And the second worst thing about traveling is the unpacking. It's worse even than packing.

Despite all crap going on here in the U.S., it's nice to be back home. Paris is beautiful, but it's just so full of people. Whenever you go out, anywhere, to a store, to a restaurant, and especially on the métro, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of people pressing in on you from all sides. I suppose it's a consequence of growing up in America, but I like my space. Even though I live in a big city, I never feel crowded here like I did in Paris. I can walk the half-mile or so from my apartment to campus and not cross paths with a single other person. I like the feeling of coming in to my office during spring break and knowing I'm the only one in the entire building. I'm astonished when I look around my apartment and realize that our entire deux pièces in Paris could fit into my living room here, and the rent was almost half as much again.

Best of all is being able to drive my car again. Public transportation in Paris is amazingly good--it puts the CTA to shame--but I love the absolute solitude and the complete authority I have in my car. I'm in my own little world, completely isolated from everybody else trying to get somewhere, and I decide exactly where I'm going to go and how to get there.

Isolationism? Yeah, that's an American tendency.

I'll be leaving tomorrow at a really ungodly hour, so no more updates until I'm back on American soil.

The worst thing about traveling to/from France is the actual traveling.

But to end this entry happily, I finally remembered what the six-digit number that was bothering me weeks and weeks ago is--it's my Hyde Park Co-op Market membership number. Yay, and just in time to go back there and use it to get my five percent member discount!

Okay, I can accept the fact that the French like to make out in public; it's simply a cultural difference. And if I sit down in the metro next to a couple where the girl is actually sitting on the guy's lap, and they start smooching really noisily, even if it was the only available seat left on the train, that's a conscious choice I made, right? But when the guy takes out an enormous Swiss Army knife, opens it to the largest blade, and starts saying, "It'll be so easy, I'll do this [demonstrating the motion] and I'll bleed him like a pig" over and over again, then that's just disturbing.

I miss NPR. I miss WBEZ Chicago. I miss Carl Kasell and Nina Totenberg and Daniel Schorr, Lisa Labuz and Steve Shadley.

The only radio station we can get in our apartment here is Latina, "la radio officielle de la fiesta." Which is fine--I've gotten used to hearing Roberto in the morning inviting me to win concert tickets and J.Lo DVDs by sending him a text message. But since I started listening to Latina and stopped listening to All Things Considered, I have no idea what's happening anywhere outside Latin America, and even then I don't always catch what Felipe is saying. I believe the latest news there is that Shakira has spoken out in favor of the government (i.e., against the FARC) in Colombia.

And what about this "freedom fries" business? Isn't this about the stupidest thing you've heard in a long time? Besides, everybody knows that, like Smurfs and Tintin, so-called "French" fries really come from Belgium.

All right, something mysterious is happening with my web server back over in the U.S., so anybody who wanted to see all my beautiful photographs (including those inserted into my previous LJ entries) will have to wait until Orion has finished working his magic (I think the pages are being moved...um...somewhere) to see them again.

I can't stop talking to people about this: we went to the ballet at the Opéra Garnier last night. I won't say much about the dancing, except that it was very weird. (Modern.) The first piece was weird and kinda boring, the second piece was also weird, but in an entertaining way. But the costumes in the first piece were great. Sometimes the women were in floaty things, and then after a bit some were wearing tiny white tube tops (really tiny, more like a bandeau top) and hot pants (also white). Seeing women doing ballet in tube tops and hot pants almost made it interesting.

The men's costumes were even better, 'cause they were also wearing tube tops and hot pants. Except that their costumes were black and the tube tops weren't normal tube tops. A normal tube top is made to cover the breasts and leave the torso bare, right? These tube tops started at the waist and went up, covering the torso but stopping a few inches below the nipples. It was astonishing seeing all these men balleting around with their nipples showing. Maybe I just don't watch enough modern dance.

Finally, everybody's seen this, right? Well, go watch it again. (With a nod to Paul.)

Well, that's two bits of wordplay that I never would have thought up. Granted, French isn't my native language, but the word "bus" is the same in English, so...

Anyway, that pretty much expresses the sentiment in France toward the Bush-Iraq thing. I was in the métro yesterday, across from a boy of maybe 8 or 10, with his small brother and his mother; and suddenly he said, very solemnly, "À mon avis, vaut mieux se rapprocher." He was probably referring to the crowded conditions in the train, but I couldn't help thinking that the kid had a good point.

