En fin....

Well, let me tell you a little bit about the tail end of my stay in Paris.

Finally, the weather was beautiful - and consistent! Before then, it would be sunny for a few days before the temperature would dip down and I would have to start wearing a sweater or a coat again. Gorgeous weather meant that none of us wanted to go to class, let alone finish our final papers or projects. (I actually didn't skip class, just for the record).

I had a few last items on my Paris "To-do" list.

I made it to the Georges Pompidou Centre, which is a modern art museum and one of Paris' most bizarre-looking buildings:


It's not under construction and that's not scaffolding - that's just the architecture of the building. As I said, modern art. A lot of it was fairly bizarre, too much for my tastes, but there were some very cool paintings or sculptures that I really enjoyed.




As I wandered through the galleries, I loved seeing the groups of schoolchildren on tours, learning about the art. I was actually very impressed by how young they were to be learning about such modern art (most of which is very intellectual). Art education just isn't as important in the States, so it was very refreshing for me to see how young these kids were.

As the weather was so nice, my friends and I spent as much time outside as possible, just hanging out or picnicking in various parks. Paris has a very vibrant outdoor culture. If it's a sunny day, everyone goes outside to picnic, play sports, lay in the sun and tan, go for a run, or do whatever.

One of the best things to do in Paris is to get dinner around the 10th arrondissement, order something for take-out, and sit along the Canal St. Martin to eat and drink with a few friends. It's such a good idea that it's difficult to find free space along the canal, because so many others are doing the same. I went one night with my friend Joe and we split a pizza and a bottle of wine. [The most French pizza ever: smoked salmon with fresh cream and caviar. Surprisingly tasty.]


Somehow during those last few days I found time to write my final papers (in English and in French) and prepare for a French presentation.
Let it just be said that going abroad for the quarter was the best thing I could have done for my GPA - I did very, very well in all of my classes.

The last weekend in Paris was over far too quickly.

On Friday, I went to the Eiffel Tower - finally. I had a picnic on the lawn with some friends. I'm glad I waited to long to go because the day was just beautiful.


Saturday was my birthday! At this point people had already started leaving Paris, either to return to the U.S. or to travel some more while they were in Europe. But, I managed to get a group of my friends together and we ended up having dinner on the Seine and hanging out around Pont des Arts. At one point we were in such a good mood that we just started laughing and couldn't stop for a very long time. The day had been warm but the evening was nice and cool, there were street musicians and plenty of other young people going for walks or just hanging out. Pont des Arts is really more of an outdoor club or café than anything else.

Sunday was spent packing and preparing for my flight home.
Monday I was up early in the morning to catch the Métro all the way to Charles de Gaulle and catch my flight. Paris --> Dublin --> Chicago.

Justin met me at the airport, and he had bought me McDonald's for lunch as a "welcome back to America" present.

Sometimes I miss Paris but I'm so happy to be back home in the U.S. And now that I've had the opportunity to travel some, I know I'm not going to want to stop.
I wonder where I'll go next...

I'm in France for only another 10 days or so. I'll be sorry to leave, but excited to come home. These days are sort of rushing past right now. There are still a few tourist sites I have to visit while I'm here, but I think I'm mostly concerned with finishing up my classes and enjoying myself for this last week or so. (Also, my birthday is almost here!)

Last week I went to the Rodin Museum. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and the museum has some adjoining gardens with statues scattered throughout.
Of course, his most famous piece, The Thinker, was up on a pedestal:


Apart from it being completely surrounded by tourists, it simply wasn't my favorite piece. I preferred

La porte de l'enfer (The Gate of Hell)


Or, Le Secret


Since we've had such excellent weather lately, everyone's been spending a lot of time outside.
The Luxembourg Gardens, surrounding Luxembourg Palace which houses the French Senate, are well manicured and colorful, with people sitting around and picnicking all around the web of meandering paths.


Willllm Clark visited me last weekend. He was on his way to Germany and decided he'd see Paris for a few days. Activities included:
The marché aux puces (flea market) up at Porte de Clignancourt. I believe it's the oldest flea market in the world, or some other such distinction. It was a little bit disappointing, actually. They had some pretty cool antiques in one section, though.
The Bois de Boulogne, a huge park on Paris' west side. According to the wikipedia page, the park is about 2.5 times as large as Central Park in NYC.
A Pop Art themed bar, a cool club, and Pont des Arts. Pont des Arts is a pedestrian bridge that crosses the Seine, right in front of the Louvre on one side and the Institut de France on the other. The bridge has a pretty cool scene at night: it's full of (mostly young) people, hanging out, eating and drinking and smoking and conversing, playing music..It's essentially an outdoor bar with a laid-back atmosphere.

