was the only security...if a small bomb went off at one of the embassies in DC, there's no way people would just be able to wander freely around the environs of Capitol Hill. The French attitude, ladies and gentlemen, is called not letting terrorists achieve their objectives.
After lunch i walked around the fence of the Jardins, where there's an exhibit of amazing photographs of China by a french photographer. The French government declared 2004 the "Year of China," and on the occasion of Jacques Chirac's visit to Asia this week, the International Herald Tribune ran a cover story about Europe's new interest in building relations with China, both for the sake of profit and to counterbalance US hegemony. These photographs were just incredible.
When i'd had my fill of them, i crossed the street to a great cafe and sat for about an hour and a half drinking a REALLY strong, really good espresso and reading St. Augustine.
Finally, around 3:30, i started to walk home...it was basically the same route that we took walking home last saturday night, and pretty much a straight shot. I had a great leisurely walk, window shopping and checking out the restaurants as i went, then, when i arrived at the northern border of the Parc Montsourris, the southern border of which is right across the street from the Fondation, i decided to detour through the park. I'd been there before, even sat and done some reading, but i hadn't realized the extent or the beauty of it before. It's pretty incredible, with a lake and waterfalls and all sorts of different gardens. We definitely need more public spaces of that nature in the States.
So on the whole, i had an INCREDIBLE day...now rest, dinner, and then a trip to a gay and lesbian club that Chris has a connection to get us in for only 5 euros, from which i will return, accompanied or not, before 3am, in order to watch the debate, which is being shown in the basement of our building tonight.
So yeah, i've pretty much used up my bandwidth allowance for this month on my photo-hosting site, but i posted four new ones from this week...i'm going to try to create another account with them so that i don't have to wait til November to put up more pictures, but for now, enjoy what i have!

Love y'all!

posted by Monica @ 6:15 PM