1. I sent a postcard today to a friend of mine back in the U.S. That seems like such an archaic thing to do. (But it was a lovely postcard of a sketch Salvador Dalì made of Freud shortly before Freud's death, that we got at the Freud house in London. Freud's forehead is disproportionately huge in the sketch; after he'd finished it Dalì refused to show it to Freud because he thought the enormous head too obviously reflected Freud's proximity to death.) Anyway, it was pretty much by necessity since I'm too cheap to telephone overseas and--astonishingly enough--she has a cell phone and a pager, but no email. Even my parents have email! (Well, and they also have cell phones.) I'm still resisting getting a cell phone--my friend feels like it's a courtesy to her friends that she's always available to them, so it's for their convenience and not her own, and that's a sweet way of thinking of it, but I just don't want to be available to everyone I know all the time.

2. We went to an Asian supermarket yesterday and I got some fresh lychees. I don't think I've had any good fresh lychees since the last time I was in Paris. The ones I've had in the U.S. always seem dry and not very tasty. But these have been just about perfect: marvelously sweet, with an edge of tartness, and so juicy that you have to eat them over the trash can--or the sink, if you prefer.

3. One of my dearest friends from high school is shipping out to the war this week. I hope he doesn't get killed.

I was on the train today and a man came in, as they sometimes do, to ask people for money or restaurant tickets. He worked his way along to the section I was in and the man next to me reached out and handed him a 10-euro bill. I was surprised by his generosity, as I think most of the other people nearby were. And the man who'd received these ten euros started feeling the bill and examining it to make sure it wasn't counterfeit. The man who'd given it sort of laughed and said that it was real, at least he hoped so. But the homeless man's action seemed very strange to me; rather ungracious. It's probable that he'd never been handed a 10-euro bill like that before. I suppose then one could say he was justified in being suspicious, but to me it seemed unkind for him to show his suspicion so openly in the face of the kindness he'd received.

Oh, what a very excellent show. A few more photos at the same place I put the others, and scans of all four setlists.

I'd found out that the capacity of the place the show was at, La Boule Noire, is only about 200, so I figured I didn't need to be so very early, but, since I have that American concert-goer mindset, I still arrived too early. There wasn't a line or anybody outside waiting, so I went around to try the door, which was locked. Then this guy walking along toward me eating a sandwich shook his head and pointed at another door a little further down and said (in English) "That one." He looks familiar, I thought, isn't that the guy who played Q on Star Trek: the Next Generation? And then, very startled, I said, "Jonathan?"

He just said "yep" and we both went inside, but it wasn't open to the public yet, so I left and trotted up around the Sacré-Coeur for a few minutes. When I was finally able to go in I sat down to wait (there were still very few people there) and after a bit Jonathan came out again and saw me and came over and started talking to me.

It was a very strange experience. I don't usually want to try to talk to bands I've come to see, because I really don't know what I could possibly say; so I wasn't trying to get Jonathan's attention or anything, he just came up to me, and he was really nice. He asked me what I was doing in Paris, and I told him I'm a student of French, and at that point he started talking to me in French. This put me into a serious pickle because I couldn't decide whether I should call him "tu" or "vous." I mean, I felt sure he wouldn't have been offended if I'd called him "tu," but then he's rather older than me and after all we're complete strangers, so I was thinking maybe it would be better to call him "vous"--and so while I was struggling with that irrelevant question I was completely unable to answer anything that he said to me because I couldn't speak directly back to him. Luckily he switched back to English, and then he went away, and I was relieved of the anxiety of trying to talk with him as if he were a normal person and not a member of a band that I admire immensely.

I think the crowd was a little more active than the one in London, but it was hard to tell because I was right in the front and so couldn't really see the hundred or so other people who were there. There was a French couple next to me, perhaps in their 40s, and whenever I went (in my American way) "whoo!" the lady would laugh. Not like she was being mean, she was just amused. I like to think that our American "whoo" was a sound she had never heard before. But at the end of the show, when the band had gone offstage and we were waiting for the encore, she started doing it too, first kind of timidly, and then later in a full-throated, enthusiastic, throughly American fashion, and I felt pleased.

Is it fair that Germany gets six Camper Van Beethoven shows and France only one? I think not.

I was intrigued by this convenient ready-to-eat flan (in individual portions) at the supermarket, so we bought a set of four flans. Each flan is cleverly packaged with a little tab on the bottom (it becomes the top when you turn it over) that you pull off to let air in, so the caramel sauce runs beautifully down over the custard. It's not bad--there is a bit of that pre-packaged taste, but since we don't have an oven it's as close as we can get to home-made.

Anyway, the name of this dessert is "Flanby," but I keep calling them "Flansy." Not always entirely by accident.

This is my second entry in a row on food. I feel like I could write about food every single day. Ask me about my trip to La Maison du chocolat...yum.