Other than that...
I went wandering around Place de Saint Michel the other afternoon, walked over towards Notre Dame:


I headed back to the Louvre, since the last time I went I obviously didn't even see half. If you ever find yourself in Paris, and you only have one day to visit the Louvre, you should visit the Denon wing, which probably houses the best-known pieces: the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, the seated statue of Ramses and a statue of a sphinx, as well as some of my favorites, like Delacroix' La liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People)


And my absolute favorite: Victory (Nike) at Samothrace:




Just beautiful.

I was at the Louvre just up until it was closing, which is 10 p.m. on Wednesdays. I was walking through the galleries with my iPod, mostly so that I could block out the other tourists more easily. At one point, a security guard stopped me, so I pulled out my earbuds to talk to him, assuming he would be pointing me towards the exit since the museum was about to close. He asked to see my map, and pointed at the Pyramid and the fountain outside. What he really wanted was for me to wait for him there, so that we could "get to know each other" after he finished his shift.
I declined!
But that's just so...typical (and stereotypical) Frenchman, I'm finding. They'll just walk up to you, saying "Je voudrais faire ta connaissance..." ("I'd like to get to know you"), and then they'll invite you anywhere.

Oh, cultural differences.

Back in Paris (Home??! Not quite.)

Well, allow me to tell you a bit about the tail end of my sojourn in Berlin.
WARNING: This ended up being a longer post than I originally intended. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, skip to the end for a surprise.

After having visited most of the major landmarks and tourist sites in one fell swoop, I had a few days on my own to wander, explore, follow up on recommendations and see what I would see.

One of the best recommendations I got was from Katie, who insisted (and rightfully so) that I visit Kunsthaus Tacheles.




Right now, the place serves as an art center housing a café, art studios, tons of galleries, concert spaces, and the whole thing turns into a bar/club every night for the Pub Crawl or other parties.


Every inch of this place is covered in paintings/posters/graffiti/stickers/canvas/anything you can think of, really. The "back yard" is full of more galleries, sculptures, tables and chairs and places to hang out.
My kind of scene.




The building apparently has a history almost as colorful as its insides. It was built as the entrance to a big shopping mall/department store in the early 1900's. That quickly went out of business, and since then it's been home to a showroom for the German General Electric Company, the Nazis as the central SS office and a prison, the German Free Trade Union Federation, and a movie theater, until it was scheduled for demolition in the 1980's. They closed the theater and removed the dome that once crowned this place, but work was stopped in 1990 when a group of artists moved in and went through the motions of having it registered as a historical site.

It's funny that this keystone of Germany counterculture is situated in one is now one of the most gentrified neighborhoods in Berlin. On the one hand, the site needs tourism to fuel itself. But seeing something again and again through the tourist's camera lens has the effect of making it remarkably trite. I imagine it's difficult to maintain the integrity of the commune as a vibrant place for art and expression (and a fair share of radicalism) while becoming more and more of a tourist trap.

Another great Katie recommendation: The Pergamon Museum, museum of Classical antiquities, the Ancient Near East, and Islamic Art.

Massive Greek temple:


The Ishtar Gate, which was at the entrance to the inner city of Babylon, built around 500 B.C.:


Massive. Just fantastic.

I spent one day visiting the sites just outside of Berlin: the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and memorial, and Potsdam. I went with a girl I met my first day in Berlin, Nerea, who is from Spain, living in Norway, but currently on a tour of Europe.

Well, needless to say, the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camps were depressing. It was more difficult than I had expected it to be for me to walk through the grounds and actually see the sites that I had previously only studied from a safe distance. Established in 1933 as a prison for political opposition, Oranienburg was one of the first sites that would later become known as "concentration camps," and in many ways served as a model for those to come. In 1936, Sachsenhausen was built to expand upon the idea. You know the rest of the story. Again, as with Tacheles, it felt disconcerting how such a site was becoming a tourist trap. Many people who visit concentration camps do so respectfully, whether they be mourners or descendants or simply individuals learning about a terrible story in history. But I couldn't help but grimace at the girls making frowny faces behind the gate reading "ARBEIT MACHT FREI."


