Paris: Day 3

Arriving at LauriAnne's was a total 180. In a wonderful way.

Upon meeting her and her boyfriend, it was friends at first sight. Much small talk and getting to know you's later, here's what we established:

LauriAnne: High school Spanish Teacher; late 20's; eager cat named Lolita; teeny, tiny apartment; stereotypically French accent and cigarettes; says "mah-mao" when passing by attractive men

Boyfriend (aka "Steven"): Australian, but living in Paris for almost 10 years; early 30's; recent architecture grad currently freelancing and enjoying his sports; translator for LauriAnne when she's feeling overwhelmed by English

After Amy and I did our parts by explaining ourselves (we could almost say each other's lines to the tee), Steven and LauriAnne made dinner reservations for the 4 of us at a little restaurant that specializes in wine, but serves up food that should really be more expensive considering how good it is. People pretty much attend for the wine selection, but come back for the food -- a quintessentially French meal since they were disappointed that we had only eaten their version of a grilled cheese and some curry that Mary Madeleine had made for dinner.

So be proud of us, because we ate fois gras and sausage filled with I don't want to know, and fillet mignon of pork. And be even prouder of us, because we thought it was delicious. Afterwards, we went to another bar for dessert and espresso before calling it a night. It was truly a great night of being out on the town in Paris.

In the morning, Amy and I walked through the Marais neighbohood thinking maybe we would find some shoes to replace the ones that hurt our feet (my birkenstocks, her cole haan nike air flats, go figure it's the 'comfort' shoes that got us...) but no dice. We did end up on the fringes of the city again though so it meant more people watching and eating.

Basically, every conversation we have in France consists of something along the lines of:

"Mmmm, look at that tart/pastry/crepe." (Emphasis on the "mmmm," imagine a very deep guttural noise that no one would recognize as having come from us... very attractive).

or

"You know what sounds good? Crepes. Nutella crepes. How soon until we can get one?" (And then the other tries to come up with a time table that rationalizes the purchase, but also doesn't seem unjust or cruel).

We spend most of our time rationalizing our eating habits. It can be anything from eating our weight in pastries but then saying "Well we didn't have a real breakfast..." or for me, finishing all of Amy's food and then defensively telling myself "Well, I'm bigger than she is" in my head.

I don't know whether it's just that I'm not used to being so active or what, but I'm constantly hungry. It also probably has something to do with a lack of will power, but I'm burning through food like mad. In search of protein that we could afford, we cracked and ate at McDonald's one night because carbs are not cutting it for us, and most meals with real protein are out of our price range unless we starve ourselves for the entire day to save the money for it. All anyone eats here are carbs and then the rich people get the protein. It's no surprise the people revolted against the upper class, they were probably crazy from a lack of meat or poverty stricken after having eaten it.

But, we have lucked out out and found ourselves with hosts who have offered to cook, so Wednesday night LauriAnne opened a bottle of wine and cooked pasta (more carbs, but delicious ones). This expensive city actually ended up being rather affordable for us in some ways. It has helped having a free place to stay since there was so much we wanted to do in Paris. Potentially, we would have had to say no to more things had we not been fortunate enough to stay with new friends who not only offered a bed, but toast and coffee too.

Wednesday night was our last at LauriAnne's. We were both sad to leave her apartment, but also relieved to let her living room return to normal and not feel as though we were imposing.

So couchsurfers.com, here we come. Yes, couchsurfing. I said it.