Day 13

I've reached the half way mark of my class. 13 days left walking around with a group of 44 students, blocking sidewalks, metro entrances, and overwhelming street venders. Our professor tries to help us not stick out as american tourists, but the size of our group alone gives away our status.

Today we took a shorter walk around the 1st and 4th arrondissement, stopping at the Pompidou (museum of modern art), Stravinski fountain, Nicolas Flamel's house, and various towers that the pilgrims had to check into at when migrating to Paris. We also stopped at a wine shop owned by one of my professor's friends, who happens to look just like Ollivander from the Harry Potter movies. 

This is me at the fountain. It's full of sculptures by the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who is also the woman who did the Sun God sculpture at UCSD.

Nicolas Flamel was an alchemist and is the only person to have written about the philosopher's stone, which is said to be an elixir of life and have the capabilities of turning metals into gold. But if you've read Harry Potter you'd know that already :) You'd also know that Dumbledore did research with Flamel.

So here I am standing in the doorway that Nicolas Flamel and Dumbledore walked through. The building is now a French restaurant that I hear has fantastic food.

We took a walking break for some ice cream. I was standing across the street waiting for the line to go down and my professor walked up to me and handed me a 5 Euro and said if I got him a chocolate ice cream he'd pay for mine. What a nice guy, how could I pass that up!?  I got pistachio and chocolate swirl.

Now I have one complaint about Paris and it is this:

Do you see all those poles that are about 3 and a half feet tall? They are all over the sidewalks and if you're not paying attention you will walk right into them and they HURT! What's worse is when I bang my elbow or funny bone on them. So many kids in our group walk right into these things and they are perfect crotch height so I feel really bad when the guys walk into them...