On a brighter note!
Nerea and I had a deliciously filling lunch of döner kebabs, the German equivalent of shawarma, those Greek/Middle Eastern sandwiches I love so much.
Then Potsdam!
Potsdam played home to Prussian kings right up until World War I. It is also, of course, the site of the Potsdam Conference at the end of World War II. Nowadays, it's a cute little town just at the outskirts of Berlin's metro area, that just happens to have a few palaces and a spectacular garden.
Unfortunately, Nerea and I got there just after they stopped admitting people into the palaces. So we took some pictures outside and went on a walk through the huge garden (perhaps "small forest" would be a more accurate term).

Neues Palais:


















The last excellent recommendation I got: the Fleamarket (Flohmarkt) at Mauerpark!
This is a huge, weekly fleamarket a little bit off the path so well-trod by tourists. TONS of stands selling everything, from antiques to clothing to art to knick knacks to bikes to furniture to tools to fresh fruit/vegetables to spices...you get the idea. Plus tons of great (cheap) food.
After walking for a few hours through all of the stalls and hordes of people, I was just considering heading home when I decided to take a seat at a little amphitheater just beyond the market in the park.
I AM SO GLAD I MADE THIS DECISION.

Bearpit Karaoke.
I don't have the slightest idea why it is called that, but after sitting for a few minutes the amphitheater was filled to capacity and then overflowing with people waiting for the karaoke to start. Berliners really, really love Bearpit Karaoke, apparently.
It was hilarious watching them belt out American karaoke standards, shamelessly, for the crowd.

This guy opened the show:


Spectacular.

A business proposition, if you will...

What does Germany have that the U.S. doesn't?

BIER BIKE!!


Yep, it's exactly what it looks like. A bar on wheels that the customers pedal around (yay teamwork!) while drinking beer.

Come on, how awesome does this look?


I think when I get back to the States I'm going to start a franchise.
Who's with me?

Berlin!

So here I am in Berlin! I'm trying to fit everything there is to do in Berlin in just a few days, so I have long and hectic days here. My only real complaint, though, is that it's TOO COLD FOR MAY. I'd really love to be able to put my coat away for good.

Yesterday I went on a free walking tour that goes to most of the historic/important landmarks in the city. I had a CRAZY tour guide named Summer who is from Southern California and is really into performance art.

We started at the Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor):


We visited the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, more accurately known as Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe:



We walked over the site where Hitler's bunker once existed. It's now an unmarked parking lot where Berliners take their dogs to do their business.

We saw a small part of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie is actually incredibly lame because it has been completely reconstructed and it's all fake and touristy.

But, I did very much enjoy Gendarmenmarkt, a public square containing the French Cathedral (Französischer Dom) and the German Cathedral (Deutscher Dom), as well as the Konzerthaus Berlin. Both cathedrals are Protestant, but since the French were Calvinists and the Germans were Lutherans, they practiced separately, and so the square with the two nearly identical cathedrals facing each other represents religious tolerance.


We moved on to Bebelplatz, a square ringed in by the Berlin State Opera, St. Hedwig's Cathedral, and Humboldt University. This was the site of a large Nazi book burning demonstration in 1933.

A plaque displays a famous quote by the German Jewish author Heinrich Heine:


In German: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen."
Rough English translation: "That was just a prelude; when books are burnt, you end by burning people."
Written in 1820.

On a much happier note, we passed by Fassbender and Rausch, Chocolatiers that always display huge chocolate scupltures of famous buildings in their windows:


Chocolate Reichstag = Better than real Reichstag???
Probably.

We saw the New Guard House (Neue Wache), which now houses a monument to the victims of war and tyranny:


And the official end of the tour was on the steps of the Berlin Cathedral:


After the tour, I went with a group of Australians, a USC student, and our tour guide to get schnitzel and beer. Delicious.

Then, on our way to the East Side Gallery, I met some Arizonans on the S-Bahn. They were from Tucson and Phoenix, just a few years old than I am. The world is too small sometimes.

East Side Gallery, the longest remaining portion of the Berlin Wall, covered in huge murals:



Berlin is great. And I still have so much to see.
(I repeat my plea that the weather gets warmer/sunnier/SPRINGIER)

Miss you all dearly.

A toutes les gloires de la France

Wow, okay, I think this might be a long post. Read it or don't.

