We saw two very different parts of Paris today within the course of a few hours. Continuing the “Skateboard Paris” tour that seems to have been forced upon me, we had planned to take Andrew and Will to a very cool-looking, free facility called Espace Glisse Paris 18, a large, covered skatepark on the very north side of Paris. Our original plan had been to take a train to a […]
Lest you thought we were, I give you this official summary of last Thursday’s weather in Paris, and draw your attention particularly to the “Indice Chaleur” graph to note that it felt like 102 degrees fahrenheit. meteociel.fr – Observations et données par stations – Tableaux horaires
Ugh. Yesterday was another awful day. The conversion from centigrade to fahrenheit is one of the most difficult for me, so I finally cheated and looked on a US site for the temperature in Paris Thursday afternoon, and wasn’t particularly surprised to see that it was 93. 93 and oppressively, painfully humid, with a hot sun filtering through thin grey clouds. The Metro was like a sauna. The heat became […]
It was hot and still and muggy in Paris today, and all day I’ve felt damp and overheated and tired, plus perhaps the foreigness of everything and the constancy of the city (it is never quiet) is starting to wear me down a bit. There’s a great expression in French, “Je suis creve,” the verb “crever” denoting what happens to an automobile tire when it gets punctured. That’s how I […]
Monday brought a new week, and a new language school for me and Will. We are now taking classes at the Alliance Francaise, which is going to be much better for both of us than our prior school, if my first class is any indication. Unlike the other school, the Alliance actually has a curriculum and textbooks, if you can imagine such a thing, and the instructors actually give out […]
We went to see the riders in the Tour de France today. Not feeling up to the crowds at the end of the race on the Champs Elysees, we went to a spot near my (old) language school in a near suburb called Issy-Les-Moulineaux, which had the advantage of being near a Metro stop and yet outside of the density of Paris. We stood on a small street named Boulevard […]
It hit me yesterday afternoon, really hit me, for the first time, in a relaxed, satisfied way, rather than a manic, what-have-I-done way — I am really living in Paris. I am experiencing daily almost as many interesting, new things as I can safely assimilate. I am meeting people from all over the world. How extraordinary. I arrived at this emotional place in part because Friday was the last day […]
I had an “wow” moment coming home on the Metro today from class. I realized that for the past couple of days, I’ve been able to sit in class and listen to the teacher speak in French and understand what she was saying totally easily and comfortably, seemingly without having to translate the words into English in my head. This, I think, is the very beginning of being able to […]
Ugh. Last night was horrible. I couldn’t get to sleep (the boys had their friend Fernando sleeping over, and they kept horsing around), and when I did get to sleep, it was fitful and uneven and interspersed with horrible, scary, and violent dreams in which I was utterly helpless to stop all the bad things that were happening, and when the bad dreams ended I had a series of cramps […]
This weekend I realized that I had to tighten my belt a notch — literally, not figuratively — because with all the walking around we’ve been doing, I have apparently lost a few pounds notwithstanding my consumption of baguettes, cheese, tarts, pain au lait (God help me if they had pain au lait easily available in the US; I would weigh pounds); non non-fat lattes with sugar; non non-fat milk, […]