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.