Tourist week

Hello everyone,

I seem to have fallen out of the habit of updating! I need to restart, so I shall. What is new in France? A BIT, not so much.

From what is new with me personally: I have a friend from Vancouver staying with me this week, Gloria (find her Travel blog on my blog list). It has been fun doing a lot touristy things here with her. On sunday when she arrived we did a walking tour with NewEurope. The tour is free (donations collected at the end), and good! It is the same tour company that I did my Berlin walking tour with. Then on Monday we went walking through the Marais. The Marais is the Jewish part of Paris (and the Gay part), so we had a bit of a Jewish day. I attempted to have a Jewish day a couple weeks ago, which was a complete failure since it was a Saturday... Shabbat... so everything Jewish was closed. Anyhow, this Monday we had no problems and went around shopping, eating Falafel, ect. My friend's knowledge of Hebrew got us a free Falafel sample too! Language skills come in handy at very random times.

Tuesday (St. Patrick's Day) we went to the ballet in the evening. It was the "Troisieme Symphonie de Mahler". It was at the Opera Bastille, one of the big opera houses in Paris. We arrive at the Opera at 710, and the show was at 730, and we did not have tickets. So, we went to the last minute line up, which only sells tickets 15 min before the show, so we were actually on time! We got great seats (5th row, fairly central), for 15 euros, a great deal. The show was amazing! There were about 70 dancers accompanied by an orchestra and an opera soloist.

Yesterday we went to Versaille, which is fabulous! It is huge, we spent 7 hours walking around and just got the basic stuff visited. With my bus pass here I get free entry, so that was nice. Also, being mid-week and low season we did not experience huge lineups like many do. We took lots of pictures and shall post some here soon. At one point we asked an asian man to take our photo, and after he asked us to take one... but he pulled back the camera and handed it to his friend, he meant to take the photo WITH us, not of him. It was a great day which ended at LaRotisserie, a restaurant in Belleville which is run by a different NGO each night to raise money, the idea is neat, the food was OK, but the company was awesome as I met back up with the people I traveled with to Morocco.

Today has been chill; I went to school and am now catching up on unreplied emails and some homework. The city is on Strike today and there are big manifestations all over town. The past few weeks have been funny in that sense... pretty much all the Universities here are on strike here (not including mine, since it is an Institution and not a public University). However, we now have to present our student cards when entering the building due to apparent thefts (but I am not sure that is the real reason). I bet they lose more money hiring the security guards than they would in stolen goods. Ironically the school got occupied Tuesday afternoon by protestors who came in through a back entrance. I am not exactly sure what that all was about, but they are gone now. Some of my friends at other Universities here have been very affected by the Strikes and I have heard stories of students returning home, since their semester is already as good as a loss with their courses being suspended now for over a month. France is definatly living up to its repupation for having a lot of strikes and protests.