By wink of water

still no pictures and still no Skype, darn it, I meant to get a headset today. I get intimidated, that’s the problem. I did go shopping and Christophe showed me around my neighborhood – lots of great things close by. it was actually quite an adventurous day. went to Les Halles, which is this weirdly enormous mall, underground, VERY crowded. this is where I got the cheap things I needed to complete my apartment. got myself a French press, which was a dire necessity, plus some groceries, a little drawer thing to put my toiletries in, a hamper, some cat food. these bastards hate the cat food, of course. it’s like pate. who knew French cat food would be different? I let them run about the apartment stairs today. this is all part of my plot to actually meet some of my neighbors.

my place is finally getting set up as I like it, though I am still missing some boxes. oh, I had a great conversation with my concierge yesterday, and by “great” I mean I understood every 5th word, about. I think something arrived for me on Wednesday. I am not sure what or what happened to it. I did manage to ask where the trash was (la poubelle, which I called la basura, but this was enough to communicate what I meant). the apartment is so small that I need to keep it meticulously neat and clean, and this is pretty frustrating. I am on the lookout for a new place.

the lab is great, I really like my colleagues. I am intimidated, but as mom said, that’s probably good. I have a project already, dealing with emotion recognition. I’ve also asked about where to dance and where to watch indie rock, and there are lots of opinions on that. Christophe also said you can get this card for 20 euros a month and see all the movies you want in Paris. and there are a LOT of cinemas. so, this might be a good activity for me in the coming months. plus I’ll be playing ultimate hopefully starting on Monday, and starting French classes the week after next. I hope to take intensive classes at the Sorbonne in the summer – it’s just a question of how long. my big priorities are doing well at the postdoc and learning French, so there won’t be much time for anything else, including ultimate, sadly. on the other hand, I need to get exercise somehow – not sure how long this “jogging in the Jardin du Luxembourg” is going to last.

ok, I really meant for this to be short, but I guess there’s a lot to say. Á demain!

No pics yet, sorry. I’m tuckered out. I opened a bank account today, no small feat, then talked to all the incredibly brilliant people in my lab. Really smart PhD students, not to mention the researchers I’ll be working under. It seems I’m the only woman, in a lab of about 20. Now I’m boiling pasta and gazing into the gorgeous penthouse apartment across the street, which appears to have a couch, 2 chairs, and a piano! My place is about as big as the piano. On the other hand, theirs is undoubtedly ridiculously expensive.

This evening I walked to the 1st to buy a kitty litter pan from a very strange pet store. they were rather small (notice a theme?) and sold all sorts of animals – rabbits, gerbils, mice, chicks, chickens, roosters, birds, dogs. I felt so sorry for the dogs, puppies in glass cages. the place smelled terrible, too. I didn’t see any cats but it would have depressed me further. Anyway, they had cat pans but no litter. I was wearing my second-most uncomfortable pair of boots, so I decided to metro home, which turned out to be a terrible idea. The subway was super crowded and I still had to walk a lot to change trains, plus I was standing the whole time.

However, on the walk between the subway and my place, I was further impressed by my neighborhood. I live adjacent to the Jardin du Luxembourg and can walk across it to my work in about 10 minutes. Tomorrow I plan to jog in it. On the non-garden side, it turns out there are a bunch of cute shops, restaurants, and cafés. And a Boulangerie! So, tomorrow I will also overcome my fear and have some breakfast and coffee. And sign up for French lessons…and get a SIM card…and buy an adapter.

I left Seattle at 7:45 pm on Tuesday night and it’s now 8:10 pm on Wednesday night in France. This will be short, I’ll do a longer one once I’ve had a chance to take some pictures. But let me just say, after spending over $200 at the vet getting the kitties checked and microchipped and getting my vet to sign a million things, then Fed Exing the forms to the USDA in Olympia and paying them $100 to endorse them, then panicking because Denmark is very specific that they must be microchipped before their first vaccination for rabies (which is just stupid, since what do you do if you’ve had your cat vaccinated but never microchipped?)….nothing happened. I arrived in Copenhagen, was told the cats were checked through to Paris (so I didn’t need to alert the Border Inspection Post, which I had, via email, but I was worried because I hadn’t faxed them notification) and was told that “their papers will be checked in Paris, if at all.” If at all!!! Well, it’s true, they didn’t really check their papers. A cursory glance. I definitely didn’t need to get them endorsed and probably could have faked the whole thing. They didn’t scan the microchips, either. In fact, the toughest part of taking the cats was getting a cab to drive me to Paris with them. Not sure what the prejudice is there, but most cabs wouldn’t take me. Needlessly documenting my cats for this trip: around $350. Having them in my apartment in Paris, in a crawl space near the ceiling, glaring down at me for what I’ve put them through: priceless.

Also, there was a crying baby on the plane, and it occurred to me that life would be better for everyone if we could put children in the cargo hold.

I’ve heard that people in Paris always speak English to Americans, but that has not been my experience – no one speaks English to me. (And in Copenhagen and on SAS, everyone assumed I was Danish.) The cab driver and I sat in silence for 45 minutes, since he didn’t speak English and I certainly wasn’t comfortable striking up a conversation in French. Upon arrival and signing the documents, I immediately went out to find some kitty litter. There is a teeny tiny market 2 minutes from my apartment (think NYC grocery), and I thought it highly unlikely that they had kitty litter, but found some cat food. He asked me (in French, of course) what I was looking for, and I could manage to say it had to do with my cats, but how do you say kitty litter in French? Finally, I said “toilette pour chats” and he said “ahh!” and indeed, had a few boxes of litter. Then I asked for a box via pantomime, which of course he didn’t have, but he gave me a wide, flat cardboard box that had been used for apples. Perfect. Brought it all home and both cats immediately used it.

So I’ve got internet and a telephone and I will be posting all the info about my address, etc tomorrow. I’ll take some pics of the apartment too (which is about half the size of my bedroom in my old apartment). But for now I’m going to get some sleep.