si il ____ , je ferai grève !

I arrived in Paris last night, a day ahead of schedule, to meet Melissa, my former suitemate and close friend from DePaul. She's spending a semester in London and we picked Paris as a halfway point.

Like I said, I was supposed to leave today but took the last train out of Bordeaux last night because today the SNCF, the national train company, was striking, along with transportation workers nationwide. I was afraid that I would encounter problems today with the Metro, so I went ahead and took a cab to my Montmartre with my only major plans for today consisting of doing a load of laundry and switching hostels before Melissa's arrival with her two London roommates. It turns out that the Metro is simply fuctioning at reduced frequency, so it really isn't as earth shattering as everyone predicted.

I woke up this morning and walked around the neighborhood before checking out of the Square Calaincourt Hostel with my bag full of dirty clothes. I tracked down a laverie to wash my clothes, and read. I've been working on Les Misérables, Part I, 500 pages for the past two months, often putting it down to read something else.

Then I checked into the Montclair Montmartre Hostel, unpacked a bit, and set out to find food. I soon found a really charming café.(This is Paris, after all.) While I was eating my baguette, paté, prosciutto, cornichons and cheese, a flirtatious little boy spied on me through the slats in the back of his chair. After his father urged him to come over to my table and talk to me, we had a lovely chat. I learned that he was English, four years old, and lives in Paris. As I left him to eat his croque monsieur (a grilled ham and cheese sandwich) with his father, the little boy bashfully touched my arm and then smiled, looking away. It made me really how much I miss being with children of his age.

Soon Ida, one of Melissa's roommates who arrived in Paris this morning, will be back at the hostel and we'll leave to pick up Melissa and her other roommate, whose name I can't remember, at the Gare du Nord. Plans for tonight include a baguette, cheese, and a [some] bottle[s] of wine, and a trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower. In all of the times I've been to Paris, I've never been to the top. This is partially the result of my terrible fear of heights, which I hopefully can conquer tonight in the spirit of adventure.