A little taste of home

Today, the sales - les soldes - began. There are two huge sales in Paris: one in the summer (not too helpful) and one in the winter (SCORE!). Seeing as I am in desperate need of sweaters and a pair of normal walking shoes, I think I'll be hitting up some stores in the very, very near future.

A short-ish post for a small adventure:

I think my entire class has completely abandoned any hope of finishing our nightly readings. I mean, if I wanted to sit and read 200 pages a night in my room, I could have just stayed in Chicago, right? In order to see more of Paris AND attempt to do work, I decided to scope out neat study spaces; this afternoon, I wanted to check out the Pompidou's public reference library to see if it was an acceptable reading space. However, my stomach - rather, our stomachs = got the best of us and we ended up searching for food.

And we found... McDonald's!

The inside was actually ridiculously chic - the McDonald's that I have seen in Paris look kind of like Apple stores (i.e. huge glass windows and sparkly white insides). I absolutely LOVE figuring out what's on the "dollar menu" at McD's around the world. For instance, in the Philippines, McD's features 8 peso (or was it 64? I forget the conversion rate from 4 years ago) garlic rice, as well as hard-shell ube and cheese ice cream. In China, there were these awesome taro-filled pie sticks. It appears that the French 0.95 euro menu is kind of sparse:
However, there is an ENTIRE DESSERT MENU:
I ordered the thing on the bottom row, second from the right. It turned out to be an apple/pear/chocolate crumble, and although it was probably oozing chemicals (oh McD's), it was absolutely delicious:
My sister finally posted her pictures, so I'm going to retroactively post at some point so I can put up pretty pictures of Paris on New Year's Eve! Until then, I'm going to experiment to see if I can pull photos from my sister's Picasa account (apparently, I can!)...

...here's lookin' at you, kid =)
xoxo (from the Paris metro),
D