I’m starting to get very settled in to my little apartment.  The floors are a little slanted, and the first three floors to get up here are easy but on the last landing, the stairs themselves get bigger. It is all a bit precarious to be totally truthful but I guess I would not have it any other way.  Marble floors freak me out way more than my crooked linoleum one.  Also white furniture freaks me out.  Thank the travel gods there is no white furniture here.

Other than that, I guess I don’t have a lot to report.  Yesterday it was cloudy and I forced myself to stay in and work all day.  I am not on vacation.  I am living here.  There is a major difference.  The difference being, I really have to work.  So work I did, except for a couple of excursions to the store.  It was not easy as from my working place I look out to the sky, which seemed ever-changing and constantly inviting.  I applaud myself for my self discipline.  Now if I can just keep that going.

Oh, and that was no drum and bass party I heard the other night.  I am realizing now, that there is a train passing nearby, or under the house, and I can only hear this train from my bed.  It is not loud and sometimes I can swear I hear music with it, like it really is a club somewhere.  But at 9:00 in the morning?  Whatever it is, it is the sound that comes with my experience.  I am already getting used to it, and may even come to love it.  Maybe even miss it.  But check in on that one with me in two weeks.

I woke up today with the following two thoughts – I have not walked through Place des Vosges yet and I also have not crossed the Seine.  Well, I could really give two figs about Place des Vosges, it’s pretty and all but it doesn’t exactly drive me to distraction thinking about it.  The river on the other hand, well that drives me to distraction.  So with that in mind I left midday (after some work, also a trip to the Nicolas wine store chain) and walked by the Place des Vosges which pretty much looks the same as last time I saw it.  Then I went to the Musee Carnavelet, which is the Paris history museum.  It is a cool museum with interesting artifacts from Roman times until sometime after 1830, but the after 1830 part was closed today.  So I only got to 1830.  There was a lock of Marie Antoinette’s hair in a pendant and on a ring which I found creepy and also, totally fascinating.  Did you know that there are some hypothesis that Marie Antoinette was actually dying of ovarian cancer when she get her head cut off?  I didn’t know that from the museum, I knew that from before.  Unless I dreamed that.

There were some school groups at the museum.  I spent my two hours there mostly trying to stay ahead of them, or get behind them.  The older ones (14 or 15 or whatever) were, of course, obnoxious as kids of that age tend to be (I know I was.) But there was a group of younger kids that were so cute.  They must have been 8 or 9, and I saw them twice sitting on the floor while their teacher talked to them about Napolean.  An assortment of races, all Parisian, all learning about the French Revolution.  Little hands in the air.  I wanted to get a picture but I thought that might look pervertesque.  So I didn’t even try.

Later I crossed the Seine.  I packed my little bottle of wine and some potato chips and crossed over, and perched myself on the river bank for a couple of hours.  Across the river a guy was playing his guitar.  At one point, he was singing Bob Dylan.  Like a Rolling Stone.  A couple of nights ago it occurred to me that no one, save my landlady knows exactly where I am.  People know where I am, but not really.  If the bottom of this ancient building were to give away and the whole thing plummet into the depths of whatever train thingy is down there, no one would know I was down there.  A complete unknown.  As you can see, the utter romance of Paris is totally getting to me. Like a rolling stone.  Heh.

It really does feel good to be on my own here, however.  I am totally digging it.

As I sat on the cement quai with my legs dangling over the edge, I noticed that the real party seemed to be on the other side of the river – at least the dude singing Bob Dylan was.  On my side, a young woman sat close to me.  She read from a prayer book, occasionally closing her eyes and praying.  She had a box of cookies in her purse and would eat a cookie between each prayer.  A tour boat went by with a bunch of school kids on it and they all screamed and waved at us.  The girl waved and smiled, and so did I. There are worlds of differences between her and me, but we still smile at the same things.

The dander of dandelion is flying through the air.  A ton of it.  It gets in my wine, on my clothes, in my hair.  It is the spring snow that peppers the view of the Notre Dame and the Hotel de Ville and the fancy apartment buildings across the river.  I pick the fuzz out of my wine while the sun goes down behind me.  My butt hurts from the cement, and I am totally in love. Next time I should probably bring a cushion, though.

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