Paris, Day 2

This is going online on what is technically my third day; it just passed midnight here. Perhaps I have a tiny bit of jetlag after all, as I’m not at all sleep despite the late hour and the fact that I apparently walked over 10 miles over the course of the day!

(I bought one of those new UP bands at the beginning of the summer, and the idea is you wear it on your wrist at all times so that it tracks your movement during the day and then your depth of sleep at night. I discovered today that keeping the band in my pocket accomplishes the same goal, thus allowing me to wear more Paris-appropriate accessories while still tracking my activity.)

Anyway, I spent most of today with my roommate, Dany. She and I set off a bit after 10 this morning and walked all over the Left Bank. She helped me get a SIM card for my phone, which is a huge help in feeling settled, and she took me to see my university. (I don’t think I was in the actual law building, but I was nearby.) Sciences Po is in a pretty posh part of the Left Bank, just a couple of blocks down from a couple of the famous cafes where people like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway used to hang out; it’s also a very fashionable district and includes stores like Karl Lagerfeld and Ralph Lauren. From there we walked back down towards the Jardin du Luxembourg (where I went yesterday), and I discovered that from the other side of the pond you could see the Eiffel Tower! Thus I had my first glimpse of this Paris icon, which Dany took to calling “my friend”. (It's in the center of the picture below - small, but there!)

After eating sandwiches in the shade at the park, we hopped on a bus that drove us through the 14th, 6th, 7th, and 16th arrondisements, right past the base of the Eiffel Tower. (Dany would say “we’ll see your friend again when we turn here.”) I realize the sequence of those numbers sounds pretty strange, so here’s a map of Paris by arrondisement to give you some idea of how that makes sense; the Eiffel Tower is right at the river between the 7th and 16th.

We got off the bus on the other side of the river in the 16th, near the Trocadéro (where I took pictures of the Eiffel Tower when I came last year). Dany is watering the plants in her brother’s apartment while he’s away, so we popped in there – and oh my God, it is the nicest housing situation I’ve ever seen. I felt like I was in a movie star’s apartment. A few minutes later we were buying macarons from the place Dany says makes them better than anywhere else in Paris; I put them in my purse to enjoy later.

And then it was time for my Eiffel Tower photoshoot extravaganza. We back-tracked to the Trocadéro, then descended the steps, crossed the Seine (which is pretty narrow right there), walked under the tower, and continued down the Champs de Mars. These are some of my favorite pictures, in that progression of locations:

 At this point it was near 4:00, so we got on another bus to head home (stopping first in the grocery store – I bought some nectarines that look like those semi-flat pumpkin-like gourds you can get around Halloween; haven’t eaten one yet, but I’m intrigued!

I putted around at home for an hour or so before venturing out for my first solo trip to a different part of Paris. I met up with another American student in my program, and hilariously enough we met at a place in the 11th arrondisement called American Kitchen (we went there because he has a friend who is a waitress there). Our fellow diners (all French) were enjoying burgers and fries; I just had a glass of Bordeaux. J From there we got a little lost heading back to the Metro but eventually found our way back to the Left Bank and the Saint Germain area (near where school is) to join a group of other exchange students who were supposedly at a café. We realized once we got off the metro that we’d overshot it a bit, so we walked back the direction we had just traveled and found the café but not the students. Dommage! At that point it was 10:00, so I hopped back on the train and headed home.

Here’s my geography observation for the day. Paris is actually not that big of a city in terms of geographic area – Google tells me it’s actually smaller than Washington, D.C. The difference is that in D.C. most of the people I know tend to stick to only certain areas of the city; there are huge chunks of the eastern part of the city that no one ever visits. In Paris, each part of the city is significant, and each is a destination in and of itself. So although traveling from my apartment up to the American Kitchen isn’t a huge distance in terms of mileage, it feels far because you go through so many metro stops and pass so many distinct, visit-worthy neighborhoods along the way. I think it will take me all year to really know the city as a whole.

With that... it’s time for me to start thinking about sleep!