Two things

A lot of men in Paris look like Mr. Bean.

Should I buy a beret?

Catching up

I am writing this in my journal. Putting a felt-tip pen to the surface of the paper in my little black journal engenders a much more confidential, intimate feeling than typing directly into the "Publication d'un message" window on the blog website. I worry that the distorted sensibility of this medium will lead to me writing some hyper-introspective, self-analyzing absurdity that I will not be able to bring myself to post on the blog. In any case, if you are reading this right now, it means that I decided the bull-shit to decent-shit ratio was low enough to type up this entry and post it online.

I am at a cafe at the bottom of la butte de Montmartre. My first week in Paris, I ate a croque-monsieur here. I was at a two tables away from where I am right now. Sacre Coeur looms above me. I just went to mass. Four days ago, Dave and I visited Sacre Coeur, and ate sandwiches at the bottom of the hill. I can see the bench where we sat. It is unnerving how quickly your reality becomes your memories.

This morning, a pale gray sky covered Paris, but noontime has seen a triumphant sun break through the blanket of clouds. For the first time in three days, there is blue up above.

Dave should be taking off right now.

I have neglected my blog, and I apologize for that, but life beckoned.

I slept for three fitful hours last night, and I am exhausted, but I feel the need to recap the past week or so, at least perfunctorily (if perfunctorily is not a word, it should be).

A few words on each day:

Sunday: up early, blinding sunshine. the lingering effects of le greve gave me no problems, and I made it to Charles de Gaulle on time. Dave. Walking tour of the neighborhood and Bastille; crepes and cheap cans of beer.

Monday: Class for me in the morning. Back to Reuilly-Diderot to get Dave, who emerged from his hotel, smiling, somehow eluding the oppressive, insipid clutches of jet lag. To Ile de la Cite. Coffee and Notre Dame. A tour of St. Michel, a picnic in the Jardin de Luxembourg. Pain, fromage, raisins. Une grande pomme pour moi. Du vin rouge--a bottle of screw-top Spanish wine (we had no bottle opener) that we left, with a few rancid gulps remaining, in Hotel Mistral yesterday morning. Beaucoup de soleil, mais les palmiers n'etaient plus là. C'est vraiment l'automne.

Walked to Denfert-Rochereau, malgré l'orteil blessé de Dave. What a trooper. Dave liked the big lion at Denfert-Rochereau. Cemetery Montparnasse. Le tombeau de Maupassant. Met Hugo at Trocadero. Dave and he reunite. Two California boys at heart, both born in the wrong place. Stroll under the Eiffel Tower, past l'Ecole Militaire, Les Invalides. Coffee again. Bon Marché. Goodbye Hugo. Late dinner in Bastille. I ordered a disgusting drink and forced myself to finish it. Don't let all those Parisian billboards fool you--un Ricard is disgusting.
Tuesday: Class again for me. A "test." C'est une blague. Long, late lunch in a sun-saturated cafe between Denfert-Rochereau and St. Michel. Croque-monsieurs pour nous deux. Stroll by the seine. Eiffel tower, up to the top. Freezing. Beautiful. But really, fucking freezing. Cans of beer in my apartment to warm up. Jazz club in Montparnasse--le Petit Journal. An American all-female quartet. I used my charm and French prowess to bring the cover charge from $25 to $15. Champagne. We ride line 1 back home--the line where all of the cars on the train are connected so you can see forever--and nobody else is on it, so I take off my shoes and run through the cars and spin on poles and it is fun. Very un-French, I think.
Wednesday: Sunshine and croissants and cafe au lait. Montmartre. Dave ate the best eclair of his life. Sacre Coeur. A French man strumming on his guitar on the steps out front, singing songs like "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia. He has a lisp. He winks at me. Dave loves the basilica as much as I do, and I am happy. We decide not to drink the wine we brought. Sacrilegious? Out to a bar with Olivier and other French friends to watch a soccer game. We order a giraffe. See below if you do not know what a giraffe is.

