hey guys. I really can't be bothered going into detail today. I'm tired, and just want to fall asleep in my bed.
I'm also thinking alot about the next time i can hold Jed in my arms and give his tummy a little squeeze.
This morning we had to meet at 9, but i thought it was at 8.30. I was silly enough to get up at 8am - and managed to get ready in time! i usually have to leave an hour to get ready in the mornings when i call home on skype, so am tempted to limit calls to home just for that extra half hour of sleeping bliss.
We're onto our last week of learning things. At the moment it's a tad scary - ana and i have to do a 20 minute presentation speaking fluently in french at the end of the week. I'm worried - i'm never too confident with speaking french. We shall see how it goes.
This morning we went to a place that has made me love Paris after all of my recent disillusion. All the places we've been visiting are dirty, the food is ridiculously expensive even in poor quartiers, the buildings are dirty, the streets unclean. Today, we went to the Quartier de La Haute Bourgeoisie. In other words, only really rich people live there. We went to Parc Monceau and there were french people running! You never see french people doing exercise, but Sylvia assures us that when people do sport in public, you know it's a rich area.
Entire families went out for a run on saturday morning. And this is a run - no casual walk, no kids on bikes. They whole family ran laps around this elaborate, beautiful parc. The parc even had relics from the Renaissance in it - the first wealthy people who moved there bought collannades and statues from national monumental museums and put them in their park. Whoa.
There were a lot of beautiful little kids with their big fat coats and little scarves and beanies and tiny little gloves. Gorgeous.
French people's sundays seem to be dedicated to family. I imagine it's hard to spend time with your kids when you're working full time and it gets so dark so early. Today, we saw so many children being taken out. A vaste majority of shops are closed on a sunday - we eventually found a sunday market where we could eat - but there were a few children's merry-go-rounds (the electric, lit-up kind) with the kids sitting there laughing. Babies playing in the park, etc. It's kinda sweet that while we all lie in bed all morning, the rich french families take their children out, have brunch (which is huge in all restaurants on sunday morning - they have heaps of deals on) or go for a run, let the kids play in the parc, put them on a few rides... it was really sweet. And a very healthy tradition to force into your kids on a sunday morning in the freezing cold!
After looking around that area and being shown some of the amazing rich french buildings, we had lunch at the market. We had french onion soup - they put bread with grilled cheese on the top of it - it was nice. Then we went to a Musée - it was just the old house of one of the big rich banking families of Paris. It was meant to show us how they lived at the time, and what a house to live in! I loved the staircase, their rooms were full of paintings and sculptures from the Renaissance. Beautiful. It started getting very windy, and ana and i finished going through the museum early (it was an individual audio guide - no boring tour person!) and we asked Sylvia whether we could leave early. She said yes!! So ana and i ran in the wind (too windy for our umbrellas to survive) and rain to the metro - and found one really close by the museum, on our home train line, that Sylvia had not taken us on! She'd gotten us lost about 5 times that day, and we ended up getting off a metro that was quite a walk from the musée, which involved a lot of changing trains, when we could have stayed on Pont de Sevres (our home line) and just gotten off at that station! Not very impressed.
I took a photo of me and laurence inside the museum. The guard came up "pas de photos!" This really isn't anything unusual here - and i was wondering why not. In Australia, if i'm about to tell off either a customer or even just someone who's misbehaving or doing something forbidden at coles, i approach them gently "excuse me sir, i'm sorry but you're not allowed to take photos here" and offer them a reason - e.g. copyright. But in france, they just presume that it's OK to yell at you from across the room "pas de photos". Their customer service needs a huge makeover. Ana reckons it's because they don't fear that they could lose their jobs. I reckon it's because their bosses don't care whether you're rude to someone or not, and french people have accepted that service assistants and guards and the like will be rude to you. I know that the fact that we can fire casuals at coles doesn't make them work harder; and part-time and full time checkout chicks actually tend to work harder than the casuals - even though it's really hard to fire a part or full-timer! I think it's just that in all honesty, their bosses don't care. If you get shitty service everywhere, you're not going to stop going to the supermarket because you had shitty service - you'll go to the supermarket that has the things you want. What a terrible attitude to have.
Anyway, now we're home. I'm so tired, i'm going to fall asleep. But i know if i sleep too early, i won't be able to get to sleep at proper bedtime.
hugs to all.
