Tuesday, Jan 17

wandered the 8th district again in the morning looking for english bookstores - a good few were closed, a few more were apparently nonexistant, we finally found a great one though, so many cool books, much better then a barnes&noble or borders - but english books in france are quite expensive, so we didn't end up getting anything anyway.

studio was neat - all our classes are basically aiming towards the same goal, so i'll probably say studio for every day of class - excellent lecture by ann attali, whose profession is 'urban exploration' through walking. her talk was about flaneurs and situationists - stuff i've studied before, but it was great to have a rehash, and she is an excellent lecturer.

she usually leads walking tours, but she's currently 7 months pregnant, so she went through all the passages with us and sent us on our way, prepared with rather sketchy maps and her verbal description.

our walk was through all the passages (french pronounciation) that apparently riddle the buildings of Paris. They were built around the 1850s as a new way to shop (and stay off Paris's open-sewer streets) and are basically glass-roofed alleyways that became very elegant with store fronts and cafes. we went through passages in a variety of conditions, kind of run down to fabulous elaborate ones nearer the louvre and then out further to some more commercial once in the fabric district, and a final one nearly exclusively full of indian restaurants. The first one actually comes out 50 feet from our front door, and we had taken it home the night before, not knowing that the tour would take us back down it. They were kind of sad places where they weren't vigorously kept up (it was a cloudy day, probably helped) with a lot of antiques and oddities being sold in them.

Probably the most interesting part was getting really lost outside the passages and wandering around Les Halles (lay all if you hear it pronounced) and discovering St. Eustache, a most impressive church. We bought pans for our kitchen finally in the last passage and had a good indian meal. The walk home was a little sketchy, the people in this area were definately in more of a hurry and possibly just less prosperous - our area is friendlier.