I know - I got hit by a really nasty spam invasion last week, while I was avoiding email in my quest for a peaceful Christmas. Dreamhost, my provider, was forced to disable the comments script due to the load it was putting on the server. I can not blame them in the least. I'm going to be upgrading MT soon and switching over to some sort of authentication-required system for comments in the future, so that I no longer have to deal with spamstorms. But for now - no comments. Sorry!

I was going to write a quick thing about eating at a restaurant next door to where Moliere lived, or about how the French really like their beef rare, but I just spent an hour - and I am not exaggerating - waiting for my check. I asked for it four times - four times! - and NEVER got it. What the hell? I know that French service is legendarily bad, but this was just absurd. I walked out - I did leave something approximating what I think the cost of the meal was, but I didn't want to sit there all goddamn night waiting for some pissant waiter to remember that he wanted to get paid tonight. Honestly, I should have just walked out without paying a cent. Damn, that really irritated me.

Thank you, Google, for letting me translate my subject line and include the appropriate accents! Anyway - still a bit jet lagged, though it's just that sort of stuffed head feeling, so I took it pretty easy so far today. I got moving at around 10:00am, after managing to sleep from around 11pm to 8am (with a 1.5 hour nap around 5pm). I grabbed a croissant from the continental breakfast at my hotel, and went wandering.

Like I said, I'm staying near the Louvre and Notre Dame - 19 Rue du Pont Neuf, more specifically. That puts me a block and a half from the Seine, right at the western tip of Ile de la Cite. So I walked on over there, and then around the island. Notre Dame is much more impressive than I expected - it's huge and gorgeous. However, here I discovered an annoyance at being an English-speaking tourist in France: all the signs are in French. I know, I know, fairly obvious thing to expect, but in Prague, the signs were multilingual almost everywhere. Here? The best I've encountered was at the Museum of the Middle Ages, where the title of each display was translated, but nothing else. Not the end of the world, obviously, but it makes me wish I'd boned up on French more before coming here: my three years of middle school and high school French are, not surprisingly, not good for much more than being able to say "Bonjour" and "Merci" with a decent accent. Which has actually gotten me into trouble as well - at lunch today, the waiter took the fact that I accepted a French menu and asked for a table for one in French to mean that, well, I spoke French. I'm still not entirely sure what he asked me after I finished dessert - I know coffee was mentioned, but there were a lot of other words that I didn't get at all. Ah well.

So yeah, after Notre Dame, I crossed over to the Left Bank and meandered around the Latin Quarter for a couple hours. It reminded me of the Nove Mesto in Prague, and probably similar neighborhoods in every other European city: gobs of restaurants, tourist-targeted boutiques, and the like. More Thai places than I expected, though. I went for French food for lunch - honestly, do you think I'm going to eat Asian food when I've got bonafide French food all around me? After lunch, I went to the aforementioned Museum of the Middle Ages, which is housed in a medieval building and the remains of a Roman-era bath. It was pretty nifty - the highlights for me were the architecture in general, the Roman artifacts, some embroidered silks from the Arab world of the 8th-11th century, and, of course, "The Lady and the Unicorn", the multi-part tapestry from the 15th century that's the museum's main calling-card. It's also the title and basis for Oberlin grad Tracy Chevalier's most recent book - her first was "The Girl with the Pearl Earring." She seems to have developed a thing for writing novels based on works of art. Sort of. Anyway - it was pretty impressive. Gigantic and old, still very vibrant.

I was planning to head down to the Museum of Natural History after that, but realized that I was, well, getting tired. So instead I did bookstores. Shakespeare & Co., famous both for being named after Sylvia Beach's original store, which closed during World War II, and for being the setting for the beginning of "Before Sunset", was not very impressive. Selection was so-so, prices were high. But it did seem to be staffed entirely by cute British girls, so I still give it a thumbs up. Yes, I'm easily swayed by cute British girls. I don't deny this. The Abbey Bookshop, another English language store in the Latin Quarter, was pretty fun - it's tiny, with books strewn all over the place. It took me a while to realize that there was at least some modicum of organization to the place, and even longer to realize that half the shelves were sliding shelves, with new books on the sliding shelves and used books behind them. I picked up a couple battered le Carre novels there, and almost grabbed a copy of Thomas Pynchon's "V", but I've already got "Gravity's Rainbow" with me, and I still haven't finished that - I'm banned from buying any more Pynchon until I actually get that book done.

Oh, forgot to mention - while heading from the museum to the bookstores, I found myself in what seems like the comic book district for Paris. I'm not kidding - like five comic book stores all on the same street. It was kind of odd. I didn't buy anything, but I did browse for a while.

After that, I stumbled on back to the hotel and fell over. Which is where I am now - horizontal on the bed with laptop. I took some pictures today - it was sunny in the morning and Notre Dame does allow flash photography - though not as many as I probably should have. I'm going to be heading out to eat this evening, but other than that, I'm probably done for the day. Tomorrow's going to be busy - I'm heading to Versailles.