Attempting To Assimilate

As I strive to avoid walking around Paris with the proverbial "AMERICAN" tattoo on my forehead, I'm discovering some interesting cultural snippets. These are creating some moments during which I appear to have much lower than average intelligence or are somehow otherwise mentally impaired. My mom having told me I could join a gym in Paris, I made my way over to one I found on google a few days ago. I had no problem finding its location thanks to the sweet map the program director gave us the first day, but I was having significant trouble entering the building. No matter how much I pushed or pulled, the door just wouldn't budge. My first inclination was that the door was locked, but I found this to be highly odd seeing as the hours were posted really clearly on the door and it was supposed to be open. There was a keypad with a bunch of numbers and a conspicuously large button on it next to the door, but I couldn't conceive that one would need a code to enter a public building, so I just kind of stood and stared at the door with this really painfully confused look on my face. About a minute later, a little boy walked by with his mother. He was a few feet behind her when he saw how baffled I was by the door dilemma. He paused, looked at me, looked at the door, pushed the big button, and ran away. The door clicked and I could push it open. I have since found this apparatus on many public doors. Apparently, it is the French way to push a button before you can open a door.

Now that I know things like that, I'm beginning to feel a little more at home. The metro is full of street performers, kind of like the New York subway, but unlike the generally talented street performers of the New York Subway, these are of varying degrees of ability. There is one violinist in particular who plays at the metro stop by my apartment every day starting at about 7 or 8 pm and going until midnight-ish. I cannot for the life of be discern whether this person is male or female, but I do know that it is really really bad at playing the violin. I've named it Jan. It seemed like a fitting name when I thought of it.

The metro closes at 2 am on weekends here, kind of like in DC, although if the metro closes in DC it's not that big a deal to walk or take a cab. Cabs are ludicrously expensive here and the city is far too big to walk, so you have to make sure you're pretty much done by 2 am unless you're going to commit to 5:30 am when it reopens. I learned this the hard way on Friday night when I got on one of the last trains on the 2 line. I live on the 1 line, and I had to make a transfer near the Arc de Triomphe. I was several stops away when the train stopped, and a voice came on the loudspeaker. To summarize, it basically said that someone had fallen onto the tracks at the next stop and that we would need to be patient while they rectified the situation. Needless to say, by the time I made it to my transfer, the last 1 line train had already left. I had to walk about 20 blocks all by myself at 2 in the morning. Hopefully that will be the last time I'll have to do that.

That's about all the summary I have for now. Look forward to a report on some sort of strike I've heard about in passing as well as what should be an interesting dinner at my program director's house this Friday...