Sheer Happiness

FINALS ARE OVER!

And Steph is here!

And I have 3 days left, which I refuse to waste. Tomorrow I shall explore numerous cemeteries and see skulls. Saturday I will explore all that Montmartre has to offer, and will finish the night by a Coen Brothers movie marathon at Le Champo, breakfast included, after which I will finally retire, sleeplessly, to pack for the next day's flight.

So I am happy.

I am optimistic about grades, I am going to keep in contact with Reid Hall buddies, and all is well with the world.

I will, however, quite miss my Paris in Context class. Come on, it's a class where you explore Contemporary Art museums in Paris for free! Freaking fantastic is what that was.

Today was the Reid Hall cocktail party, which was of course 60 or so people lumped into the room, tired after finals, and swigging free glasses of wine like nobody's business. And cheese. And desserts. I left almost as full as I was on Thanksgiving. The "cocktail" (aka cheap white and red wine) party was followed by walking to the Notre Dame and spending over an hour talking to a stranger in Shakespeare & Co., an infamous all English-language bookstore in the Latin Quarter. Gotta love the brits. Night was concluded by hookah, per usual (could this be my last hookah night of Paris? Oh, sadness!).

Oh! And I forgot: last week I dined at la Coupole, which used to be frequented by Picasso and Hemmingway, among numerous others. Mmm, foie gras + some sort of beef + mousse. A bit on the pricey side, but at least I could tell people I dined at a veritable french restaurant in Montparnasse rather than just baguettes and cheese. Some pictures:



The ceiling also received some attention from the French press because it hired 4 famous contemporary artists to do their own rendition on a quarter of it:


Pretty beautiful, I think.

And, of course, there was the politically incorrect probably-not-even-really-Indian man serving curry:


That's him with my friend Peggy. Gotta love it. I didn't even ask him for a picture. He saw my camera and asked me for one. Ah, France.