I honestly think I might hurl. I bought something tonight to eat for dinner that I thought was a beef sausage. I started cooking it and actually it smelled horrid, like spicy melting plastic, and nothing like a sausage. It also quickly stopped looking like a sausage and started looking like a severed penis. Sorry, boys. Hope that doesn't give you nightmares. But honestly it was really unappealing. In the interest of trying new things, I was determined to give it a chance. The woman I am currently living with (renting from) told me that it is a kind of sausage that "people from the arabic countries eat". That it has chili in it. OK, I thought, that can't be all that bad. But honestly, OMG. I managed to consume one of the two I had opted to eat with my brussel sprouts for dinner. I couldn't even force myself to eat the second. And the other 4 are all going in the trash also. Chalk that €3 loss up to experience. And pray to the almighty baguette that the one I did eat does not get returned to sender.
So .... Saturday I went to try to take advantage of "the soldes". It was a miserable day - snowing bit fat flakes, raining, windy... fun! So we went to this underground shopping mall known as Les Halles. Big box stores type stuff. I snagged a few t-shirts but was so otherwise overwhelmed by the hordes of people that I could not make decisions. It was a zoo. So, it was an experience, fun hanging out with "the americans" (Dene & Jacob) but otherwise pretty fruitless.
Sunday Dene, Jacob, and I went to see the Yann Arthur-Bertrand exhibit at the Grand Palais. I learned that those gilded pillars in one of my photos in Photo Edition 3 is part of the structures of the Grand Palais. Aha! Exciting to connect the dots. The exhibit was amazing. A really remarkable project. Video portraits of 6 million people (hence the name "6 Million Others") from all over the globe. They were all asked the same 18 questions, and then video mantages were created with their answers - grouped by theme. If this exhibit comes your way, I strongly urge you to go see it. I was there for 4 hrs (then they kicked me out because the museum was closing), but easily could have stayed another 4 hrs.
Today was just a ton of reading. Lots and lots of reading. And a lot of snow. There is a "tempet" (I think I have that spelled wrong) hitting france now. This is the second major storm to hit since I arrived. The last one left the southern part of france without electricity for nearly a week. This one has grounded all flights until at least tomorrow afternoon. It is dumping tons of rain on Paris. Fun.
On the housing front - I am going to see the studio apt tomorrow. I will hopefully be moving into it at the end of the week. If that for some odd reason doesn't work out, I have another option that would begin at the end of the month. Though I actually have competition for that one. Telling the woman I am renting from that I am leaving is not going to be easy. She had been very very lax about when and how she wants the rent payment from me, up until now. Now she has decided it must all come right away and that she told me at the beginning that the security deposit is needed now also (actually, she never specified, in my defense). In any case, she is pressing me and I am going to have to tell her tomorrow night/Wednesday morning (depending on what time I get home tomorrow) that I'm not staying. The next week of my life is going to be really really unpleasant, I am sure.
Wish me luck. And let's hope that this be one of the very last installments of the blog that is eaten up by complaining about housing. Although I hear that it is very french to complain a lot. I thought that was an American thing... ;)
a tout le monde de Paris, a plus!
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