Thursday: Louvre. Ancient Egyptian wing. Overcast. To Saint Germain des Pres to pay a visit to La Rhumerie. Finally my dreams of hot alcohol materialize. Dave gets a grog and I get a Cafe Creole. We discuss what, exactly, Creole means. It gets heated. A large old man in a tweed coat and a scarf sits in the corner booth puffing on an impressive looking cigar. He grumbles that there is to much ice and not enough alcohol in his drink. He is great. Shakespeare and Co. I read about the gospel according to Dostoyevsky, Dave reads old history books. Out to dinner at Chez Paul (an "institution" in Paris, according to Theo). We resolve the white wine (me)/red wine (Dave) dispute withe a bottle of rosé. We eat escargot.
Friday: Cloudy. Stroll through le Marais. Patisseries and sandwiches in Place des Vosges. Rugby exhibit at Hotel de Ville. Catacombs are closed. L'Arc de Triomphe. Champs-elysees. The ferris wheel by Place de la Concorde. Crepes. Dinner with my host family. Language barriers. Dave valiantly attempts to explain his major (try translating "Public Policy Analysis"). Yolaine made a tart. Out to a bar with some of Theo's friends, though not Theo (he eventually shows up later on in the night). We leave to go meet Olivier and some other friends near Jussieu. I order a bloody Mary at the bar, because it is 4 euro. It is, I must say, not disgusting. The metro closed, we walk home.
Saturday: Patisseries and coffee. Walk in Bois de Vincennes. We sit on a log and drink tall cans of strong beer (Dave goes all out, downing one with 11.6% alcohol. I can only manage 8.4%). A man carrying a near-empty bottle of wine stops and talks to us for a moment. He says that Paris is too noisy, but that the Bois de Vincennes is like Africa.

Dinner at Hugo's beautiful apartment in Montmartre with his friends. He makes quiche. We drink wine and champagne.

We go out to a bar near l'Opera Garnier, where Hugo and Co. are "very famous." We dance, and I drink a Coca Light that tastes nothing like a Coca Light. Home. Sleep. Awake not much later. We get halfway to the train station before we realize that today was daylight savings and we are an hour early. Who is in charge of this shit? After much procrastination, Dave finally boards a train. Dave leaves.
I walk around in the gloomy, delayed morning, from Gare du Nord up to Montmartre, then all the way down Blvd. de Clichy. I listen to Ani Difranco on my ipod and revel in my melodramatic angst. I look at Paris from the top of the hill. Mass.
My coffee is done now. And so am I.

Dave's here

I have many things to describe and write about--the greve, rugby, parties, lifelifelife.
But I will not write about them now.
Because Dave is here.
Goodbye.

quel desordre

I had a lovely weekend from which I have yet to recover. My eyes want to shut and I have class in the morning, but my sense of duty won’t let me rest until I’ve written at least a brief blog entry (I’m using brief in the loose sense of the term…I’m a loquacious lady.)

Highlights from the past few days:

Friday I had my (I believe) final fiasco with the French university system. Apparently when the administration decides to change the day or time of a course, a sufficient means of communicating that change is to post a small piece of paper in the corner of a bulletin board at the end of a long hallway on the 4^th floor of one of the buildings on campus, a building which is not, in fact, anywhere near where the class takes place. The consequence of this apotheosis of efficiency was that I missed my class. But (thank GOD!) I didn’t miss my travaux dirigé (T.D.), the weekly tutorial for the class, during which I listened to a sweaty middle-aged man explain, for three hours, how to read a poem.

Saturday night was the big England vs. France rugby game. To kill the suspense right off, let me just tell you that France lost. It was actually a pretty depressing game—we (we???) were winning until the last 8 minutes. I watched the game with Theo and about 12 of his guy friends from high school, the same group I went to a house party with a few weeks ago. After the game, there was disagreement about where to go next (my friends wanted me to meet them at St. Michel, Theo and his friends didn’t want to go that far away—we were in Vincennes at the time, a suburb just southeast of the city). I ultimately convinced 5 of them to come with me to St. Michel, the incentive being the declaration that “il y aura beaucoup des americaines!” (there will be many American girls).

It was a fabulous night. We all convened at the jam-packed hub of the city’s nightlife, the network of tiny bars, pedestrian streets and drunken students that is St. Michel. After much persuading and screaming directions on my part, the final crew ended up being pretty large and diverse—Theo and his friends, a handful of girls from IES, Olivier—my dread-locked conversation hour homie—and a few random French guys Olivier brought along. It made me happy to witness the successful mingling of some of the different groups of people I’ve met.

