Classes? Ummm...What Classes?

It's time to play Super Hyper Skip School Day!

The Players:

Don: growing increasingly frustrated by his french class and the uses of "qui", "que", and "quoi".

Gina: has decided to stop the madness of "il y a", "pendant", and "depuis", and study Italian instead

Carlos: like his french class, but is very susceptible to peer pressure, especially when he has to study more passe compose

The Goal: Skip Class

Objective: Achieved!

Methodology: It was a beautiful day, and there I was all ready for school, apple and bescherelle in hand, when two non-adolescent truants virtually forced me to accompany them on aday filled with delinquency.

In reality, I had overslept, missed breakfast, and had just gotten out of the shower when Gina knocked on my door and said, "We're skipping. Skip too!". I said ,"Naaah". She said, "C'mon". I said, "Okay". I finished getting dressed and at 9am on the dot, we were out on the street heading towards Jardin de Luxembourg.

Gina wanted to follow Rick Steve's walking tour of the Marais, so we headed to the start of the route at Place de la Bastille. We strated off walking by the Pantheon, we're we had a small pit stop for Gina to buy souvenirs and for Don to purchase a dashing ethnic scarf that will probably get him arrested in the US.

From there, we stopped at Gaudeamus for a coffee break, since we'd been walking for 20 minutes and were tired. Then we crossed the Siene and took a leisurely up to Bastille. passing a building housing the police horse academy along the way.

It's cool, how behind the doors of a lot of buildings, there are whole new things and structures happening. You can go in the front door a totally normal looking apartment house and instead of a lobby you find stairs leading up to a bocci ball court, or a whole new set of buildings, or a garden with fountains. In the courtyard next door to the dorm there's a hospital and a little house.
From Place de la Bastille, we headed to Place des Vosges, where we hung out for a little bit and went to see Victor Hugo's house. Then we went back to the main street to find the apartment where Jim Morrison died (I tell you, Rick Steve can surprise you sometimes). The apartment now houses a podiatrist.
From there we went back to Hotel de Sully to take more pictures, and continued on the walk heading to the Rue de Rosiers to have falafels. The streets get really twisty and we took a couple of wrong turns, but after running into Courtney and Danielle, we finally made it to the resturant where we spent a relaxing time with our food (and trying to take secret pictures of the waiters).Afterwards, we looked around the shops for a bit, lost Gina at a place called La Piscine, found her sitting pretty on the steps of a church, and then decided to go to take the metro to the Pere Lachaise Cemetary.

Falafarama

We made it to the Ile St. Louis and chose Amorino as the frozen treat of the moment. They're Berthillon's big competitor and really delicious. They also shape their ice cream cones to look like flowers, and like Juli said, sometimes presentation is everything (Amorino pics to come).

We continued on to the Marais. We had been wanting falafel since the day before, Saturday, but all the falafel joints had been closed for the sabbath. Now they were super packed. We queued up to L'As Du Fafalel, which Juli had read was one of the best one, and waited for one of the order takers to come by. The order takers were hilarious, they looked like total New Jersey guidos, but with yarmulkes. You basically give them your 5E, they give you a slip, wait your turn to get to the window, and then trade your slip for a falafel (with or without spicy sauce).

Weird thing was the illustration on the glass above the window. The resturant mascot seems to be a smiling, but slightly deranged, falafel, He has onion eyes, olive pupils, a tomato nose, and a tahini smile, with what looks like a pepper for teeth. It was a little too anthropomorphic for my taste, like maybe he would bite you back with his spicy pepper teeth when you tried to eat him.

But I don't like to be intimidated by food (unless it's three months old and comes out of my grandma's freezer), so I overcame the ickiness, wrapped that little sucker up and we walked to the Seine to eat. I showed that falafel who was boss. And it was, indeed, crazy delicious.

Khalil, Tartare, and a Library

I met Khalil right by the Hotel de Ville, and after introducing ourselves, we set off to look for a place for dinner in the Marais. We wanted to look for a restaurant with outdoor sitting, but it was a beautiful night and everything was packed.

We finally found a table at Les Philosophes on Rue Vielle du Temple. I ordered steak tartare with potatoes, a glass of red wine, and a huge bottle of Perrier.

It was a fun conversation. Khalil is Egyptian, a linguistics scientist from New Haven, and in Paris for a conference. He's currently working on research concerning the "r" and "rr" sounds in the spanish language and I learned all sorts of fun facts about the different sounds and physical involvement of the letter "p" (like a very highbrow The Electric Company). He also does advocacy work for undocumented people and the incarcerated. Ummm...I talked about how much I like cheese.

Oh...the toilet at Les Philosophes was very interesting. First of all, I did drink the huge bottle of Perrier, so I'll freely admit I was in a hurry to use the bathroom and did not notice that I went into the women's by mistake. However, I maybe would have missed the wonder that was the women's toilet. It was a toilet with a view!

The bathroom was in the basement level, but inside the stall was a window through which you could see a very nice old fashioned library. I'm not sure if it's an active library or just for show, but I did worry for a sec about someone looking at me from the other side. The other very, very sad thing is that the books are not reachable, which, really, makes the whole thing more of a tease than anything else. C'mon, would at least one accessible magazine to pass the time kill anybody?

Marais Gardens

The Marais is full of little restaurants and shops and it's a half Jewish, half gay neighborhood. We looked around a few shops, since all the stores have sales in July. But since I'm trying to be good and I am, as they say, between jobs, I only bought some Mariage Freres Marco Polo tea, and that was purely because I ordered some online two months ago for chunk before I knew I was coming to Paris and it's so much less expensive here. Stupid shipping and handling.

From there, Patrice showed me a couple of hidden gardens in the area. One being in the back of the Swedish Museum and the other behind a toilet showroom that's housed in an old mansion (but don't tell anyone). They were really pretty and surprisingly quiet considering we were in the middle of a very busy neighborhood. And from there...
first is the Swedish Museum Gardenand second is the toilet mansion garden. But it smells like roses.