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When I arrived in France, I carried with me only a few books: my Bible, a couple of reference books on living on France, and a few novels. My intent had been to have a few boxes of books, constituting what I consider my "core" library, shipped to me here. However, as things fell out, I ended up trying to do this just hours before my flight, and I ran into so many problems at the Post Office that I just gave up and had them shipped to my brother instead. (With many thanks to Uncle Arnold for helping with the process and to Little Brother for housing my temporarily orphaned books!)

So, here I am, with hardly any of my own books. The apartment has a bookcase, tiny by my standards, of course, with a modest selection of books, including some in English. I’ve thought about asking my brother to start sending some of my books, but then reconsidered. I’ll only be in this apartment for a few months, and then I’ll have to find a new home. Really, wouldn’t it be better to wait until I’m properly settled before sending for my books? (It’s way traumatic on books to have to settle into new homes: they’re worse than cats that way. Not that books are happy about being mushed into boxes either. But it’s the lesser of two evils.)

No, the answer, it seems, is to build a new and modest library, comprised mainly of books that I can love & leave.

There are several bookstores in Paris that carry English language books, and I’ve visited two of them so far: Librarie Galignani and W.H. Smith, both on the Rue de Rivoli. Disciplining myself strictly, I came away with only two books.

Books are so expensive in France, though: even ordinary paperbacks start at a little over 10€ (about $13-14 at current exchange rates). I did a little online comparison shopping at amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, and amazon.fr, and found that, even with shipping costs added in, amazon.com ended up being least expensive. That may be in part a function of the books I chose, and I’ll continue the comparative shopping routine to be sure. But in the meantime I’ve expanded my local library by another eight books.

There’s also the French missal that I bought, since I don’t know the Mass responses in French, and my French isn’t quite up to the task of following the readings just by listening.

So here I am, barely three weeks into my stay, and I’ve already bought ten (or eleven, if you want to be picky) new books. (I’ve also finished five, including some I brought or found already here, and have three in progress.) And I consider myself justifiably proud of my self-restraint!

I went out again yesterday to see the sights. I walked in a wide arc that took in the Arc de Triomphe:

and ended up at the Eiffel Tower:

It took two hours to get to the Eiffel Tower, and when I got there, I found that the third floor was closed for the day, due to high winds. (And yes, it was indeed seriously windy yesterday.) So, I didn’t bother to go up (‘sides, after all that walking, I was tired!).

Besides the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, I ran across the Lithuanian Embassy and the shop for The Fleuriste du Chocolat (the chocolate florist). There were some amazing bouquets in the window, which combined (real) flowers with flowers created with petals of wrapped candies. These must be seriously popular hostess gifts.

In the past week, I’ve seen Apocalypto and Hollywoodland. These were both listed as "VO" (i.e., subtitled rather than dubbed). Unfortunately, I forgot that, in the case of Apocalypto, the original was Mayan; fortunately, my French was up to the task of following along!

I was actually more impressed with Apocalypto than I expected to be. It was gory, but the gore didn’t have the pornographic glee of Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. It also dragged some, but I got caught up in the story and the fate of the characters.

I wasn’t all that taken by Hollywoodland. Affleck made a valiant effort, and maybe the script was at least partly to blame, but he came across as wooden, and didn’t convey Reeves’s charm. Neither was I convinced by Brody. Diane Lane, on the other hand, was very good, and I liked Spano and DeMunn (who played Strickling and Weissman, respectively).

Well, there’s no point in living in Paris if you’re not going to go see the sights. So, last week, I went out to visit the Louvre. On my way there, I made a detour to see Sainte-Chapelle, which I had never seen before.

The palais de la Cité, where the chapel is located, is now the home for the Paris law courts, so you have to go through security, complete with x-raying bags, to get in to the chapel. They’re doing some renovation, so the exterior is swathed with scaffolding, and the lower chapel is cluttered with tools and drop clothes and the like. (As an aside, I really think they should discount admission when work is going on.) Even without the clutter, the lower chapel, while nice enough, was nothing all that impressive.

The upper chapel, on the other hand, was utterly exquisite. The upper walls are nearly entirely paneled in stained glass in vibrant reds and blues. On a sunny day, it must be dazzling. As it is, I was enthralled.

My next stop was the Louvre. (The last time I had been was before I.M. Pei’s pyramids had been completed.) The immensity of the Louvre still takes my breath away. Try as I might, I simply can not imagine people actually living there: everything is on simply too grand a scale.

I wandered about for a couple of hours, and probably covered less than a quarter of the total museum. But then, I’m not much of a fan of painting, and I was mostly interested in the sculptures and antiquities. Especially my favorite: the Winged Victory:

There is, by the by, a Starbucks in the Louvre. This is just so wrong. Come to think of it, I can’t recall having seen any other Starbucks in Paris (not yet anyway).

The popularity of studio apartments in Paris makes for very space-efficient appliances.

For example, the stove in my kitchen has a dishwasher built in. There’s the range on top, a fairly shallow oven (no roasting turkeys in this oven; I’m not even sure if I could manage a roast chicken, which may account for the popularity of roasted chickens in the butcher shops), and at the bottom, a drawer that opens out as a dishwasher rack. While demonstrating the amenities of the apartment to me, my landlord explained that I can not use the oven and dishwasher at the same time. It’s hard to imagine that this is a problem that would arise often. And in fact, I’ve not yet had occasion to use the dishwasher. Nor have I used the oven all that often, either.

I also have a washing machine at my disposal, which is certainly handy. It’s very cunningly designed. It’s less than 20 inches wide, not even as wide as a one of the cabinets, so it fits quite handily into a corner of the kitchen. It loads from the top, and the drum rotates vertically, rather than horizontally. It doesn’t hold a lot, so I’m needing to do laundry a few times a week. And there’s no dryer: instead, I have a folding rack that I drape damp laundry over. Apparently, the existence of a washing machine but not a dryer is a fairly common arrangement. On sunny days (we’ve had a few recently), I look up sometimes to see people drying laundry on their windowsills.

I also have a towel drying rack in the bathroom. This seems rather an indulgence, but it is nice to have a dry and toasty warm bathmat and towels in the morning.