Lesson #438,973 since coming to Paris:
It is nearly impossible and completely inefficient to attempt to read a book in French about Paris between World War I and I while listening to the Backstreet Boys.

At some point in my life I would like to stop eating things that come out of machines, whether it be sodas, candy bars, or coffee. Now is really an inopportune time to commence with that plan, but perhaps on my 30th birthday I can quit cold turkey. In the meantime, file café au laits from vending machines under the list of things that help me make it through the day.

I live with the coolest old lady in the world, and the longer I live here, the more convinced I am of her status as such. She’s amazing. There are always friends here, always the phone ringing, as Jessi once put it, "I think we live with a celebrity..." and I won’t lie, it kind of does feel like shacking up with Coco Chanel, who lived in the penthouse of a hotel in Paris for the last 30 years of her life. Now you can stay in her penthouse for your vacation, if you want. For 8900Euros a night. (Or about $11,000).

I go to a church where the average age is 24. I have never seen any kids there– no one is old enough to have them. The pastor is 30, single, and has hair approximately the same length as mine. The congregation is half white and half not, half French and half expats like me, but everyone speaks at least a decent amount of English and French... and most people something else as well. Pretty much the place is amazing.

I found the most glorious café down the road from my apartment today– it’s a good 15 minute walk, but the place is amazing. It’s next-door to a building designed by Hector Guimard, an uberfamous Art Nouveau architect. The place is all red leather seats and tiny round tables with chalkboards on the walls with the day’s specials, and I was the only one in there that did not get greeted by name by the waitstaff, who apparently caters mainly to local regulars. It’s called Café de la Fontaine, and I ended up there for the better part of three hours, trying to squeeze every centime out of my 4Euro café au lait and reading "Le Pieton de Paris," a book about...well, Paris, that I have to write a paper on by Wednesday. Still though, sitting in there with my book and dictionary, it was impossible to feel stressed in the cozy little place, looking out the window at the blustering wind.

The thing about living in Paris is that it is completely impossible to forget, even for a few minutes, that I am not in the midst of the greatest adventure ever. Even though things here seem "normal" now, it is still impossible to treat any day as "routine" because I never know what is going to happen when I leave my apartment. One could argue that I don’t know that kind of thing when I leave my dorm room in Atlanta, either, but I have never had such a myriad of adventures in such a short time in the US as I have here. Because every day here holds some kind of adventure, some kind of mystery, some kind of thing that I will probably never understand, whether it is some concept my prof tries to explain, the reason the lunch lady at the restaurante universitaire makes me get back in line to get fruit before she will give me chicken, or the reason Jessi and I never seem to pick the line at the supermarket where they give you grocery bags, I generally finish each day with at least one experience that can only be explained by the fact that we are americaines living somewhere we clearly don’t belong...
But I don’t mind.
C'est la vie, je pense,
Miss Murder

On a gingerbread cookie in the window of a bakery on my street: "Le seul vrai langue au monde est un baiser..." (The only true language of the world is a kiss.)
Addendum: the meaning of that language changes drastically when one has mono...