SO last Friday, the Astro program went on a trip to Nançay, about two hours south of Paris, to visit the Observatoire de Nançay Radio Telescope. They have a couple gigantic arrays of radio telescopes that are pretty sweet.
We climbed up the primary mirror of the big radiotelescope:


I wish I had a better picture to show you the scope of this thing. It's about 200m long, and 40m high or something. High enough that it was pretty scary climbing the steep ladder and standing on a flimsy-looking wire frame while we went up. I know one of the girls took pictures of us while we were at the top but she hasn't uploaded those yet...

We had lunch at a little pub in the village with our professor and a solar physicist who had given us a tour. (Apéritif: Blackcurrant Kir, Appetizer: Salad with prawns and avocados, Main dish: Beef, with a side of sweet potatoes, polenta, and sautéed mushrooms, Dessert: cake with crème anglaise, espresso.)


That Saturday I had a thoroughly American movie-going experience with Joe and Ethan. We went to the theater at the Forum des Halles, we paid too much for movie tickets and popcorn, and we watched Kick-Ass. It was better than I had expected it to be; an absolutely ridiculous action movie. There were lots of stupid parts, too.

On Monday we had a wine and cheese tasting at the Center with our professor and the Humanities class. A wine merchant came to teach us about the different types of wine and cheese we were eating. My favorite wine was a Sauvignon Blanc, and my favorite cheese was Tomme de brebis, a cheese made from ewe's milk.

Tuesday night I had a pleasant surprise: I randomly got to have dinner with Erik Lokensgaard, my friend from UChicago who graduated last year and is traveling around Europe right now. We cooked a big dinner at his hosts' apartment (Pascal and Sophie), and a couple other UChicago people showed up, Antoine and Gideon. Dinner was cous cous, lentils with sautéed veggies (cabbage, zucchini, onions), a fresh salad, and bread and wine. SO much fun. Definitely worth the long ride all the way to the 17th arrondissement, which is the opposite end of Paris.

Wednesday night my French class went to see a play, La Fausse Suivante, at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. It's this small, old theater that's very cool but has tiny seats.
And then I stayed up all night finishing my Astro final paper and presentation! Woo!

Yesterday we all went to the Palais de Versailles. After a slow start, we went on a tour of the palace. It's overwhelming how vast and beautiful it is. It was ornate beyond anything I've ever seen before.



The famous Hall of Mirrors:

We had lunch there on the grounds. (Appetizer: tomatoes, pesto, and some fresh greens on a little pastry, Main dish: Salmon on a bed of carrots, snow peas, green beans, zucchini, Dessert: Chocolate gâteau "mi-cuit" [half-cooked...meaning very gooey on the inside] with crème anglaise, espresso).

After lunch, we were free to wander the gardens. There are about 850 acres of gardens that make up Versailles' "back yard." Huge, right? It used to be about 15,000. Good ol' Louis XIV.

Ethan and I:






Later that night Ethan, Joe and I finished our bottle of whiskey and headed to this little hole in the wall sangria bar. It was tiny, and the sangria was delicious and obviously home made by the little old bartender.
Such a good night.

Next week: Germany!

Le Printemps!

Paris is kind of too beautiful for words right now. It's (finally) full-on springtime: sunny, temperatures in the 70s, flowers blooming everywhere, any spot of grass is taken up by people picnicking or napping or playing soccer or frisbee, people have finally stopped wearing coats...
And I'm stuck inside doing some Astro homework. (Or, more accurately, procrastinating by writing this post.)

So last week I had a bit of a cold. Being sick sucks in any country, apparently. Go figure. I missed one day of class, but it wasn't a big deal because my professor was still in Chicago (because of the volcanic cloud blah blah blah) so the lecture was being given over Skype. Translation: I didn't really miss out on any learning.

Last week I went to a free jazz concert at l'Hôtel de Ville, Paris' Town Hall. You know, this place:

Très agréable.

This weekend my French class went to l'Opéra! Now, you would assume that since it was a French class trip and since we're in Paris we would watch an opera in French, to keep improving our language skills etc. etc.
Nope.
We saw Billy Budd, by Benjamin Britten. Not only is it an English opera sung entirely in English, it was comically anti-French because it is set on a British warship during the French Revolutionary Wars.
Overall, not my favorite opera. It's an all-male cast, with a very uninteresting plot centering around the young sailor Billy, who is the epitome of good and whose only flaw is that he has a stutter. Lots of blatant religious symbolism and undercurrents of homosexuality.

