comment je t'aime

On Tuesday we went to the musée d'orsay for a quick tour. it's fantastic; it's in an old train station and has entire rooms of manet, van gogh, monet, and cezanne. Rodin is everywhere; in the gardens at the museums outside the train station. It felt like meeting celebrities because i've studied so many of these pieces, including this Manet of a prostitute.

classes: definitely writing (american students @ Reid Hall), and translation (Sorbonne), I'll try differential equations (Paris VI), and ethics (Sorbonne), and maybe 'learning to view sculpture and painting' (Sorbonne). I have my first homework due tomorrow for a grammar review session; it's remarkable how much I've forgotten since high school or never learned.

i've taken to watching french TV and it's too much fun. Tonight I watched two documentaries, one was 'le sexe, c'est la sante' which translates to 'sex, it's health' and 'mr. big: grandeure est decadance du penis'. I'm still don't understand a lot of what is said but I get the gist of it. Random facts: if a baby's thingy is between 1 and 2.5 cm, it's not acceptable as either sex organ, so they generally chop it down and the baby becomes a girl. Also, while male heart rates are like jumping off a cliff (or some idiomatic phrase like that), females are more like bell curves when having sex.

This is a picture of Alex and our lunch the other day; the cheapest meal I've had so far- a baguette for a euro, a pear for another, and some goat cheese that we split. SO simple, so cheap, so delicious. We went on an hour and a half walk to find this famous bakery, which turned out to be closed on Mondays. Oh well, it worked out in deliciousness anyway.

The longer I'm here, the more and less I think that everywhere is the same. The Paris Metro looks exactly like New York but cleaner; we even got a crazy hobo guy the other night. Food here is delicious but it's still just food; today I again had bread and goat cheese for lunch. Classes are classes are classes, people are people are people. When I bought my beautiful French scarves the other day I had a great little conversation with the clerk girl who I think appreciated my trying French, albeit ungrammatically and brokenly. Emerson said it best, "I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe ... so that the man ... does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself. ... At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. ... My giant goes with me wherever I go." Anyway, that whole idea is getting a bit too self-centered for me (despite the fact that this is on a blog, already the epitome of narcissism as it imagines that any life is worth reading about). We'll see what I have to say on the subject of travel later.

The weather right now is rainy and chilly, which is bad because tomorrow we're heading out on the Seine in a boat for a tour or something like that. I love walking around this city, looking at the architecture, the hiply dressed people (EVERYONE here dresses well, and all pants are very skinny though not tight), the public art and historical monuments, the cobblestoned streets, the crazy drivers, the rental bikes (there are stations everywhere; you can rent a bike for half and hour and return it somewhere else for free), the cafes where all the chairs face out so you can people watch, the brasseries and boulangeries and charcuteries. It really is beautiful.