Symphonie, et voyages, fantastique(s)

Currently sitting at an internet cafe in the Latin Quarter, right next to the vegetarian restaurant where we ate last night. A was happy to be able to choose from a menu without skirting 800 different kinds of chicken and beef, though we did have a false start to our dining adventure: for future reference, "faux-filet" does NOT mean "imitation filet", but rather, sirloin. A ha.

Our trip to Aix ended in style: we found 25 euro tickets to see the London Symphony Orchestra play three works by Berlioz, as one of the features of the month-long music festival that we discovered from our guidebooks. I could not actually see the orchestra play for the first half, based on my seat, but I enjoyed listening and going through the program, circling new vocabulary words and trying out various conjugations of the unusal verb tenses I saw. Not only do the French employ the subjunctive, a strange enough situation for Americans, but also a tense called the "passe simple," which is used in place of the "passe compose" when writing a formal document. It has been a shock to my system to realize that while I have a lot of vocabulary in place, I am wrecking up even the regular verb tenses, to say nothing of the complex ones. The single good thing I can see about A flying home in two days is that I will be forced to speak even more French, and will hope to feel more confident by the time J arrives.

From Aix, we took two commuter trains (no reservation required!) to Grenoble, where I studied for 4 months about 5 years ago. We stayed at the fairly luxurious Hotel de l'Europe, where the sheets smelled the same as in my memory; hiked up the Bastille, where they've installed a contemporary art gallery; ate on Quai Perriere, where I was pleased to see that dozens of pizza shops still exist, side by side; and discovered that Neptune Cafe, my old haunt, has shut down its computers for the last time. Before leaving yesterday, we went to the Museum of the Resistance and Deportation, which chronicles the resistance effort in the Isere Valley. The entire 24 hours felt like a trip down memory lane, and I pointed out shops, cafes, streets, even tramcars with fondness.

Now we are in Paris, for the last leg of A's trip. After meatlessly dining last night, we strolled across the bridges connecting the banks to the islands, and found ourselves in the middle of a very choreographed show by an endearing street artist, which he brought to a close by saying, "If you give me 5 euros, I will go home happy. If you give me 10 euros, I will go home very happy. But if you give me 50 euros? I will go home with YOU." His hat was overflowing by the time we left.