After the opera, a group of us went out in the neighborhood, La Place de la Bastille:


We had some crêpes for dinner (I hadn't eaten all day) and went to an absinthe bar.
For the record: Absinthe is plenty sweet on its own and does not need to be in a cocktail.

Alright, I should go finish my homework. For our astro lab, all we have to do is recreate Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the Universe. No big deal.

Au lieu de faire mes devoirs...

So, I don't feel like doing my French homework at the moment.

Mostly because my French class takes so much time! There's the class itself, plus Phonetics lab, plus weekly conversation sessions with a French university student, plus movies for class, not to mention the reading and the homework itself. Most of it would be much more enjoyable if there were more wine (come on, speaking a foreign language is just easier after a few glasses) and no grades. Hélas...

Speaking of French class outings, last Thursday my whole class (of 12 or so) had a dinner with our teacher and our "conversation assistants" (the French students who we meet with once a week). After a long day of all of my classes, I wasn't really feeling up to another few hours of awkward French conversation with my teacher. But it was mandatory, and it was a free meal.

It was surprisingly not awful. There's just something satisfying about watching your teacher order bottle after bottle of wine, making sure no one's glass is ever empty.

Afterwards, I went with a couple of the Astro kids (Ethan and Deniz) and three of the French students! Sara, Guillaume, and Gregory. They are SO COOL when they're not forcing us to practice our French. We went to an Irish Pub nearby and it was quickly revealed that les françaises know American 80's music better than I do. Go figure.

The rest of the weekend had its ups and downs. A lot of people chose this weekend to travel, so in general it was harder to find things to for those who stayed.

Saturday I went exploring some more. I found a street with more comic book/graphic novel stores right next to each other than should be good for business. I bought a couple of books in a little shop. I'm glad that the Small Used Bookstore is such a universal thing, because the shop was exactly the same as so many I've been to in the states - floor to ceiling books, title after title, dust, the owner's cat rushing past your ankles. Of course I bought a couple.


That night I went out with the frenchies (Sara and Gregory) and I actually ran into two of the Astro girls so they tagged along. We went to a club, daaanced for a while, left at about 4:30 am, decided we may as well wait for the Metro to start running again and got some breakfast. I made it home at about 6 or 6:30 am. on Sunday. Good times were had.

And now I really don't think I can put off my homework much longer.
But I leave you with a picture of our Astronomy class with our first professor, Rich Kron, looking goofy in his brand new beret:

Space 'n' Stuff

These are some of the images I took with the telescope at the Stone Edge Observatory in Sonoma, California.





Messier 3 - a Globular Star Cluster, 33.9 kilo light-years away.
It has a radius of about 90 light-years.






Messier 51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy, about 23 megalight-years (23 million light-years) away.
The radius of this sucker is about 38,000 light-years across. Its mass is estimated to be about 160 billion solar masses (that is, 160 billion times the mass of our Sun).








Messier 81 - Bode's Galaxy, about 11.8 megalight-years away. If you look up at the night sky, it appears as a "star" in the constellation Ursa Major.






Messier 101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy, about 27 megalight-years away. This one has a radius of about 85,000 light-years, making it nearly twice the size of the Milky Way.

Une autre semaine est passée...

Bonjour!!
Another week and some days have gone by, so I have lots of updates!
Last Friday all of the Paris programs went on an excursion to the Loire valley (sort of central France, about a two hour drive south of Paris) to visit two châteaux: Blois and Chambord.

First we had a guided tour through the Château Blois, which has four wings encircling a courtyard. The oldest section was built in the 13th century, one wing was built in the 15th century by Louis XII, one in the 16th century by François I, and the last wing built in the 17th century by Gaston d'Orléans, who was Louis XIII's brother.
This is the courtyard:



Notice the staircase, which was highly ornamented and jutted out from the building so that when the king was residing at the Château, everyone could see him as he moved from floor to floor.

Excursions like this have been a pretty big reminder that I didn't learn anything in AP European History in high school. Or at least that I had retained very little information.
Apparently, the French court was nomadic through the Middle Ages and the French Renaissance. This is mainly because the monarchy wasn't powerful enough to be able to rule from one city, so the king had to move around and take his court of thousands with him. This is the reason there are so many Châteaux scattered throughout France, so the King had lots of seats from which to rule.

