I went to Paris yesterday.
Monday was sort of a holiday in France. The schools were out, but the post offices were in. The city buses were running, but the town-to-town buses were not--which meant I couldn't get to my internship. I called in to the office, and the director said, well, see you tomorrow. So I went to Paris.
And I didn't really like Paris. I feel terrible for admitting this--it's Paris after all. Maybe I just caught Paris on a bad day. It started in Rouen, though, at the train station, where some guy sat down next to me and told me I was very pretty, and would like to know my name and get my number and buy me a drink. I tried "Je ne parle le français" with the worst accent I could offer, but he just switched to English. I can't really do very good apologies in French, nor nice thank-you's, and rejections fall into the same category: "That's very kind; no." This was when I moved my ring to my left hand.
I ended up sitting next to someone else on the train. A sailor who works on the Seine. He warned me about bag-snatchers in Paris and told me he thought Alabama was the state with the largest racial tension. He said he didn't think France was ready for a woman to be president and told me what Roosevelt did to ease the Great Depression. He got off two stops before Paris.
It rained a lot once I got there. I walked around for awhile trying to find a place to eat, and got overcharged with what I finally settled on. This made me really mad. I'm still kind of mad.
So, I walked around for a bit. I got a crepe. It was underdone. I went to the Musée d'Orsay. It was closed. It rained some more. It was certainly an adventure, at least. They're always adventures, things like this.
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