13 Hours of Sleep & Les Champs Élysées

Well, everything is easier once you sleep! I slept from 10pm last night to 11ish this morning, like a true sleeping champion, and was far more prepared to stay awake for an entire day (talent). I had my usual breakfast of bread, fruit and tea, and then I attempted a shower. Oh, the shower. It is not a shower. It is a big bathtub with a handheld showerhead that I had to awkwardly hold over myself, and then put it down when I needed to open a shampoo bottle (and subsequently freeze) and then put the shampoo down and hold the showerhead again. I'm definitely going to enjoy this fun activity for the next five months. In the afternoon, Brigitte took me to the Champs Élysées because she had a meeting for work nearby, so we took the métro together (after figuring out what type of ticket pass I should buy, which took a while because the man at the counter wanted to tell me all the places he's been in the United States (the Bronx, Harlem, and Miami) and where he wants to go (San Francisco, New Orleans, and apparently that's "all you need to see" in America and he can head to Brazil after). I didn't end up buying the pass navigo that I need yet because apparently you have to have a passport sized photo with you to apply for the pass, I guess it's like a Metrocard with personal information on it, so I'm going back tomorrow to buy it). So anyway, she left me at the Arc de Triomphe:

Black-on-black, or How to Dress à la française

While Brigitte was in her meeting, I wandered down the Champs Élysées and back. Since it's still les soldes (designated sales in the stores) I went to some French shopping stores and tried on a few things, but the sizing was strange. The clothes would fit perfectly width-wise, except everything was too short, made for the classically short-torso Frenchwoman (???). Oh well. I ended up in the Virgin Megastore, four floors of CDs and DVDs, and I spent a fair amount of time there because I wanted to find some new French music. This turned out to be quite a challenge because everything was American or British! Even the French musicians all sung in English. What was really interesting was their "indie music" section, which had CDs by tons of American or English-speaking bands on independent labels (Nurses, Beirut, Caribou, etc.) that would never be in a large chain of CD stores in the US. I couldn't find any French indé bands that sung in French, so I ended up buying a compilation CD of new independent artists that only had two non-French bands (The Dø and The Go! Team). Close enough! On the way back to meet Brigitte, I walked by the Maison du Danemark, a building that housed a fancy Danish restaurant with all sorts of gross interesting seafood dishes and pastries and such. I didn't have time to go inside but I did take a photo!

Brigitte and I took the métro back to her apartment, only this time we took a different "ligne", the 6, which was so amazing because all of a sudden it goes above-ground and you're literally right next to the Eiffel Tower and all these old French buildings and it's the most incredible view all around! I was so unprepared for the view that I didn't have time to snap a quick photo (although it would've probably been far too blurry). I'm definitely going to plan trips around using the 6! Once we got back to the 15th, I went shopping on my own at a supermarket so I can have some things to prepare my own lunches once orientation week starts (sup tabbouleh, pitas and hummus, nom nom). I got back only to leave again, to go with Brigitte to the apartment of another woman in the same building, Céline, who is in her late twenties, and an older woman named Jacqueline (who, I was informed immediately, is Jewish and so naturally we must be friends). We went to celebrate the end of the Christmas season, which Wikipedia tells me is called the Epiphany. You celebrate by eating, naturally. So we had apple cider and une galette des Rois, a type of puff pastry-like cake with a creamy but light filling. It's a "king cake," so there's a little party favor in one of the slices and whoever wins it becomes king and gets to wear a crown. Guess who won the crown...

I AM KING. The woman on the left is Céline.

Fun fact about Céline, she just got engaged and although you can't see it in the photo, girl's got the biggest engagement ring I've ever seen in my life. Seriously. I have no idea where she's going to fit her wedding band, because that thing takes up basically her whole finger. Also, another sidenote, that whole stereotype about "the French don't snack"? I'm pretty sure galettes count as snacking, and the Champs Élysées was packed with people snacking all over the place.

Soooo, after the party we went back to the apartment and had dinner. It was much more to my liking than last night, which doesn't bode well since last night was the "typical French dinner," aka a few vegetables in a casserole dish covered with layer upon layer of every type of French cheese ever. Oof. Tonight's fare was considerably lighter (and vegan!). We had to start a soup that was very thick, almost a purée, of several different kinds of vegetables, and then a basic salad that we topped with spiced and cooked tofu, tomatoes, broccoli, sunflower seeds, raisins, and whole-wheat rotelli pasta, bread with almond butter, and banana-applesauce for dessert. Yum, or as the French say, "miam"!

That was basically it for today, which is fine with me because I prefer a slow-and-steady approach to being dropped in a foreign country. From what Brigitte has told me, I'm in for quite a busy weekend so I'll finish here. À bientôt !

x R.