Move over, New York...

Paris is the legitimate city that never sleeps. Everyone walks around with bags under their eyes and drinks copious amounts of coffee. I wish I was joking. I have been following a bit in their footsteps, thanks to the infusion of homework into my epic touring stints. I'm excited to, as they say, "faire la grasse matinée" (literally, to do the fat morning, figuratively, to sleep in) on Saturday.

Before I collapse, though, I thought I should share my experiences and pictures from yesterday and today. Wednesday, after class, Katherine and I went back to our apartment and had a picnic. We had a miserable time getting the cork off our 3 euro wine, but she finally succeeded...and then we didn't like it. The bread, however, was excellent. Picnics are the way to go for cheap food and drink. After nap and homework time, we both had meetings at IES. After these brief meetings (literally a 45 minute commute for a 10 minute meeting) we went to the Jardin du Luxembourg. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves-- it's beautiful. The first couple of pictures are from the park that's just south of the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Here it is!! (sideways)

This is what people do in France on Wednesday afternoons, apparently. I'm jealous.

French people playing basketball! The guy in the middle is wearing a Bulls jersey... of Michael Jordan. For some reason not in the picture is the guy wearing the 'Blazers jersey (Roy). I seriously thought he was in the picture but I couldn't exactly go back and take another... Katherine was dying of shame about how creeper I was anyways.

After spending some quality time in the gardens, Katherine and I headed to the Place de Saint Michel to meet up with the rest of IES so that we could get on the boat for our evening dinner cruise.

Agh, more sideways. But sweet monument!

A street performer. He played with those two glass balls and with a few Chinese yo-yos.

I have friends on the boat with me! 

So many that they don't fit in one picture!

Most of my boat pictures were pretty unsuccessful, so I'll just pick out a sampling.

Blurry, but you get the idea.

La Tour Eiffel! This becomes a theme. After we got off the boat, we decided that we should try to walk to the Eiffel Tower. It was only 10 minutes by boat on the Seine, so it couldn't be that far...

We made it... an hour or so later.

Ahh it looks so cool at night! I'm sure there will be more pictures to come of this particular building :-).

Thursday was fun but a bit less eventful. After class, we found an excellent lunch deal and then got coffee. After this, we went on a tour with one of the IES staff to a supermarket, where we learned how to buy groceries (there are some tricks of the trade, such as with fruit, which you need to weigh and get a sticker with the new price before you go up to the cash register. Katherine and I learned that the hard way...). I learned that skim milk legitimately does not exist in France (I'm taking a calcium supplement as we speak), and that peanut butter is over twice as expensive as nutella. After the supermarket, we went back and I had my academic meeting, where I was pretty much ordered to do an internship. Apparently my French is at a level where I really should use it now, which makes sense and made me proud. I'm currently organizing that particular project and trying to figure out if that's possible while still travelling on Friday. Yay! After a little bit of down time, we attended a seminar on love in Paris, which mostly consisted of not making eye contact with weirdos. 

À demain!