This past weekend was slightly depressing at times, I have to admit. But there's definitely some good that came from it. I had a fairly uneventful week aside from a beautiful little promenade around the Pantheon and Luxembourg Gardens with Mary Margaret and Katia. We took awkward pictures in front of the huge Pantheon, the millions of mopeds parked next to it, and the scrum-diddly-umptious chocolate-banana crêpe they helped me find on the way to the Gardens. Ohh man that was the best thing I've tasted in a very, very long time. Sheeze louise, AND it came complete with cute middle-aged crêpe-maker man who gave us a free lesson on how the word "dime" originated (I didn't know how to say it in French, so he went on to explain that it's a Greek word for tythe...makes sense right?). I was thus quite satisfied with my first crêpe experience.
Pantheon.
Holy Moped.
Crêpe maker-slash-history teacher.
Holy Crêpe.
Best first bite of my life.
I now have some beautiful pictures of the Luxembourg Palace and its gardens, despite it being slightly overcast. Actually made for luminescent cloud cover..regardez.
Friday was a much lonelier day. Most of my friends went on a day trip to Giverny, Monet's home, and since I'm signed up for two different excursions I couldn't go. Plus, I'd been invited to Stockholm for the weekend to visit my bro-in law Philip but failed to buy tickets far enough in advance, so they ended up being too expensive for the amount of time I would have been there. However, I'm going on record saying that this has been my biggest regret of my trip yet...should have just gone ahead and spent the 100 € when I had the chance. Ahh well. I'll get to travel plenty while I'm here (just booked fairly cheap flights to Oslo and Prague!! Barcelona's up next).
Therefore, I decided to be somewhat productive during the Friday morning hours and go sit through a couple mandatory film outings for my film classes. Unfortunately I was the only one who showed (proving that everyone else had plans but me..) and the film of the day was a medical documentary called MSF: Médicins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) =très depressing. I managed to get through the 2.75 hours of gory disease, natural disaster, and war refugee camp coverage without a) falling asleep and/or b) vomiting. Mind you, this was all in French. I've gotta big heart for those kinds of situations and was actually somewhat thankful I'd been better informed. But needless to say I was feeling rather emo after that and decided to spend the rest of my day at the Eiffel Tower (I know, poooor Sarah). I let my ipod run on random all the way there and enjoyed this happy little number as I was approaching la Tour once again...it made me feel much lighter.
I took a million mypace-style pictures of myself as well as another awkward video attempting to get the thing in the background. I'll put it up eventually, they take forever to upload, and I was only minorly successful during taping. I debated walking up the stairs, but even that costs money. Besides, I decided waiting in the massive lines with friends would be more enjoyable anyways. So I opted for making friends with the randoms I asked to take my picture along with taking a much needed nap on the Champ de Mars lawns. Let's just say never before had I been so happy to lay at my leisure with a French play and a banana rather than be starving and homeless in 70s-era Somalia.
So often life is more beautiful in the ways it doesn't work out.
Nap.
My day.
Later on that night I met up with Mary Margaret at her homestay and hung out on her adorable back porch for the better portion of the evening. Eventually we decided to head out to explore her local area and came across a late 20s/thirty-something neighborhood pub that was celebrating somebody's birthday, 80s à la mode (you can't walk past a Parisian bar blasting Thriller and not be tempted to check it out.) We made friends with an older couple who had a cute lil pooch whom the husband plunged into my arms at one point (made for a cute photo) and even got some free cake. Good deal. OH! and a broken French conversation with some passers-by informed us that this year's techno parade was regulated in comparison to years past.......shhyeaahh and monkeys might fly out of my butt!
Saturday we followed a drumming group (some anti-landmining, 'munitions-handicap' fundraiser that involved live percussion, a mountain of shoes, and silly costumes...don't ask) to a park near the Bastille that was entirely surrounded by fancy-shmancy apartment buildings.
Awesome drummers.
Awkward mound of potential foot fungus.
We lazed about amongst a mass of crowds and ironically ran into some of Mary Margaret's friends from college. I have no idea how that happens in such a large city. Oh and speaking of irony, SIDENOTE: it turns out one of the boys in the picture from Frog and Princess is good friends with my friend Claire's 'host-brother' Massimo, the one I went to see in concert. Tristan noticed we were mutual friends with Mass on facebook and left me a comment in English that read "the world is little." hah. It sure is.
Anyhoo, since we'd wandered Mary Margaret's neighborhood the night before, we decided to do the same in mine. We ended up at a quaint dancing pub with more American music (only this time it was early 90s Eminem, not Michael Jackson...I don't think you can get away from mediocre radio-pop in Europe nowadays). The only questionable aspects of the night were the overpriced mojitos and the dude who verbally accosted me after taking a picture of us girls. We'd been chatting nonchalantly about how everyone in France hates Sarkozy so I jokingly said "à Sarkozy!" instead of "fromage" before the camera flashed.....unfortunately the random guy holding Mary Margaret's camera was an anarchist, and it was all we could do to get back inside before he had us trapped in an hour long rant about how much he hates French capitalism. Whoops.
All in all it turned out to be an excellent weekend, lots of quality bonding time for M.M. and me ;] I definitely took it easy on Sunday; mainly just struggled to write facebook comments in French and found that it's very frustrating when the English translation for a French word is something that I've never even heard of:
I.e. Déclinaison-->Declension:
1. Grammar.
| a. | the inflection of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives for categories such as case and number. |
| b. | the whole set of inflected forms of such a word, or the recital thereof in a fixed order. |
| c. | a class of such words having similar sets of inflected forms: the Latin second declension. |
Who knew.
Ok, I'm signing off. I hope my handy-dandy definition of the day was a good enough stopping point.
"Sarah's World, Sarah's World, party tiiime, excellent!! Wee-ew wee-ew weeeeeeeww."
[It's gotten too late.]
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