The group tapered off one by one, and the night concluded with me, two girls from IES, Theo, and two of Theo’s friends wandering around the streets at 4 in the morning, happily searching for any bar that wasn’t trying to close, realizing that all the metro had long-since stopped running, and listening to Louis and Guillaume rap (I believe I mentioned previously the French Wu-Tang equivalent and the French Bob Dylan aficionado—they are, respectively, Guillaume and Louis). They both call me Kat because Kate is too hard to pronounce. It was wonderful.

Theo was very drunk, which means that he insisted on trying to speak English. Despite a year in Montreal, ten years of hosting American students in his apartment, and three road trips across the states, his English is pretty horrible—but it’s endearing to watch him try, to see the pained look of concentration as he searches fruitlessly for a word, eventually giving up and just saying it in French. In his drunken state, he told me that I was the second best French speaking student they have had (number one was also from Boston, incidentally). He also explained to me, very seriously, and without an ounce of derision, that the Big Mac is the United States’ Mona Lisa—that is, the masterpiece that we have contributed to the culture of the world. I can’t remember all of his reasoning, but it made sense at the time.

I think my plan to become a regular at Café Titon is working. The guys who work there know me now, and say “Hello” when I come in because they know I speak English. Last time, one of them came over and sat with me for a while—when I told him I was from Boston, he asked me if I’d read that article in the Boston Globe that mentioned the café—apparently they all became really friendly with the guy who wrote the article. They know my name now, too. I could be well on my way to getting a “Hello, Kate!” when I walk in.

Today on the metro, a disheveled looking fifty-something man in a dirty t-shirt wandered on, disoriented, his glasses askew. He carried a large square box filled with dirt, with two dismal geraniums poking out, and a massive tome entitled “Ma grossesse, mon enfant” (my pregnancy, my baby). Just an interesting image to leave you with.

P.S. Thanks for the grammar correction, mom. How embarrassing.

Ask me what a bidot is. I dare you.

Nobody here thinks I’m American. That is not to say that they believe I am French, but rather, that I am English or Australian or from Quebec (what is the word for that? Quebeci? Quebecian? [en français, c’est québécoise (désolée pour le français, ma chère Maggie)]). What that says about me or about Parisians I do not know and I will not attempt to analyze here. Just an observation.

The past few days have been busy, filled with tasks and commitments that are slowly coming together to form my daily routine here. IES classes, dance class, the Louvre, Café Titon, visiting my favorite little Greek sandwich shop where the Turkish man behind the counter talks to me and corrects my French. Also, I’ve started doing homework. Sort of. It’s, like, really really great homework—we’re talking worksheets and fill-in-the-blanks and vocabulary quizzes.

Wednesday nights, IES hosts a conversation workshop, open to American and French students who want to hang out for two hours and improve their skills in whatever language is not their native tongue. The concept seems bizarre at first—one person speaking French and the other responding in English—but it works out to be a really fluid blending of the languages, and the brain manages to transition between the two modes of speaking pretty seamlessly. Last week was a special wine-tasting conversation hour, so about 40 IES students showed up. The lack of alcohol this week meant that only huge nerds like me showed up. It turned out to be a great decision, though—my friend Lauren and I ended up talking to three French garçons and going out to get a drink with them afterward. They are all really great and funny and down-to-earth—no pointy-shoed, tight-pants-wearing, cologne-doused, slick-haired Euro-style. One of them, Olivier, may be the only person in Paris with dreadlocks. After a very American weekend, it felt good to meet some new French people. Apparently, they love IES and come every Wednesday, so there is some serious French homie potential there. Incidentally, my French slang is getting really good. Ask me about verlan.

Today I got a walking tour of Paris from a French student I met while I was roaming aimlessly along the Seine. I discovered secret parts of the city that I never would have found otherwise—a hidden quai by Ile St. Louis, a raised garden not five minutes from my apartment that runs along a serious of connected roofs for miles, all the way to the Bois de Vincennes, a secret alley that will seriously cut down my morning walk to the metro.

This Saturday France plays England in the semi-finals. Serious stuff. I was really disappointed to miss the France/New Zealand game last weekend, so this time I’m going to ensure that I am surrounded by excited/drunk French fans.

I’m still feeling overwhelmed by how much stuff there is to see and do. Time speeds silently by, imperceptible, striking me suddenly when I ask someone the date and realize that I’ve been here for one month and two days. Jesus. Sacre bleu.

