France

Okay, this is weird, my blog site is in French. Luckily I know where all the right buttons are, so I don't need to worry about what they say.

I got to Paris without any trouble, other than being a bit sad to leave London. The last couple days were quite wonderful and it made going away much harder. However, the weather is much nicer this time than when I was here in January and for some reason the language barrier isn't as scary. Besides, most people speak english. Except the beggars, who have their sob stories written out on postcards and have learned just enough english to ask "do you speak english?" before putting it in your face. I was impressed enough with the effort involved to hand over a couple euros.

The trick with this money is that their 1 and 2 euros are coins and after years of not dealing with coins over 25 cents, I have this idea that coins aren't real money and are therefore open spending territory. But it's only after six euros have left my pocket on nonessentials that I stop and go, hey, that's sort of a lot of money when one is living on 50 a day...

Speaking of tight budgets, I really lucked out today; it being the first sunday of the month, all the museums are free! So I went to the Louvre (nice, but not life-changing), after that I was pretty arted-out, so I took a break and ate my lunch in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Then, refreshed, I went to the Museum d'Orsey- which was wonderful! All my favorite impressionist painters.

My feet are quite sore however, since I've decided to save money by walking everywhere. And while Paris isn't a really big city- it's big enough when you're walking everywhere, but that's the only way to really learn a city, by foot.

Tomorrow I plan to go to the Picasso Museum (there are two apparently, one in Barcelona as well) and go back to the Eiffel Tower to ride the elevator up. Tuesday night I'm taking a sleeper train to Barcelona (hopefully; it's my first eurrail ride, so I'm a little paranoid that it's all a lie and my many hundred-dollar ticket isn't worth the paper it's printed on. I should learn to control my paranoia at some point...)