This weekend was good as well. It's my roommate's last weekend in Paris. We decided to go to the Catacombes, underground tunnels where skeletons were transferred from overflowing Paris cemetaries in the 17th (or 18th, or so) century. It was creepy, and astounding.

We were invited to dinner that evening at my friend's grandmother's, so we went to a flower shop to pick out beautiful wine-red flowers for a bouquet. We also got wine, bread, and cake, and walked in carolling "We Three Kings" since we were bearing gifts. Dinner was lovely with lobster and a russian salad decorated with pansies. I learned that night that pansies were edible, and ate many of them just because it was so much fun to eat a pretty flower! The feast was complimented by six 20 year olds' profound discussions on growing up and the loss of innocence and trust, physical blindness and deafness and how we would cope were we to find ourselves in such a scenario....

The next day, we slept in and left for Musée d'Orsay after long breakfast chats on physical attraction vs. personality. On our way, we walked through Tuileries, a botanical garden on old palace grounds beside the Louvre, where we bought delicious chestnut crepes to snack on. We crossed a very pretty double-levelled bridge across the scene to the museum, where many, many impressionist works are kept. Afterwards, I went to an art and design bookstore and spent hours looking through books unwearyingly. My roommate had to drag me away for dinner.

We went home to watch a surprisingly hilarious French-Canadian movie (La Grande Seduction). The power went out at midnight, so on a whim my roommate decided we should go down to the storage rooms (called the "caves") in our apartment building's basement. It's a really old building, so the caves look like a medieval dungeon, with a spiral stone staircasse down, cobwebs and exposed wooden beams, and the antique keys to open the weathered barn-wood doors. (i'll post pictures). I was quite thoroughly frightened, so to counterbalance that, we stayed up until 3am drinking tea, reminiscing and playing cheesy spice girls music! it was fun but... i'm sleepy.

inbetween all of that, i tried to make progress on reading Darwin's Origin of Species, and i love it....