Nathenel, my little host brother, had to write a paper for school, in English, describing his ideal day in New York City. This day revolved around hanging out with homeless junkies in dark alleys. Last night I heard him playing Smells like Teen Spirit on his guitar in his room. He wears skin-tight jeans—we could probably share pants. I wish you all could meet him. I want to write a whole blog about him. Fifteen-year-old boys are great.

Pensive=entertaining (?)

On Saturday night, at a bar in St. Michel, a man asked me, following the requisite small talk formula, if I like Paris. I said yes, and explained why in a few pre-scripted words. Then he asked me what I don’t like about Paris. I laughed and said something about it being too expensive. I’m feeling reflective, so please indulge me while I try to articulate some precise answers to both of the above questions.

I like Paris because there is so much to see in such a concentrated area—as if a giant picked up the city in the palm of his hand, and carefully plucked out all of the boring stuff, all the eyesores, all the strip malls and highways and gas stations and junkyards and Walmart’s and Target’s and any store exceeding 20x20 feet, then squeezed all the remaining interesting stuff together into one tight mass, and plopped it back down on earth. It is impossible to walk for more than five minutes without seeing something incredibly beautiful or historic or famous. I meet friends in front of Notre Dame just because it’s an easy place to convene; I drank wine by the pyramid of the Louvre because that was where the nearest benches were; every day, I walk by the very spot where the Bastille was taken over and the French Revolution turned around. Everything is smaller here, but so packed with something. Tiny boulangeries overflowing with morning or noontime crowds, everyone peering at the tiny, tiny pastries, each one displaying its own world of intricate icing designs or fruit arrangements or glazes or meticulously drizzled chocolate. Tiny Smart Cars with six people inside. Apartments—mine included—with seven rooms and as many inhabitants. Restaurants where strangers share tables for lack of space. I already mentioned the shrunken old ladies and the microscopic dogs. St. Chapel nestled inside the Palais de Justice, which is watched by the gargoyles of Notre Dame not 100 meters away. Narrow cobblestone streets, so narrow that they make the 5-story apartment buildings lining them look like skyscrapers. There are, by the way, no skyscrapers in Paris. Well one, in Montparnasse, and that’s a pretty big deal. Laurent, my host mother’s friend, told me that, after visiting New York City, she realized that she couldn’t live “dans une ville avec autant de verticalité.” Paris, I realized, is not very vertically orientated, and it’s wonderful. Everything rests at eye level or close to it, such that the world actually surrounding you is what catches your attention. Unless you happen to glance up for a moment, in which case the lack of verticality allows you to see the top of the Eiffel Tower peeking out over some apartment buildings or, if you’re lucky, the crisp outline of Sacre Coeur, pale and porcelain, way up on the highest hill on Montmartre. I’m getting very poetic right now, but that’s how Paris makes me.

That might be another reason I like Paris. It affords me a romantic backdrop against which I can brood and ponder and wander and gaze and, to the greatest degree I’ve ever experienced, make my life into a novel. And that is, it must be said, my ultimate goal. Most places, in reality, do not live up to their stereotyped and idealized archetypes. Paris does. I actually pass old men sitting alone on benches drinking wine and wearing berets. People actually walk down the street with baguettes poking out of their bags. Couples kiss under the Eiffel Tower. Men wear tight pants, women are tall and beautiful and nonchalant, everyone age 9 and up has a smoldering cigarette between their fingers, every face bears the same expression of disinterested, aloof poise. I actually heard a little boy on the metro yell “Sacre bleu!”

So, there you have it, a circuitous and partial explanation of why I like Paris.

Now I’ve lost energy to try to identify what I don’t like about Paris. I’ll try, in 100 words or less, to do a brief overview:

Everything is expensive. Parisian people always look put together and fabulous—this can be lovely, but also a bit exhausting and intimidating. There is too much to do. Small inconveniences—Paris doesn’t have the toothpaste I like, or Red Bull, or Target (I know that I praised the lack of Target above; it’s a double-edged sword), or coffee to-go (another thing that I truly love as an idea, but in practice can be irritating). French people love their friends and go out with their friends and aren’t looking to make new ones in cafés or parks or bars, so I always have to make an extra effort to meet people, except, bien sûr, for the scary, sleazy, old drunk men, who are extremely friendly. French people don’t put the heat on and love open windows (ha!ha! just try to imagine how I’m dealing with that). And of course, most importantly, I miss YOOOOOU!!!!!! (that is directed specifically at you, not the other people reading this blog)

