After class, my friend Vanessa and I walked along the boulevards and soaked up the beautiful sunshine. We ducked inside Shakespeare and Co., a great book store just across from Notre Dame. It's all current books on the first floor, and the second floor is only for reading and reference where you can sit for hours on the many beds or sofas just wasting away the hours thumbing through oringinal prints of Austen or Stienbeck. When you're not reading you can pour yourself a cup of coffee or play the piano that's tucked in between all the forgotten livres. It's really a great little place to visit if you're a bookworm.
After that, we continued our journey along the river and made it out to the point on the Ile de la Cité. It's directly in the middle of the Seine and with the water rushing past you on both sides, it's a great view. Mostly students congregate here to smoke and shoot the breeze, but we didn't linger for long as a group of dreadlocked teenagers were having their bags and coats searched by the police.
Then we took the métro out to Château de Vincennes (an area I MUST return to - this castle looked amazing, but I know nothing about it or what it's currently used for, so I'll have to make a field trip on my next free weekend) to visit the Parc Floral de Paris and an independent farmers' market that we had heard word of.
Since it was such a beautiful day, the park was just gorgeous and it really lifted my spirits to see more than a little patch of green in Paris. There is a beautiful lake, great big trees, whole fields of flowers and tuplips, daffodils....just incredible. We've decided that if tomorrow's weather is as wonderful as it was today, we're going to pack a very french picnic lunch of baguette, strawberries, cheese, wine and sausage and go back to the park to do our homework and relax in the sun for the afternoon.
The farmer's market was equally amazing, both visually and gastronomically speaking. There were close to thirty or forty independent farmers selling all sorts of products including cheese, jams, wine, olive oils, breads, foi gras, honey, salt, meats, candies....oh my goodness we were in heaven. We tried a little bit of everything including the duck pâtées (the french love a good pâté)and just about every cheese that they were dishing out to us. We bought a strong goat cheese that we're going to picnic with tomorrow, and I bought a jar of violet milk jam - it's difficult to explain, but it's jam that's made with sheep's milk and tastes like violets...it's delicious. There were also oysters and escargot, ciders and fresh olives, and probably a ton of things that I didn't get to taste or see. The best part was that all of products were 100 percent natural without any preservatives and of course made by hand. We weren't ready to leave, but we had made our free-sample tour a few times and the sellers were begining to recognize us.
Such a beautiful day, I wish I could fully express what a wonderful mood I'm in right now! Spring time in Paris - who would actually believe that it would hold up to its reputation?
Alright, enough of this over-the-moon crap, tonight I have a date with Romain, a new french manboy, so I need to go primp and brush my teeth. I know the french are all about their cheese, but I'm not so sure that smelling like a rotten goat sock is the image I want to present.
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