Friday I flew into Paris's Charles Degaulle aerogare. I arrived around noon and took a bus into the city itself. I wandered around, aimless, lost, with nowhere to stay carrying about 15 kilos of gear. I stumbled from the Odeon metro station to the fifth arrondisemond because I heard it was a nice area of the city. I was not disappointed. I found an english hostel, I booked it for Sunday through Thursday because they were booked for the night, then got lost in the city again and tried to buy a metro pass.

<<Euh, parlez-vous anglais?>> I asked the ticket seller.
<<Non>>, elle dits.

Things more or less worked out from there with the guy in front of me being bilingual. He ordered it for me, I payed, he took off and I realized I was completely and utterly unaware of how the ticket system works. I'm used to Toronto. We don't have machines that suck in our tickets and open the gates. We have a card that we flash to the ticket agent, who lets us pass through the turnstiles. It's an antiquated system, but it works.

So I stumbled out of the station and tried to find somewhere to sit down and read the directions that came with the pass. Je lis le français la plus meilleur puis je parle ou ecrite.

I found myself at Notre Dame Cathedral where some fairly attractive german tourist decided to chat me up for a couple hours and explained the metro system to me before I wandered off to find a hotel.

The next day I went to the Eiffel Tower, walked around the Louvre, and stayed at a hosteling international. I wasn't expecting the germendarie at the tower or the louvre. Somehow all the tourist pictures and descriptions manage to miss the fact that all the monuments in Paris have men with beret's, full camo, and fully automatic weapons wandering around their base.

Sunday I went to the Paris catacombs. The walls are full of bones and skulls that were disintered from other cemetaries along the Seine due to the plagues that they were causing. Every now and then there are little signs in french that I assume translate to something like "In loving memory of all those who died so that we can charge goth tourists 6,50 euro." The catacombs supposedly follow under all the streets around the area, but they're caged and blocked off so that you can only follow a predefined straight line that takes about an hour to get through. All the same, it was pretty cool.

I moved into the hostel that I stayed at for the rest of the week, which was about a million times better than the HI. I went out drinking with an aussie who worked there, and three Americans. She was unusually fascinated by my drunken attempts to explain what an Acadian was, what the difference from a Quebecois or Canadian was, what happened in the FLQ crisis, and various other aspects of french canadian history. The American guy with the girlfriend from Montréal helped. The other two American chicks were bored out of their minds.

This was the view when we left, though the picture didn't really turn out:

It doesn't properly capture the ethereal and stunningly beautiful nature of walking out of a pub at night and seeing the french pantheon covered in a thin fog. I couldn't use my flash because the light reflected off the fog particles. Does anyone have any tips on how to take that type of picture and get it to work with a shitty portable digital camera? (Other than getting a tripod or having steadier hands, trying to figure out if there's a way to use a longer exposure, not being drunk, and buying a better camera?) Or to fix it up with some kind of post-processing?

The next day I was tired of walking around Paris for 3 days straight. I stopped into the jardin du Luxembourg with the plan of staying there and reading. Some lonely old crazy french woman with white hair was taking her dog for a walk. She said something to me.

<<Euuuh.. quoi? Je parle pas français tres bien.>>, I replied with the hopes of getting rid of her. She started talking to me in an adorably crazy old french woman broken english, and having nothing else to do until the hostel's lockout ended I humoured her and kept her company for a while. Once she found out that I just finished a degree studying math she wanted me to meet her for breakfast so I could use my maths to help her win the lottery. She needed to win it, you see, so she could celebrate her birthday which she hasn't been able to celebrate for two years because none of her friends or family are there, and being a mathematician, I could find patterns in the old results. I didn't have the heart to tell her "no" or the knowledge of french to explain that each lottery is an independent event, unrelated to the previous ones, so I agreed (with no intention of showing up) and used that as an excuse to escape.

I got on the metro and took it somewhere else. I wandered again, aimless and lost, feeling sorry for the poor old woman until I happened across a tiny used bookstore. On the table outside, for 5 euro, I found a beautifully illustrated hardcover copy of Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo in the original french. It's not that old (I think the publishing date said this edition was from the 80s), but it's bound in the style of a really old book. Ma mére (who is an Acadian, can read french fluently) is going to love it when I give it to her for Noël.

At night my roommate brought me to an english pub down the street from our hostel. There were a lot of Brits there. They played beer pong. I had never heard of it, but it seemed like a good drinking game. There was a quiz (apparently they do quizes there every night with the prize being a free drink of your choice), and the only question I got right was "What modern day country is Babylon in?"

This brings us to Tuesday. I wandered around some more. I bought a french hat, which I like although it's slightly too small for my oversized head. It claims to be made of "100% PU," which I assume is polyurathane. When I got home at 6 I couldn't stay awake even though I tried. I think the fumes of whatever it is that was put on the hat for preservation was knocking me out.

At any rate, at 8-ish I woke up and went downstairs to the hostel's bar. I met a guy from Vancouver, a girl from Calgary, and a girl from somewhere in the southern states. As much as the anti-American in me hates to admit it, the American was by far the coolest of the lot. She's a bellydancer. She was on her reading week from a master's program she's taking in London in Arabic and muslim's studies, but I decided I liked her the moment she told me she was on Bush's watchlist of suspected terrorists (because she's a liberal, studying islam in a foreign country, you see.)

The four of us went to a jazz club. It used to be a french revolutionary torture chamber. It was great. Small, crowded, and was full of intimidatingly good old french swing dancer. Did I mention it was used as a torture chamber during the reign of terror?

This brings our narrative to Wednesday. Wednesday I went out with the incredibly hot and intelligent bellydancing suspected terrorist from the jazz torture chamber the whole day. We spent 9 hours walking around the Louvre, looking at famous french and italian paintings, without having time to get to the sculptures or other aspects of the museum. We had some wine and dinner at some french restauraunt, then walked down to the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower looks like this:

I'm rather disappointed that I'll probably never see her (the girl, not the tower) again.

This brings us to Thursday. I went to the musée Picasso. Call me racist if you will, but that museum has the most byzantine set of rules ever.

The coat check is free. Checking your bags is required. You're forbidden from having your camera in your bag when you check it. You are allowed to take pictures of the paintings, but only in the permanent exhibit, not the temporary exhibits. Et cetera.

I passed by the maison de Victor Hugo on the way there. It was just an apartment in downtown Paris.

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Friday I woke up and had to catch a flight to London. I lost my favourite Dresden Dolls shirt and had to leave to make it to the airport before I could find it. I missed my stop on the RER and had to backtrack a station. The plane was an hour late before boarding. I caught a train into downtown London after arriving, got on a bus and asked the driver to tell me when he got to $RoundAbout as per Breaker's directions. "Okay," the driver said, then didn't. I wound up at the end of the line bus line, had to take the tube back to where I started, called Breaker to meet me at the station after losing faith in the bus, then had to go out drinking with a bunch of LHuSites having not eatten anything or slept much the night before. While there, I found out that misslake and 256 have broken up.

Fuck, that was a shitty day. I feel I must apologize to the LHuSites who showed up for the LHuSiDrinks meet in my honour, but I was having a bad day.

On the plus side, Breaker is entirely too generous and hospitable for his own good and in no small part thanks to that I'm currently mildly inebriated.