Sunny!

According to the weather reports, it is supposed to be precipitating every single day for at least the next 10 days.  I've actually seen the sun twice, though, to my surprise.  Once the day I arrived and this morning!  Here is the view from my window, up the street towards the Pont Neuf.  I had to lean out to take it.

I arrived on Saturday morning an hour early.  Normally this would be cause to celebrate, but since it added another hour to the time I had to wait until I could check in to my apartment I was not overly pleased.  My flights were fine.  The last one, from Dulles to Paris was great because I had upgraded to Economy Plus and while regular Economy was packed like a can of sardines, Econ Plus was only half full.  I had someone next to me, but the extra leg room added to the plethora of empty seats added a sense of spaciousness.  

I held of sleeping until my last flight in order to wait until it was really night-time in Paris. 

Mind you, I had gotten up at 3:30 am PST to get ready for my flight and landed in Paris at 8:45 pm PST.  So, I finally fell asleep on my last flight to be awakened after only an hour by the very loud burser yelling last call for duty free goods.  This scared the crap out of my sleeping self and left me awake for the rest of the flight.  Grrr.

I waited for a very long 6 hours and took the train into central Paris to my apartment.  I'm very glad I'm staying in the same place as last time, even though it's tiny, because I already know the neighborhood and I didn't have to wander around figuring out where to go.  Yay!  I got in the apartment and realized the circuit breaker had been turned off, so got everything going and was getting ready to take a shower.  Then I realized that I had also just turned on the water heater.  Went grocery shopping and got my French SIM card instead.  I came home and skyped with M before finally taking a 2 hours nap around 3:30 pm.  At that point, I had been awake for 27 hours with only 1 hour of sleep.  I tried to take a picture of the spectacular bags/black circles under my eyes, but no picture could do them justice.

Saturday night into Sunday morning, I slept for 13 hours.  Granted, I did wake up for a while at 2 am because there was something that sounded like a huge street party outside my window.  I looked out and the entire block was filled with a traffic jam.  It was noisy like when I was here two years ago for the Fête de la musique.  I still don't know what was going on.

Other than that, I went on a walk Sunday afternoon to Notre Dame and the Louvre.  On my way between the two, I stayed on the Right Bank and walked along the Quay looking over the Seine.  At one point, I was pretty much by myself when I heard someone walking behind me.  I turned my head to look at the person (with peripheral vision) and it was a guy coming up rather quickly.  Just after I turned my head, he stopped and started looking across the street.  Shortly thereafter, he was gone.  Weird.  At first I was all, I averted someone trying to steal something (he would have been in for an unpleasant surprise because I only had my umbrella and my keys), but I'm not so sure of that now.  Who knows?  (Note: I was planning on going to the Musée de l'Orangerie, which had been closed for 7 years, and that has been when I've visited Paris lo these many times, so I've never been.  But, waking up at 11:30 am and then slowly moving around, plus the heavy rain and winds made that plan go down the drain.)

Anywho, today is the day when I go to the Bib Nat and have my interview.  I'm tired and feeling a bit woozy, but am okay otherwise.  We'll see how it goes.

Yep, my time here is just filled with excitement.  People reading this are going to wonder why the hell they did.  :)  More boring stories another time!