Paris: day and night

Last weekend was exceptionally fun because it was another weekend of exploratory adventures. I went to some new places and found cool stuff, and went to some old places and found new stuff. That happens a lot in Paris.. just when you're starting to feel familiar with an area, you discover a whole new corner of it and get that feeling of a brand new experience all over again. For example, last Friday I went to Montmartre with some friends again. I've been there several times, mostly to the largely populated touristy areas. We walked up the hill to the top, and looked at the view of the city (old news). But one of my friends wanted to keep going up the hill - past the touristy spots. We were looking for the Musée Montmartre, which is kind of on a side street hidden from the crowds. At the top of the hill, you can see a fabulous view of the other side of the city - the side hidden in the shadows of the hill. From this same spot, you see the backside of Sacre Coeur Cathedral (which was interesting in itself because when you move away from the façade, you can see the cracks going down the side and lines in the design). It suddenly hit me that I'm not really a tourist anymore.. I'm kind of a longstay visitor.

Also on Friday, we went to the Latin Quarter for dinner and drinks. One thing I'm starting to like about restaurants here (despite the prices) is that even at expensive places you can find a cheaper menu. Most places have a menu at 10euro, 15euro, and 20euro. Each menu (here, menu means something like a 3-course meal) comes with an appetizer, and entree, and a dessert - so in all, it's not a terrible price for a meal. On Friday night we found just such a restaurant. The highlight was the chocolate mousse for dessert. Afterwards, we walked to a bar (although here, bars are called cafés) that had some live guitar music. They also had awesome raspberry beer! It was amazing..

On Saturday, I discovered a movie theater near my school and watched Milk with my friends. All the San Francisco scenes made me kind of homesick though.. That night, we had plans to track down this jazz club in the Latin Quarter. So again, we headed over to Saint-Michel and wandered past the tourist-packed streets and into a quieter alley-way. The jazz bar is kind of a hole-in-the-wall - called The Guillotine. The interior was all classic and original stonework very reminiscent of the Revolution years, I think. The Jazz Cave was downstairs.. literally in the basement of the building. You can look at my pictures to see how it looked. The music was ok.. some weird version of new-age-fusion-jazz. But the drinks were good and we had a fun time.

On Sunday I studied all day for my midterms. Nothing exciting happened, except I realized that I have a lot of split-ends in my hair. But that's another story.

You can see all the pictures here:

Paris days and nights