As I write this I am sitting outside, by a beautiful fountain (there are copper turtles spitting water at some naked people!) in a park whose name I don't really know... something about explorers and Marco Polo if I remember. It feels like summer, by the way. It is hot and hazy; it must be near 80. I read somewhere that climatologists predict (can they? I guess they can) that 2007 may be the hottest year ever. So buy your fans now before Home Depot runs out.

Anyhow, Paris. I'm still having a great time. I've also settled into "classes" -- although I do have to read 320 pages of French before next Thursday for an exam, which will be legitimately challenging. But other than that I can say my life is free of academic obligations. My class at the Louvre is such a joke... we went this past Wednesday only to find that the antiquities wing was closed. So we went to look at some random rugs instead. And my French class has only met once, even though it's the end of the second week. Whew. Life is hard.

So here's what I've been doing....

:: Going out every night, for one thing. Oh, man, the exotic life of Paris. Actually, it makes me think of The Sun Also Rises all the time... if I find reason to say "Oh darling, I'm so miserable" or whatever that silly tart in the book was always sniveling about it will be perfect. But yeah. The way those lost generation kiddies just went out, out, out, night after night after night... that's our life!

Most of the time if we go out it's just to some café-slash-bar kind of place, which is fine with me. It's nice because you can linger at the tables for as long as you'd like, and they're just comfortable and pleasant. Well, not comfortable in a squishy-loveseat kind of way... they have hard wooden chairs and little round tables. But they're comfortable in the dim, smokey sense, because no one's really doing anything besides talking with their friends, and that's all we really want from our evenings sometimes, so it works out well.

Last night we tried to go to one of Paris's most celebrated nightclubs, LE QUEEN. Alas, something went wrong and we were all denied entrance! I think it was because our group spiraled into an enormous clot of Americans, and they might have just been like, no. It was sad... all of us on the sidewalk while bright pulsating disco lights and campy Madonna songs drifted out the door. Whatever. We'll try again.

:: I've had some adventures trying to find the books I have to read for next Thursday. For some reason, the Stanford Center only sells English books to us, and we're left to find our French language books in the city's bookstores, which is harder than you might think. There's this one book that none of us can find... apparently there was one copy of it at FNAC (a big French chain), but now it's MIA and might in fact be a myth. Anyhow. I did find the other book I needed at this magnificent bookstore called Gibert Jeune, which is so enormous it sprawls over 7 stores in the Place Saint-Michel. Too bad none of the seven had a single damn copy of La Revolution des droits de l'homme.

:: I have become a patisserie addict. Oh my god, I know we know this, but French pastries are delicious. Holy god. I'm also addicted to a candy bar called Balisto... so good!

:: I continue to live in my prison-like dorm, and it's okay, although I desperately need to do laundry. The biggest annoyance recently is that there are people who practice their instruments (a clarinetist and a saxophonist in particular) nonstop! The saxophonist especially spent, I'm not even kidding, three hours doing scale exercises each day this weekend. And on Saturday I left my room at maybe one in the afternoon and came back at nine and the person was STILL practicing! Is that what dedication is? I say this as my French horn lies rusting in a storage closet thousands of miles away from me....

:: I think I'm getting to like pigeons. Parisian pigeons are actually kind of pleasant and dumb, like miniature cows, and I like the sound they make. It might have more to do with the setting, though... Parisian parks are in general outrageously nice (the Jardin de Luxembourg is one of the loveliest places I have ever been in my life, and surprisingly green for how early in the year it is), so maybe even garbage-can-sized centipedes would look pleasant in them.

Well, with that I will wish you bon week-end! Thanks for reading if you did. :)