Ok. Brief, brief update on goings-on: France won the rugby quarter-finals on Saturday, when they were expected to lose. Paris went CRAZZZZY—naked people and screaming and beeping and debauchery. I met a bunch of African guys at a bar who all spoke like 5 languages but worked as gardeners or mechanics. Go figure. I went to the Centre Pompidou with Hugo and his amazing, extremely French friend P.H. Hugo is fabulous. He teaches me all the cool French swears. He is going to take me out in Montmartre. On Friday, I went to my Paris VIII class in St. Denis, which is located, for those of you who don’t know, really fucking far away. And when I got there, j’ai rendu compte que, premièrement, it is the ugliest university ever created, et secondement, the administration had decided to change my class from Fridays to Mondays, which I can’t do because it conflicts with another course. It took me about 15 minutes to figure it out, because the secretary was out to the longest lunch in the entire world and literally every wall was covered with posters explaining something about the classes, many displaying contradictory information. Anyway, long story short—I’m now enrolled in two courses at Paris IV—the Sorbonne—instead of one at Paris IV and one at Paris VIII. I had those two classes today. Mondays will be busy. The classes, I think, should be an interesting experience. Enormous, in an amphitheater, I’ll explain more about them later because there are lots of interesting things to describe about the French university system and its students and professors, but I’m even testing my own patience so I’ll leave that for later. One brief thing—one of my professors at the Sorbonne stood behind a table, leaning forward, with his palms spread out on the table in front of him, staring straight ahead, and stood like that for the entire hour while he lectured. And the first three minutes of the lecture was him telling all of us that, if we just do our work “normalement,” we probably won’t fail. I was entertained.

Saluuuut

Standing on the edge of the weekend

Cafe Titon again. Same table. I'll be a regular any day now, I can feel it. I even made a joke to the guy who worked here (joke=I say "Bonjour," he says, "Ah no, bon soir," and I say, while laughing, "Ah! C'est deja le soir?"---the laughing part is what makes it a joke, if you didn't get it). I'm drinking an expresso (and no, I am not one of those insufferable people who call espresso "expresso," that is actually how it's spelled in France). I like parentheses. Is my life one big parenthesis? Finding an aside in every new phrase, and gradually, one bracket after another, veering farther and farther away from the topic at hand, until I am so entangled in layers of punctuation that there is no way out? No way to remember what the hell I'm talking about? Wow I just got so worked up that I spilled coffee on my laptop. Oops. Anyway, the point I was going to make was that I drink a lot of coffee and red wine here and my teeth will be black by the time I get back. Back in blackkkk

I booked tickets to Amsterdam today. Not going until November, but it felt good to get the tickets. I was getting really overwhelmed about all of the places I want to go and not being able to decide where I wanted to go most and when and with who, so today I just went for it. Man I love planning things. Legal marijuana and sex shops here I come! Just kidding. Only windmills and Hans Christian Anderson museums for me(those things are both in Amsterdam, correct?).
Yesterday, Marine and I went to Versaille (if you don't know who Marine is, please refer to one of the below blog entries). It's a pretty sweet pad. Marine is fun, not your typically Parisian. She wears a lot of heavy eyeliner and listens to rap(mostly French, but she is a big Black-Eyed Peas fan, both pre- and post-Fergie) and just got back from 6 weeks in Buenos Aires. Five straight hours of intensive conversation only in French.

My friend Emily and I enrolled in a dance course in the Marais, a hipster-trendy-artsy part of Paris with a thriving homosexual community and lots of hair salons. It's a hip-hop class. The class seems pretty great--lots of "cool" Parisians, with their baggy sweat pants and fashionably ripped tank tops and oversized jewelry that somehow stays in place through the grueling hour and a half of grooving. I, by the way, am not a very good dancer. That was the first thing that I learned in dance class. It will be fun, though. The teacher is actually from L.A.---sassy black city woman turned expatriate. There was also an American woman who is here for a year teaching English--she and I got to talking, and somehow came to realize that we were both in the midst of reading the same Maupassant book, and both of us were carrying it with us in our purses. Anyway, point is, I'm going to be a hip-hop machine come December.

There are a bunch of homies by the door of Cafe Titon and I want to be their friend. That will be mission #2, after becoming a regular.

Tomorrow is my first class at Paris VIII, another one of the big Paris universities.

