Living the Bing life

So last week was really something extraordinary. For one, I had a rather valuable package stolen out of my mail. I reported the theft to the police this morning, entirely in French. It was rather exciting. That makes twice in my life that I've made declarations with the French police. I think the last time I did it in English, though...

That sort of put a damper on a couple of days there, but the week in general was pretty cool, and largely funded by the Bings. On Wednesday, they paid for us to go see Les Fables de la Fontaine at La Comedie Francaise, which is the most important and high-brow theater in Paris. We had nice, center, orchestra-level seats too. Very swanky. The play itself was a bit difficult to understand - not only was it in French, but it was in old French and in poetry format. The play was, however, visually beautiful. It felt a bit like being at the ballet.

This weekend, we had our Bing-trip to Provence. The trip was a whirl-wind tour of 4(!) towns in 2 days. We didn't have a lot of free time, unfortunately. There were some beautiful places that I would very much like to spend more time exploring. Cities built into the sides of hills, lavendar fields, ochre cliffs, Roman ruins. It was wonderful. And the air smelled amazing, which was such a nice change. I also saw the Pont d'Avingon, but I did not dance on it because they charge you to go on it. :-(

They did give us plenty of time to eat, however. My guess is that from Friday night through Sunday afternoon the total cost-of-food-per-person came out to about 190 euros ($250 ish). We had 3 or 4 course meals, wines specially picked to go with the food, duck, foie gras, ratatouille, 4+ kinds of fish, lemon meringue, eggplant pate, bruschetta, pain perdu, fresh fig jam, couscous, tiramisu... and the list continues. I came home from that trip with absolutely no room left in my stomach. For the entire trip, I never once had the slightest desire to snack between meals. So much food!

Last Thursday was also the day of la grève in Paris. This meant that almost no metro or regional trains ran all day. However, not all of my classes for that day were canceled, and unlike many Stanford classes, attendance here is mandatory and part of our grade. So off I went to class across town on foot. It took me an hour and forty minutes each way. Luckily it was a lovely day so the walk was actually fairly pleasant most of the time and I saw some parts of Paris I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise. But my legs were sore on Friday!

I will post pictures later... I look a bit like the living dead in most of the pictures off my camera from Provence (I was really tired) so I'm hoping someone will have some better pictures of me.