The Two Windmills and Tumbleweed

Day 22
Monday June 6

Class today--we workshopped the last of the Normandy poems, and then guest lecturer Christophe Lamiot came to talk to us about translation. We ended up learning a lot about having dual nationality in France and the States, and how even if you have two PhDs you can end up eating nothing but pasta at an ex's place in Belgium for a year. I wish I spoke French. I must say, though, 90% of the time I can understand what people are saying to me in French--but only about 5% of the time can I string together a sentence of my own...aren't poets supposed to have a way with words? Oh well.

A book I found... I have an Uncle named Dutch,
but my uncle has only one ear so I'm not sure
this is him...

After class, a group of us headed through Monmartre and found Cafe le Deux Moulins (two windmills) from the movie Amelie. Our waiter was the penultimate frenchman, "pfft-ing" between words, rolling his eyes at our english, and sending the flirty barman over to try his hand at charming us. Ha. All in good fun. I ordered oeuff au saumon, a creamy egg dish with smoked salmon and chives, served with baguette (naturally) and fresh salad. It occurs to me that this salad was the first serving of vegetables I've had in forever--it was delish. Normally if I eat nothing but calorific treats for three weeks, I feel like hell, but all my cheesy, carby, chocolaty, etc food feels just right. We feasted, then headed down the hill to the metro to go to shop-hopping.

Diana and I wanted to go to a bookstore called Torn Pages and Tattered Leaves, an english bookstore with a tea room. When we got there, we were greeted by a ginger cat with a giant feather-duster tail. He hung out with me while I posted up with an Anais Nin biography for a bit. Then Kelsey wanted to go to Le Bon Marche, Paris's first department store, whose name translates roughly into "cheap," which it is not. Bon Marche is like a Barney's--everything is beautiful and upwards of 500euros, which is about $750. Unfortunately, that is just a tad out of our price range, so we headed to a different bookstore in retreat. The store is called The Red Wheelbarrow, and there I found the Fernando Pessoa book that has been on my list of things to buy called The Book of Our Disquiet. 


On the next street over, we found a little store that specializes in high quality wooden puzzles and brain teasers. Awesome--just up my alley. Here's the kicker: its called Tumbleweed! Woo. I talked to the lady who runs the store (she's originally from Philadelphia), and she knew all about this blog's namesake (the tumbleweeds at Shakespeare & Co), and she put me to work on a puzzle---the puzzle is four pieces of wood, and the idea is to shape these four pieces into an uppercase letter T. I swear it could not be done. Diana and Kelsey bummed around the stores and bought gifts and trinkets, and an hour later I still hadn't figured out this stupid T. I had to buy it. I refused to lose to this thing.

word

So we took our loot home, and I continued to play with that (insert profanity here) "T" while I talked to Mom (hi Mom!) on the phone until I figured it out (tres gratifying).

Then Kelsey, Diana, and I decided to go to a night club we'd been hearing about since before we got here. It's called "Queen" and it was once a gay club (which we like going to), but now its only a gay club on certain nights. We got all cute and drank our wine, and we took the metro all the way to Champs D'Elysees, but Queen was terrible. It was empty and pretty dull (only studded with the random group of girls that could have passed for us in a heartbeat), so we decided to take advantage of the fact that the metros were still running (until 1am) and head on home.

Voila, Day 22 (we're finally getting this down)