More nerdy awesome.

[tenlittlebullets]

Oh god, how am I gonna remember all the stuff that's happened over the past few days? Haha. So on Monday mmejavert and I met up with misatheredpanda and we wandered around lots of Les Mis-related locations being big ol' geeks and shopping in the rue Saint-Denis, and then we utterly failed to find the Café Procope. I think all of us assumed that someone else would look up the address or something. So we went back to the apartment and produced cracktastic Frenchboy doodles and read bad fanfiction aloud until we were all quite silly, and then we realized it was almost midnigt. Oooooops.

Tuesday was Père Lachaise, which is omg huge and beautiful and I love it to pieces. And I might've kissed Oscar Wilde's tomb and taken a picture of the lipstick mark. >___> And then we went down to the Place d'Italie and found the "real" location of the Gorbeau house, which happens to be occupied by a fantastically ugly police building. Irony, thy name is Paris? Then we split up and I went to look for any remaining traces of the Field of the Lark. Haha, fat chance, even if I was better informed this time. I do wonder, though, how old some of those laundry establishments around the rue Corvisart are--the Field of the Lark was bordered by the Bièvre river, which is why that part of Paris attracted all the tanneries and laundresses and the like and also why it was so polluted. And speaking of the Bièvre, there's a little artificial stream in the Square René-le-Gall that allegedly retraces part of its path. I have pictures; it was pretty neat.

Wednesday was amazing. We got up at an ungodly hour to meet misatheredpanda again before it got unbearably hot outside, took a brief walk through Notre-Dame, and then went down to the catacombs. I love the catacombs. They didn't make as much of an impression on me this time around, possibly because I wasn't alone, but oh god I love the catacombs and the occasionally-strange arrangement of skulls (a heart pattern? really?!) and the gratuitously morbid inscriptions everywhere. We emerged with our shoes absolutely filthy, which I don't remember from last time--mine were the worst; they had started out black and ended up almost pure white from being caked in limestone dust.

And then we went to the Café Procope. Oh my god. I am used to making nerdy pilgrimages to places that are really awesome but do not necessarily acknowledge that they are sites of nerdy pilgrimage--and then I get to the Procope which was just so gleeful about its nerdiness. I sat under Buonaparte's hat at lunch, guys. No, really. And there were quotes from Voltaire and Rousseau and Molière and André Chénier painted on the ceilings, and the back room had the Declaration of the Rights of Man painted on the wall, and the bathrooms were for Citoyens and Citoyennes and they had little engravings about the months of the revolutionary calendar hanging on the walls. Where else can you read poetry about Floréal while you're taking a pee? And as we were wandering the dining rooms in shock and awe, misatheredpanda and I got hailed down by a Radio France reporter who wanted to interview us about why we were there and, unspokenly, why we were standing in front of a bust of Robespierre grinning like idiots. So we got to ramble about the Enlightenment and the Revolution for Radio France, and--dude, did I really sit in the Café Procope yesterday being interviewed about Camille Desmoulins? It was surreal.

We ended up spending like three and a half hours in the Procope. Then we went back to Laurel's hotel room and wrote some bad fanfiction, of the wonderfully cracktastic and typoriffic variety, and generally acted like loons until an unspeakable hour of the night.

Today was a lot more relaxed. Slept late, wandered around the Latin Quarter alone for a while, bought used books, went to the Musée du Moyen-Age at Cluny, ate at one of those tourist-trap restaurants in the rue de la Huchette with Authentic French Cuisine advertised on a menu translated into English. But the boeuf bourguignon was good, so I refuse to be ashamed. I ended up seated next to a bunch of French students--students of French, that is, not students who were French--who invited me to join them once they figured out I was a foreigner too. So we sat around for a while having halting and grammatically-suspect conversation, which was about the most French I've spoken at a time since I've been here. It was fun in a way.

And now I am tired and really damn full. And if anyone wants me to lj-cut these mammoth Paris entries please whap me, because I tend to lose track of how long they get.