french food, it's good, but, well, even it can get boring, oh, and a hammam, and paris transit, and, well, random stuff

okay, so here's the thing about french food. it's delicious. it's rich. it's often beautiful.

but it's also a little monotonous. (for me, 'cause, well, i don't eat fish, and we're going to cheap places, 'cause, well, paris is expensive. even cheap places are expensive. i do know that there is a great variety available if you look for it and pay for it. here's the other secret though, i generally don't like most french food, the stuff i like i really like, but it's stuff like, oh, i don't know, steake frites)

i'm the type of person who likes some variety in what they eat. i like different ethnic foods. so, i'm hoping that starting tomorrow we can stop eating in cafes and start eating in indian, african, japanese, chinese etc etc etc restaurants. i anticipate this will not be an issue, since where mum and mark live in rural south of france, there is pretty much no 'ethnic' option, and i think mum is going through withdrawl.

a little update on what we did today... well, lets start with yesterday actually. yesterday my mum and i went to a hammam at the grande mosquée de paris (yep, that's a mosque). there's loads of stuff about hammams on the interweb, but the two articles that brought us there were this from a newsletter, and this from an expat's website. mum described our visit on her blog, so, with this wealth of information, i really don't feel a need to go into it, basically, just that it was amazing, like stepping into another world. it felt like i was in a movie or something. very cool.

but i do bring it up because it does in some way inform today. while in the hammam you cover yourself with this slick soap stuff, then hang out in a room made entirely of marble. you following me so far? well, in the hottest room there are these steps up into the pool, and i wanted to sit on the steps, so i (very very very carefully) started climbing the wide steps (there are only 4 steps or so) and got to the top. where i gently lowered myself down to sit, and promptly slid off. zip. thunk. thunk. thunk. did i mention it was marble? you'd be surprised, i'm sure, at just how little give there is in marble. as a result, all the give had to come from my body. so, well, it did. now i have a big bruise on my ass, and i have whacked myself out of allignment, my hip is all wonky (i need my chiropractor, whaaaaa!). basically, it means a lot of pain, and a big wimp walking (seriously, i'm useless walking right now. *sigh*).

so, today was lots of busses. you know, build your own bus tour. that's the joy of having a carte orange (metro pass), not only it is bound to be cheaper, but you don't hesitate to take a bus for a block or two. anyway, it was pretty cool. we explored a couple of touristy places, like momartre, place des voges (i can't spell these, but i'm tired, i'll fix them later).

tomorrow we're going whole hog tourist, toure eiffel, arc de triomphe, le louvre. we figure we'll do all the really touristy stuff in one day.

oh, i just remembered what else we did today, we tried to go to st. chapell, but there was a huge line up. oh, and yesterday mum and i walked by notre dame and there was a line up to the back of the square (where the metal detector was christmas eve) so we breathed a collective sigh of relief that we had gone when we did.

and now i should get some rest for the big day ahead.