"There's a party for peasants, you should go"

Pictures aren't working out for me now, I'll put some up soon.

You could say I'm master of imprudent footwear decisions. I never anticpated this much walking. You think walking isn't bad but when you can't take off your shoes that are rubbing off new layers of flesh with every step and you are miles from home walking becomes something it wasn't before.

I went to go walk along the Seine today. I like to do that if it's sunny. Somehow I always end up getting there around lunch time. Lunchtime is a bad time to go because you run the risk of being accosted by men on their lunch break. As I walked by a trio of construction workers one called out, "Bonjour mademoiselle, est-ce que vous cherchez travaille?(are you looking for work?)" Um, nope. Theres a whole new element when these things go across languages. I generally say I don't understand which immediately makes them address me in English with things like "I want to know where it is you go, may I walk with you?" "NON!"

While sitting and reading today a road construction crew came to loiter under a bridge and harrass the passing joggers. As one of them approached me I prepared my withering gaze.

"Bonjour mademoiselle, madame, mademoiselle......" and he went off on a long and complex speech that was completely lost on me.

"Je ne parle pas Francais," I said, he replied that he didn't speak English but that everyone should speak French when they came to France. I tried to look like I didn't understand him.

"Je parle Anglais." I said knowing that he didn't. He began to explain that he knew I spoke French because I wasn't a tourist, tourists don't read books on the Seine by themselves, and plus, I had clearly just spoken Fench to him.

"Je suis Americaine" I said hoping to discourage him, "Je ne comprend pas." He offered to help me meet people at bars. As he said this another man came up on a bicycle. Immediately the first man asked him if he spoke English, "Yes", he said "and there is a huge party down that way for all the peasants, they are throwing milk on the ground for all the poor people, it is the place to be." They carried on in this way, talking to me and eachother while I made great efforts to read my book.

"You should not be reading this stupid book, you should go to the party....It is a sin not speak French when in Paris......when you go to America tell everyone you know that we are not stupid, we are nice, we speak English very fast.....I speak English very fast....he wants to know if you want to meet people in bars....'no merci'....anything so that we will leave you with your book, huh?" "Yes." Eventually they wandered far enough away for me to make an escape.

On Sunday I went to an English secondhand bookstore called "Shakespeare and Co.". It's exactly the sort of place that Paris is full of, adorable, quaint, so famous several movie have been made about or in it, stinky and absolutely packed with tourists. It was cool but a little too overrun. I was tempted to buy lots of books but made it out without any thing vowng to get to the library at the earliest possible chance.

As another episode in my 'getting lost in Paris' narrative, allow me to offer a story of greatly missunderstood train routes. I rarely use trains. There are a few reasons why I don't use them but the main reason is that there are less of them and they make less stops and generally are unuseful to me personally. The other reason is that they aren't the metro, therefore they are a mystery I have little desire to solve. Buses, trams and the velo all have this in common with trains. Just to get your bearings: the train is faster and bigger than the metro. It generally stops at metro stops but stops much less allowing it to get from point a to point b much quicker. Paris navi-go cards have three levels, zones 1 through 3. I have a second zone card that allows me to use all the metros. Since trains go over the entire country they have zones so you scan your card before boarding and after exiting. The nearest train station to me, though also a metro stop, does not allow me to board the train. But anyway, because I don't use them, I don't really know how to use them. But some people, especially those living further out in the suburbs, use them alot. Even though all metros run on a grid, trains don't and so rather than having directions or names or anything sensible they have endings. Each train goes to an ending but be careful, some trains go in circles and most run on a track that forks several times. And also, some times the trains, though stopping in the same place as the metro, have a different name for their stop. So, to get on with my story, I was out with a friend of mine, Hannah, who is also American and who lives in the suburbs of Paris. She seemed to have some insight into the mystical interworkings of the Paris train system and even though I had misgivings about our direction we hopped onto the train. One other thing about trains, they have lots of far apart stops but sometimes they don't stop at all of them so you have to look at hte list of stops to make sure it will stop at your stop. As soon as the train picked up speed I was pretty sure we were not heading deeper into Paris but towards the outskirts. Once it was evident that we were not going the right direction it also became evident that we were now no where near Paris. We zoomed by stop after stop through trees and by lakes. Anxiously we joked that we had accdentally boarded a direct to Nice. It was kind of funny but also not. Finally we stopped and managed to turn around going straight back to Chatelet. The train we got on to go back was a stopping train, it stopped about fifteen times before we reached our destination. I don't think I'll be using trains much more.