John and I have been living in Paris for about a week now, and we're just starting to think of our new apartment as home. We've already made a few forays into various parts of the city, including an art museum (!) (but more on that later), and we manged to find a theater that shows "version originale" for the bigger blockbusters like Spiderman 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean, so we can still enjoy most of the American movies in their original English. After Pablo told us about watching the latest Bond movie in French, we decided that we would be better off seeing big movies in English and save the French for actual French movies--all Pablo had to say to convince us of this was: "Je m'appelle Bond, James Bond." Yikes.
Our neighborhood is very nice and bustling with people, cafe's and brasseries, and despite the persistent cloudy/rainy weather we're enjoying ourselves quite a bit. I don't feel like we've really had a chance to explore our neighborhood quite yet, but tomorrow we'll be hitting up one of our local bars to watch the Champion's League final (soccer), and on Thursday we're going to go out to a restaurant and maybe a club afterward. After that, we're off to Monaco for the weekend for the Grand Prix, which both John and I are really looking forward to!
My only complaint with Paris so far is that everyone speaks English, and I mean everyone. I had to rather stubbornly continue speaking French to a lady who sold me ice cream today, so my new goal is to get so good at French in the next few months to the point where I am not immediately identifiable as an English speaker. Sometimes the locals respond to our French with pleasant surprise and are happy to engage us in French, and yet others seem like they don't want to bother waiting for me to conjugate a verb correctly in the conditional tense. I feel like I must be in the middle somewhere because sometimes I get a compliment that my French is quite good, and then other times they respond in English after the first sentence. While I am extremely thrilled to finally be in Paris, I do miss Montpellier in the sense that knowing English was the exception rather than the rule.
Pics from our week's excursions coming at the end of the week, but I thought for now I'd show you exactly where our apartment is on the map:
75 Rue de Rennes
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