April 7, 2011 part deux

I have blisters galore after all the walking we did today. I probably should have worn my sneakers again, but a) they didn’t look as cute with my outfit, and b) I thought my boots would be fine. But no. Admittedly, I may not have gotten such horrendous blisters if we hadn’t gotten lost looking for the bookstore. Paris streets are horrible… The street the bookstore is on literally split into to streets, one on either side of a park, and there were no obvious signs dictating that that happened.
But we found it eventually, and I got five books – two for me, and three as gifts. The two for me are the fifth Harry Potter book (which is probably my favorite out of all of them, though it’s hard to say) with the European cover, plus in paperback, which makes it easier to carry around, and one that I can’t remember the name of and I am far too lazy to get up and look in the bag because that means walking on my aching feet.
We didn’t get out of the house until about quarter to noon – Patricia was not very receptive when I went in to wake her up. (Although apparently Francesca would have been… Weird.)
Other notable sights of today were the Eiffel tower and Notre Dame. The – I guess you would call them gypsies, though that always brings up images of women in vibrant colored skirts and bells and things, and these were all men – gypsies were plentiful there. And then there were girls pretending to be deaf to try and get us to sign something, though what good that would have done I don’t know, since we’re not citizens. But the real sights were not the Eiffel tower – no, in fact, it was the boy (I think he was probably like nine or ten, Francesca insists that he was sixteen or older) who decided to strip naked and go swimming in the water in front of/behind the tower, and then the car that had been backed up between two posts onto the sidewalk, but couldn’t get out again. (The mirrors were hanging by the sides, to give you an idea of how close together the posts were.) From the Eiffel tower we went looking for the bookstore, and after that, Notre Dame.
And actually, another funny thing happened at Notre Dame. Patricia went up to pray, and Francesca went to “explore” and I sat. Because churches are not my thing, plus this was towards the end of our day so my feet were killing me. So Patricia does her thing, and then comes back to where I’m sitting, and asks me where Francesca is. I shrug. About five minutes later, Francesca walks up to us, trying not to laugh. (It should be known that Mass was starting as this was all transpiring.) As it turns out, somehow she had gotten back to where the priests lie in wait for the music to start so they can enter, and ended up following them out onto the altar while Mass was going on, before making her way up the aisle to us.