Everything in Paris is eat-able

Paris is an adventure and a half when you don’t speak French. This afternoon, I spent about 10 minutes attempting to communicate the fact that my desk lamp bulb has burned out (I brought my burned out bulb to the front desk and made frantic unhappy motions with it)… and now I’m back in my room, sitting in the semi-dark, afraid that my lamp will never, ever, ever work! Oh well. It could be worse, oui?

I’m finding that a large part of why Paris is so darn exciting is because anything – and I mean anything – I do counts as an accomplishment. For instance, semi-successfully asking for change for a 50 euro bill? Accomplishment! Figuring out where and how SIM cards work for an unlocked phone (and finding out that you need your passport handy to buy the damn things. So, yeah, I still need to buy a SIM card)? Accomplishment! Of course, the stuff I’m doing in Paris would count as really, really mundane back home – I’m essentially completing one or two small tasks a day and feeling extremely, extremely proud when something (more or less) works out.

Yesterday, I moved into my dorm. I’m being housed at Maison du Cambodge at the Cité Universitaire… and apparently don’t have a picture of my building! I’ll probably roam around the Cité tomorrow to get a better sense of the, um, sheer size of the darn thing – the Cité offers 5,600 beds in 40 residences(!!!). My room is pretty simple, but has two really terrible design flaws.

Design flaw #1: Curtains over the radiator. This makes turning up the heat at night a bitch. Also, I’m afraid that my curtains will start smelling like, well, burning:

Design flaw #2: STUPID SHOWER DESIGN. As the photo below illustrates, I don’t quite have a shower stall. Instead, I have a drain in the middle of my bathroom and a shower head that SPRAYS EVERYTHING IN THE BATHROOM when I turn it on. Because it sprays everything, I have to be 100% sure that, yes, I really do want to take a shower – once the water is on, your cold, naked body is either scalded or further frozen by the showerhead’s unnaturally strong spray:

Additionally, a good amount of water leaked out of my bathroom and into my room. This made me unhappy… but, again, things could be worse. At least I have a shower, right?

By the by, I’m pulling all of these photos from my Picasa album (Jason, if you’re reading this, the mac uploader is pretty effing sweet): http://picasaweb.google.com/Danica.Tiu . I’m taking pictures like mad, so my Picasa album will house a small selection of the bajillion photos I will no doubt take while I am here. Apparently, I have something like 1,000 photos from two months in Beijing; who knows what 3 months of frolicking in Europe will bring?

Today, I had two adventures. This morning/early afternoon, I dropped by an organic produce market about a mile or two away from where I live. It’s about 10 minutes away by train, so I’ll probably take the train to it from now on (i.e. FRESH ingredients!). I found out about the market – and about a lot of other produce markets – from this blog: http://chocolateandzucchini.com . Something tells me that I’ll be heavily relying on said blog to aide me in my Parisian cooking adventures! Oddly enough, the organic produce was way cheaper at the market than at any of the stores I’ve dropped by. I mean, I paid 4€ for 4 pounds of apples and clementines! Goodness, I’m going to get so happy and fat over the course of the next three months. Here are a few pictures of the market:



And a picture of a delicious, delicious Clementine:

After the organic produce market, we wandered around some side streets and found, among other things, a honey store and a seafood market:

My camera died in the middle of our next excursion, but I spent the evening wandering around the Latin Quarter/Notre Dame. We actually ended up at the Notre Dame towards the tail end of Saturday evening mass, so we heard a lot of the singing and organ playing surrounding Communion. How amazing would it be to regularly go to church at the NOTRE DAME?

Afterwards, we ate dinner at a cute Italian place that played a lot of American music and had gelato at Amorino. Kate, if you’re reading this, thanks so much for the Amorino suggestion! If you order gelato on a cone, Amorino crafts your icy treat into a gelato flower!

Wow, that was a long entry. I get the (sad) feeling that once class starts, my adventures will get shorter… For those of you starting school again, I hope you've all gotten back to your respective schools safely!

xoxo,
D