nawl

Ok, I slept all day.

In the evening, we went to dinner with JB and Gabriel, a veritable stagiaire reunion. None of them have seen each other in years. Go me for being the visitor that brings people together. Renaud managed to find the most Californian restaurant I've ever seen in France. That's right, they sold smoothies (only there's apparently no word for such in French, so they were listed under "cocktails") and had multiple vegetarian options for dinner. (Ok, that's not entirely fair, a creperie or a pizza place also has multiple vegetarian options, but they all involve large quantities of cheese. This place had ones that just involved vegetables. I was impressed.)

We went out to walk through some expensive areas of town. It finally clicked that the colored lights everywhere are all part of Paris's campaign to get the 2012 olympics. (Yeah the sign on the Eiffel Tower is pretty obvious, but random colors are less so.) Here's some more official buildings lit up like a circus:

You can see what they did to the front here. We went by Notre Dame, whose front facade is freshly cleaned and pretty. In this picture, the bright spots in the lower right is a pair of fire dancers.

The Seine looks calm at night, when you can't see that it's brown:

We took the metro, and I decided I like curved metro stations. I also like weird artsy ads on the walls.

I had a conversation with Hixie yesterday afternoon before taking a nap:

Me: "There's just one problem with being in Europe..."
Hixie: "Yeah. No Tivo."
"...besides the lack of decent Mexican food."
"And that."
"All of my American friends are asleep."
"Oh, well, I rarely have that problem. I just live on CA time."