Here is the Salamander, which was the emblem of François I:



Salamanders were believed to be able to live in flames and to swallow them. Also look how cool the ceiling is. The whole château was incredibly colorful and ornamented like that on the inside.

Here's the Porcupine emblem of Louis XII:



This is the oldest and coldest part of the Château, the Medieval room:

Apparently there have been a few movies filmed here over the years. Nothing that I had heard of. But, one remnant of a film shoot is the newest thing in the entire château, this throne:

Tourists were encouraged to do whatever they want to the throne, said my snarky tour guide, since it was obviously of no historical value.

After lunch, we hopped back in the bus to go to Château Chambord. This is the type of castle that ends up being the subject of those 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles:


Incredibly cool from the outside, pretty sparse on the inside. The center of the castle is a double-helix spiral staircase, and off of each landing is a stone room that leads to more rooms and more rooms, many of which are empty and undecorated. Very easy to get lost.
Here's a nice view of the "backyard" :

(That's John, a kid in the Math program this quarter. He's also in my French class.)

And so ends a nice day in the Loire Valley.

The next day I went to the Musée d'Orsay with a few friends:

Apparently, it used to be a train station before it was converted to a museum in the 1980's.
My favorite exhibit was about French Art Nouveau furniture and décor.
Seriously.
Look at this dining room:
Or this couch:
This couch was actually designed by Hector Guimard, who also designed all of the Paris Métro signs that are so iconic:


A few other things of note:
One evening, I was trying to hail a cab home with a couple friends. There were plenty of cabs, but they all had fares already. While waiting at the corner, a girl walks up to us and starts a conversation. Her name is Élaine, and from what I could gather of her poor English and rapid French, she is a novelist, and she has a meeting with her publishers coming up but nothing to show them. So, she's out on the streets of Paris, drunk, looking for stories. She told us she'd help us hail a cab if we just talked to her for a few minutes. By "help hail a cab," she apparently meant running into the middle of the street and waving her arms at oncoming traffic. I feared for her life, but fortunately nothing happened.
She asked me if I was Parisienne, telling me that I spoke with no American accent.
I mean, this is just not true, but it was nice to hear nonetheless. Drunken compliments from strangers are still compliments.

I still love my Astro class. We have remote access to a private observatory in Sonoma, California and I've been taking images in class for my final project. I'll post a few once I accumulate some good ones and add color. It is SO much fun. And I don't mean I've just been taking pictures of Mars or things "close to home," but entire galaxies and things that are well beyond the Milky Way. It's awesome.

My mom requested info about the food, so this section is for you Mom :)
Yes, food is expensive. But just like anywhere, it just takes some searching to find affordable (and delicious) places to eat.

The day we were in the Loire Valley, we had lunch at an expensive restaurant (paid for by the University) near Château Blois. As it was Friday in a Catholic country, and still during Lent, all of the courses were fish. But hey, I love fish, so I was happy. The first course was a small fillet of raw salmon on an unsweetened waffle, served with some sort of dill sauce. The main course was a baked white fish in a cream sauce with rice and spinach and nuts that I think were filberts. Very yum. Dessert was first a plate of fresh citrus fruit (grapefruit, tangerines, blood oranges) and a small scoop of a fruity sorbet. Then they gave each table another plate full of sweetness: macaroons and little cakes and meringues and candies and it was actually just too much.

Down the street from the Cité (where I live), there's this great little place called Planet Food that sells Greek sandwiches (pitas) stuffed with meat and with a side of fries for €4.00-€6.00 depending on the meat you get. They are DELICIOUS and completely filling.

Crêpes are delicious anywhere, anytime. A non-dessert crêpe is usually called a Galette, and they come stuffed with..almost anything. Potatoes-carmelized onions-Bacon-Swiss. Tomatoes-Basil-Mozzarella. It's hard to go wrong.
And dessert crêpes? I'm in heaven. Fruit. Nutella on everything. Cream. I'm drooling just typing this.

Lots of bread. So much bread. Bread everywhere. Fortunately, my diet has been mostly carbs for years anyway, and now it's just part of the lifestyle.

Fortunately, grocery shopping is pretty cheap. It's very easy to get good, fresh ingredients inexpensively. I keep my room stocked with usually some granola, some sandwich ingredients, and maybe fruit or something. Wine is also very cheap (although not actually cheaper than water, which is a popular misconception. Well, maybe it's cheaper if you compare the cheapest wine to the most expensive water, but in general, no).