la sécurité est important

So, Day 2 was a lot of sitting around and learning things. And then waiting in line for long periods of time. I did learn a couple of interesting things that I thought were worth sharing. The first is that they spent a long time impressing upon us about how dangerous it is, but then backing off and saying it's no worse than any other big city. In any case, I'm intensely paranoid about how I hold my stuff and check fanatically every time we get off the metro. The interesting part of this lecture was that people are allowed to carry pepper spray on the streets but it's illegal to use it. Go figure.

We also learned that calling people/texting people in France is impossibly expensive no matter which way you try it. So I finally ended up buying a 20 euro SIM card, but no minutes. I'll buy some minutes under the Bourgney (or something like that) plan tomorrow elsewhere-- it was too frustrating to wait in a lengthy separate line for that. There are 80 of us and many of us needed to buy phones. If I decide to buy 2 months of unlimited texting and 90 minutes of speaking time, it's 35 euros. I could also buy 3 months for 35 euros, but there are only 350 texts and I'm nervous about counting. Yuck. It's too bad that I need to communicate with people...

The metro passes are also kind of expensive, though they cover the metro and the bus and the RER an unlimited number of times, which makes me not feel less horrible. 65 euros for that.

Finally, the advice I received about how to be French (according to French people!)
1) Be rude! Don't say I'm sorry, don't say excuse me-- that's a waste of valuable time.
2) Wear black (and in my personal opinion, dress far too warmly for the season. Everyone was wearing jackets in 65 degree weather)
3) Speak French, and speak it a bit more quietly than you would otherwise.
4) Don't tip. In French, the word for "tip" is "pourboire" which literally means "for drinking"-- meaning, the money you're giving in the tip isn't for the waiter to live on, it's for him to buy himself a drink after work.
5) If you're drunk in public, you must be a hobo. It's illegal to drink openly (no open bottles or cans) or be drunk outside, so you either have to be really unsophisticated or not have a place to live to do it.

Let's just say I know a bunch of super polite hobos back on campus.

Bonsoir tout le monde!