I have been here two weeks today.  It has gone by quickly, also slowly, kind of the way life does.  Like you always think time is going by so fast, but then ten years ago seems like a long time ago. Doesn’t it?

Anyway I often feel that I should be checking my mail or something.  Is that weird?

I worked a lot this week.  All day Monday, till 4 on Wednesday, and till 6 yesterday.  But Tuesday!  I had intentions of getting that day written up earlier.  I had been living so… frugally.  But then I got a nice gift so that I could maybe loosen up a little here, money wise (THANKS DAD!) so I went out on Tuesday and went on a Spending Rampage.  Within reason, but it was SO awesome.  I bought a whole bunch of groceries, I bought shampoo and conditioner.  I bought a phone card.  I had been buying it all in dribs and drabs to keep in the budget.  To buy everything all at once was pretty liberating.

Then I decided to take myself out to lunch, and I got on the metro with the intention of changing onto a metro to get me to the Odeon area as I have hardly been to that side of the river at all.  But, the metro going to Odeon was not working at the station I tried to transfer at, so I hopped on another line and just got off randomly.  What the hell, right?  I had no idea what I would find up there. What did I find?  The Hard Rock Cafe!

I don’t generally go to the Hard Rock in the U.S. but I confess to a certain desire to visit them overseas.  Someone I know once called them “ramped up Applebee’s” but Applenbee’s ain’t showin’ no 1980’s OMD videos, Dawg! So of course I had to go in and was very happy to find that had a HUGE bar.  (I tried to go to the one in Venice last fall, and they don’t even have a freeking bar.  Lame.) So I sat down at the bar and proceeded to drink white wine, eat some overpriced crappy food, watch videos and write in my journal.  My bartender, Chadia, was totally awesome.  She thanked me for asking for my wine in French and she was just really personable and nice.  I totally want to go back there because of her.  Hard Rock Cafe, give that woman a raise!

I left there pretty happy, it was just really nice to go out and spend some money.  Except that after about an hour after leaving I was totally, insanely starving.  I am not sure how I could eat some pseudo Asian chicken lettuce wraps and then be so hungry an hour after.  But I was.  Also, I was just walking around aimlessly, and somehow found myself at Les Halles.  How, I have no idea (I kind of have no idea where I was initially, I guess.)  Just the name “Les Halles” made me more hungry.  So I started thinking about the little plate of salami they gave me at the cafe near St. Paul on my 3rd day, and then I totally wanted to go there.

So I did and ordered a glass of wine but they didn’t give me any salami… my life, the comedy.

It was OK to not have anything for a post lunch snack because I was going to Nancy and David’s for dinner.  They had ordered up these big trays of shellfish to eat.  Oysters, and big shrimps and snails.  And we had pasta and some cuajada (a sheep’s milk cheese kind of dessert that I love and they have at my local market).  It was a FEAST.  It felt like a day of riches.

Today after working a couple of days, I decided to go down to the Eiffel Tower because I never really went right up to it before.  I have always seen it from afar.  Before I got there though I got a bee in my bonnet to have an Italian pizza, so I did at a place called Gusto something or other  (is it just me, or are there an insane amount of Italian restaurants in Paris?)  Then walked to the Eiffel Tower.  It really is an amazing structure.  I was very tempted to go up but there were a LOT of people there… so I meandered down the river and looked enviously at some houseboats, then walked over to the other side, down Champs Elysees, by the Concorde, to the Tuileries where I was forced by exhaustion to sit down and have an overpriced glass of wine at a one of those cafes there.  I think I walked about 50 miles today, seriously.  Then I walked to the metro station and the train home was so packed that out of the stress of it all I was forced to go to another cafe, on the Bastille canal, for a REALLY overpriced glass of wine.  If it makes you feel any better, I am making dinner at home tonight.  I was tempted to get take out Asian at one of those Asian deli places, but I think I will save my weekend splurging for tomorrow… and Sunday….

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2011 at 11:26 am and is filed under The Paris Diet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.