Saturday is "Nuit Blanche," which means everything stays open all night. Things stay open late anyway, so I'm not quite sure what difference that will make, but everyone seems pretty pumped about it.

In Paris, the three most common things to see when one walks down the street are hunched over, bundled-up old women walking microscopic dogs, pre-adolescent girls dressed like 30-year-old women and smoking cigarettes, and (probably related to item #1) dog poop. The old women, by the way, all wear the same calf-length off-white coat.

Tonight I think I'm going to an Irish bar in St. Michel to meet up with some French college students that came to a conversation hour at IES last night. We'll see.
Oh, and Malika, if Maggie (or someone else) is reading this out loud to you, I wanted to let you know that I saw something in the window of a Chinese restaurant today called a Malika. I'm not sure what it was, but it was some kind of Asian treat.

France doesn't do Monday

It is Monday night and I am drinking wine alone in my bedroom. My wireless has decided not to work tonight, so I will save this document and bring it to IES to post tomorrow morning after class. I rolled down the big wooden blinds over my window, so I can see, clear and vivid, my reflection staring back at me as I write this.
I’m drinking that bottle of white from Crus et Decouverts. I think I taste smokiness? It’s good.
Today should have been my first day at the Sorbonne, but it was cancelled. When I came home and told my host brother, he said, “Ah. Ca c’est la Sorbonne.” He hates the Sorbonne. He’s really great. He and I were supposed to go to a play tonight, a play that one of his friends was in—a university show, free admission. By the time I got home from my afternoon doings (=walking around Paris with some girls, realizing slowly that EVERYTHING is closed on Mondays) at around 7:30, I was exhausted; so, when Theo came stumbling into my room at 8 barefoot in sweats and said, “Euh…veux-tu aller?” in a tone that really indicated he did NOT want to aller, I was pretty relieved. We did, however, make plans to go to this tiny theater in St. Michel to see some Ionesco plays at some point. Ionesco is, like, a really crazy French playwright. I read some of his stuff in a class last semester—things about people turning into rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?), and dead bodies inflating and flying away, and mushrooms growing out of carpets. I think he drank a lot of absinthe. Anyway, there is this theater that I stumbled upon on Friday in the rain that has apparently been showing the same three Ionesco plays every night for 50+ years, so Theo and I are going to go, at some point.
On Saturday I went shopping with Loubna and she introduced me to her friend Fabian (Lou and Fafa, as their best friends [a.k.a. me?] call them). It was fabulous. Loubna had no interest in shopping for herself, but took me all around Paris, trying to “comprendre mon style” and advising me about what was worth my money and what wasn’t. Fafa had just gotten back from a year in London, and so was the “English expert.” English expert apparently = broken sentences and phrases like “I go Greece my cousin last year.” We sat at a café afterwards and the two of them chain-smoked cigarettes and Fafa showed me pictures of her many boyfriends and we talked about all sorts of topics that were pretty difficult to address in a foreign language, but fun nonetheless. They were fabulous (adjective repetition intended).
That night, they took me to Maxim’s, this club near Place de la Concorde, apparently one of the chicest clubs in Paris. At dinner with my host family that night, I told them I was going to Maxim’s, and they all gasped. It was quite the establishment—three stories, spiral staircases, velvet carpets, chandeliers—an old building still bearing witness to the décor of la belle époque. That, of course, means that each drink was 12 euro. And mom, you’ll be happy to hear that my host mother, Yolaine, called my cell phone at 2:30 in the morning because she wanted to remind me not to drink anything that someone gives to me, and to keep my eye on my glass at all times.



Ahhhh this one really was meant to be short. Okay real quick—Sunday I walked along the banks of the Seine and then met up with Hugo, Cohen’s host brother from last year (for those of you who don’t know Cohen, it is sufficient to know that he is some guy). I went to a bar in St. Michel with Hugo and his friends and watched the Ireland vs. Argentina rugby game (Argentina won, which is apparently bad for France). Hugo and his friends are all 19, so it was a nice break from the ultra-sophisticated Parisian world that seems to surround me pour la plupart du temps. They quoted Beavis and Butthead. And Hugo had been to Pomona to visit Cohen earlier this year, so it was really nice to talk to him about people that we both know. A (sort of ) taste of home.
You know what, I’m going to stop apologizing for long blog entries.
Bye.