Une Journee Extraordinaire

Here in Paris, our program has pre-scheduled events nearly every day -- museum visits, tours by boat, plays, dinners, etc. This isn't exactly a problem -- it's been excellent to have a guided overview of what Paris has to offer, so when we do get some time to ourselves, we can maximize our time around the city to do what we please.

Yesterday we had a free day and thus I was able to plan and execute some quite exciting adventures!

My day began with a visit to the Musée des Arts et Métiers. This museum doesn't have impressionist art or Greek sculptures or tapestries: what it does have is a wide assortment of historical technology, contraptions, inventions, and (as the French would say) rather strange trucs. One may see a re-creation of Lavoisier's laboratory, a miniature model of a steam-powered engine, astrolabes from hundreds of years ago, very early sewing machines, and modern robotic technology (to name a few).

However, the journey is half the fun. The metro stop on line 11 for the museum, called Arts et Metiers, is decorated like a Jules Verne submarine. Any steampunk worth her salt knows about this metro stop! It is part of the destination itself, and I found it delightfully shiny. I'd read online that it had been largely obscured by graffiti, and so I was pleased to find that was not the case at all.


After locating the museum (it is situated in an old abbey right near the metro stop), I began my exploration. I enjoyed it immensely; it was laid out in a logical, orderly fashion, broken into categories like Navigation and Energy. Most of the displays were in nearly all glass boxes, set in the middle of the corridors so that one could fully circle the objects within.

Here's a flying machine I came across:


Any museum that brilliant has to be followed by a meal somewhere. As I had yet to explore any of my vegetarian restaurant listings, I decided to check out La Victoire Supreme du Coeur. There I enjoyed a lavish lunch: an appetizer of little onion fritters and salad, the Indian plate for my main course, and then the chocolate-orange-cardamom cream for dessert! It was all delicious and I adored having wheat bread instead of the all-fluff-no-substance baguettes that are tasty but not very filling.


I still had some time to spend in the afternoon, so I took the metro to the Centre Pompidou, where I recorded my adventures the old-fashioned way (in my Moleskine) for future reference. Then I headed back to the hostel for some resting (reading, not napping -- napping is something I find very difficult).


But friends! The day is not yet over! A friend from Davidson, the charming Ms. Wood, met me for drinks at Les Furieux. After several minutes of debating whether we ought to order at the bar (apparently we are both rather inept at bar culture and correct mannerisms?) we both ordered glasses of absinthe. Never fear, ye who worry about such things. Today's absinthe bears little resemblance to the absinthe of early bohemians. It lacks the hallucinogenic properties and simply bears a strong licorice flavour. We found it quite appealing.

Here Ms. Wood looks charming with her glass:


And I simply guard my drink from passers-by:


So there you have it! It was one of the best days of the trip thus far. I really enjoyed planning out the day, navigating toute seule, and of course, seeing Ms. Wood.

A Tribute to S.I.B.

I have a fantastic roommate.

Before you go to college, all of your well-meaning friends (mostly the older ones) counsel you to not expect to be best friends with your roommate. "You'll just live with them," they say, "so it's a businesslike arrangement." You're told to be reasonable in what you think your roommate will be like.

The Residence Life Office here matches up students well, taking into account their likes and dislikes, circadian rhythms, even their Myers-Briggs results. Even so, I was not positive that they would do a decent job. I was quite afraid that I would end up with someone whose loud, wanton ways would drive me crazy.

Then I met Sarah, my amazing roommate. We are highly compatible -- her F type complements my T -- and she has an incredible ability to overlook my more atrocious caprices, like my very noisy coffeemaker and tendency to strew my clothes everywhere. Every day we discover ways in which we are similar, sometimes reading the other one's mind, but we also learn the ways in which we deviate -- and we definitely have our differences.

Besides her high tolerance level for my nonsense, Sarah is also very creative, making beautiful cards for people on their birthdays and covering the walls of our room with her calligraphic brilliance. When we got back from the Christmas holiday, she presented me with my gift: a recipe box.

[It is not crooked. I just can't take normal pictures.]

Not only did she paint the box with a fantastic goddess/fairy/muse/nymph, she wrote Rensad ryn adin on the cover. I was so dumbstruck by the gift that Sarah had to remind me that rensad ryn adin was from the language I created. The phrase means "to eat and to drink" in Pannat.


I can't thank Sarah ever enough -- not just for the beautiful recipe box, because her friendship extends way beyond that -- for her gracious spirit, her charming presence, her perfect advice, and her enduring patience. This post is thus dedicated to her and her wonderful self.