Arc de Triomphe, Check

Day 2

Monday May 16

Jet lag is silly. We got up ridiculously early and decided to go grocery shopping. Our wanderings the day before brought us easily to the supermarche by our apartment, where we bought what we hoped was a collection of French-ish food...and three bottles of wine for 2euro each. Then at boulangerie on the corner we asked for baguette (they dont say "a" baguette, just baguette), and I got pan au chocolat amande (chocolate almond croissant), which is want for my dying meal, by the way.

Heartened by these successes, we jumped on the metro and went to the Arc de Triomphe. Its glorious. We have to go into an underground tunnel to get past the treacherous circular road that surrounds it like a mote. In tunnel, a slimey shiester that clearly swindles tourists for a living tied a thread bracelet on my wrist and tried to make me pay 10 euros for it. Ha. I gave him a US dollar and called it good. We paid the 9euro to climb to the up to the top and started walking. Naturally, there is no elevator--just a spiral staircase teeming with tweens on a field trip. I figure its important to check the obligatory tourist attractions off the list while its still fresh though, so up I go. From the top, I saw just how many of these tourist stops I'll see--everywhere I looked there's a building that is more beautiful than everything in Los Angeles combined. 

"Bitch please"

I hate feeling like a tourist. Looking at the unwieldy guide map of Paris is equivalent to freshman year clutching the diagram of campus to find my next class; hopefully someday soon I'll know where to go, becoming part of the fabric here as if I belong. 
But, at the top of the Arc, we are not the only ones with the dreaded tourist map, so we pulled it out and find that the Concorde, where Louis XVI was beheaded, is nearby. 

Invalides

We head in that direction, taking a leisurely detour down the Champs d' Elysees (the Rodeo Drive of Paris). After being extorted by a coffee shop (4euro for a cappuccino), we continued our trek and stumbled across Invalides, Napoleon's tomb. Its massive, a golden domed fortress that has napoleon complex written all over it. I thought it was funny (in the most reverent way of course).

Concorde is a giant pink granite obelisk (insert phallic reference here) that was given to France by Egypt in the early 20th century (according to Cecelia, France stole it. ha). It sits in a square which also pays homage to the place where Marie Antoinette met the guillotine and a grand hotel that was built in the 1600s. 

Starting to realize that every single building we see is a kodak moment, we poke around Le Concorde, and jump on the train (where I am yelled at by surely the first of many french ladies-- this one a ticket agent at the metro stop) to Cecelia's apartment in Monmartre where she will teach the class. 

Our lovely professor served us kir royale and olives, and as a class we took the train to the poetry reading in Saint Michele (the center of Paris near Notre Dame) at Shakespeare & Co. Shakespeare & Co is the quintessential famous bookstore started in the 1920s. It used to be a literary lending library for the english nerds of yore. Then they started selling books, and putting up the young writers that need a place to stay. To this day, if you show up and tell them youre a writer, you can stay there. They call these people tumbleweeds. All they ask is that every day you work in the store, write something, and read one book...there are no words. This city feels more like surreal literary Disneyland every day. 

Shakespeare & Co.

Shakespeare & Co. is swarming with reading types from all over the world. Everyone is speaking english though, so for once I explicitly understand exactly how incredible this is. The poet who was to read, Jack Hirschman, is American and was once the poet laureate of San Francisco. A truly brilliant, charged, and funny man, he took a swig of vodka out of a flask half way through his reading. Something about the violence in Egypt and orange soda.  

Then Cecelia took us to Johnny Depp's favorite back alley falafel shop that also comes recommended by Lenny Kravitz (they took this very seriously). A little dingy and smelling of parsley and Kronenberg, pictures of the thickly accented proprietor and these celebrities smile down on us as we dig in to our saucy sandwiches. 

Three hours of food comas and heavy discussion later, we wander back to Rue de Republique, and Diana and I realize we're somehow just up the street from our apartment. So, naturally, instead of sending our friends home, the evening continues with wine and slap jack at our apartment. We had to walk them to the metro stop by 12:30 because the trains stop running early here. After we dropped them off at Oberkampf, we stopped at the bar underneath our building-- a beer for Diana and a glass of something red that I cannot pronounce for me. We made friends with the bartender--should be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Day 2. Voila.