J'Adore

This is the weirdest thing. I've been knocking myself out using French keyboards for the past week and now I'm in an internet cafe that actually has an American keyboard and I've forgotten how to type on it. FRANCE HAS RUINED ME.

In other news, every time I turn a corner I fall more hopelessly in love with Paris. I can't believe how much I love this place. I also can't believe that I've really forgotten how to type on an American keyboard. This is seriously so weird.

J'adore my neighborhood. It's a mix of wide boulevards and quaint, winding streets, ivy scaling the walls and flowers in every window. There are trees everywhere, everywhere. The streets are filled with people-- old men and children, students and beggars and businessmen, people with skin of every possible shade, wearing every imaginable style of dress. Today I wandered into an Asian grocery store and when I walked out the back door, I found myself in the middle of an open-air market that seemed to stretch for miles, the air thick with the smell of fish and the sound of voices shouting in French and a thousand other languages.

The best part about my neighborhood is that no matter how long I walk, no matter how many twists and turns I make, no matter how many alleys I slip down, when I'm tired of walking and ready to be home, I look up and there I am, like some kind of homing pigeon.

I've been studying French like a crazy person. Actually, I'm not sure how much a crazy person would study French so maybe that's not a good analogy but I've been studying a lot. There's a shop next door to my apartment that sells primers for little French kids and I bought one that's designed for seven-year-olds. It's perfect. I struggle with some of the examples because a seven-year-old French kid would actually have a better vocabulary than I do (they would know the word for rabbit, for example) but I'm learning.

I haven't been carrying my camera with me lately so I don't have any photos for you but if you just picture the most beautiful city you can imagine, that's what you would see.