I woke up very late today. Truly, undeniably late, as I didn’t roll out of bed until 12:45. And even then I felt like death. Apparently my body can’t run on 3 and a half hours of sleep for two nights in a row. It’s just quite difficult to prioritize sleep in Paris, with so many things to see and do and taste! At any rate, food was a top priority when the lot of us woke up, so we did some grocery shopping at a local store and headed to the Seine for a riverside picnic. The sun was out, the Parisians were friendly, and laughter flowed as easily as the water before us. We watched roller bladers zoom by, little toddlers wobble along, and dogs strut behind their owners with their tails in the air, conducting the sounds of the city like an exacting metronome wagging from side to side. It was a cozy type of beautiful; friendly, familiar. After lunch we headed to Shakespeare & Co again, because Shakespeare & Co is always a good idea. The short walk across a bridge took us to the small shop where this time, a guitarist was stationed outside the door serenading all the book lovers.
It truly might be my favorite place in all of Paris. Books in every single nook and cranny, a piano in an upstairs reading room; old-fashioned typewriters decorating small tables scattered here and there, large comfortable chairs that swallow you up the moment you sit down; warm, simple chandeliers, and a tightly wound, tiny red staircase with its paint worn down the center till the wood peeks through in places. It is a store well worn and well loved, and we came across a book where visitors had left little notes inside. It seemed like a brilliant but curiously strange idea, until we read the title of the battered volume: Essays and Belles Letters. Perfect, right? We added a note of our own to the mix, and I left a second one in a small alcove that housed a chair, a desk, and a typewriter. It was a predictable note to leave, but jotting it down felt like I was sharing my wishes with the very woodwork of that tiny book store; “May I fall in love with a French man and call Paris forever my home.” All in due time, I’m sure.
Afterwards I headed back to the hotel on my own, and I am very proud to say that I now have a pretty good grasp of getting around Paris! In fact, on my way to a metro station in the Latin Quarter, a tourist stopped me and asked me for directions to a place I had never heard of before in broken, half-hearted French. I had to blurt out “désolée monsieur, mais je ne suis pas française”, although I couldn’t stop feeling delighted that I had been mistaken for a Parisian. My ultimate goal in Paris was achieved! It was achieved more than once, in fact, as a Parisian woman began speaking to me on the metro in rapid French that I couldn’t quite keep up with, so it took exuberant body language, short retorts, and fervent head nodding to keep up the act before I revealed that I was in fact, merely a student studying French.
Dinner that night was at a restaurant in our own neighborhood, magnificent as always. I ordered a three-cheese salad, and only in France does a three-cheese salad truly mean a large bowl of lettuce and tomato topped with entire wedges of three different cheeses. I didn’t complain.