Lost my ticket for The Return of the King. It'll turn up somewhere.

Otherwise I'll have to use my still-doubtful German-language skills to explain my situation at the theater.

In which case I hope that the employee in the box office lacks the typical German sense of protocol. I just don't want to have to buy another ticket.

On the other hand, I shouldn't have lost mine in the first place.

So then. I suppose it's time for a tedious description of my weekend. It's a very long description, and if you think your time is better spent, you're right.

That said, I'm writing it anyways, before I forget every tedious detail.

The train ride lasted eight hours, and for five of those hours the young Frenchman sitting behind me was humming/singing along to crappy-French-rap (or "frap"). It's possibly the worst music in the world.

The point here, oddly enough, is not that all the French music I heard this weekend sucked to an amazing degree. It's that, fully expecting to find the typical Frenchman lightyears removed from traditional stereotypes (like "French people are rude"), I found those stereotypes confirmed time and time again.

It could be that I was so obviously a tourist, or it could have been that I was in Paris, a huge city with a typically-metropolitan sense of entitlement and a large eclectic population in which all stereotypes eventually appear. Whatever.

After The Politician and I had settled into our room (a small affair with a sink, bunkbeds, and some unidentifiable piece of plumbing which I assume is for washing one's feet), we hit the town.

Paris is closer to Prague than London (pretentious sentences seem to be the rule today… my apologies) as far as my (untenable) "sense" of the city in concerned. It's laid out for walking and has the usual touristy shops in narrow streets, although these shops tended to sell food and not tacky crap.

I'm satisfied with our sight-seeing; I know we didn't see everything there is to see (the catacombs, for example, would have been interesting) but we saw everything that I would have regretted not seeing. We walked past the Arch de Triumph, the Eiffel Tower, and what I assume was the U.N. Headquarters.

The Modern Art Musuem on the fourth and fifth floors of the Centre Pompidou (a big glass building that looks like a huge hamster terrarium, complete with tubing) was the best of all the sights. They had works by Ernst and Magritte and Dali, strange artists who, I've gradually decided, are some of my favorites.

They also had an all-blue painting, number 11 in a series of works showcasing International Klein Blue (the Tate Modern in London has an identical painting with a different number).

Once again, I came under fire from The Politician for defending a color. Conceptual art in general annoys me, to be honest.

The Rodin museum, which as you might or might not guess is devoted to the sculptures of Rodin (The Gates of Hell, The Thinker…) was somewhat cool. The Politician has different taste in art than I do and I'm glad he dragged me there.

The Louvre, on the other hand, was not so hot. I understand that it's a good museum, but the works were too old for me. Also, the hordes of mostly-japanese tourists fetishistically photographing the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo made me a bit queasy.

Which brings me to Sunday night, not exactly your first clue that I'm not following a direct chronology. The Politician and I had a candlelit dinner for two at a nice restaurant and talked about our very separate futures. Cut to me, ordering the peppercorn steak because I don't buy/eat meat in Germany.

Cut to the next night, after our talk of founding a moderate newspaper at Lawrence but before the people down the hall started playing loud frap and got in a fight with some guy who would rather sleep.

I don't think I've ever had food-poisoning before. Never order a "medium" steak in Paris, or anywhere. Always get "well."

I always get "well", actually. I don't know why I said "medium". Nevertheless, I was sick and cold for prettymuch the whole day on Monday, and thus couldn't enjoy The Louvre or Sainte-Chapelle. We ran into some random Lawrentians at Sainte-Chapelle, which was odd.

We saw another church, of course. Notre-Dame was cool mostly because of the game Timesplitters 2, which Jonas bought and I played last year. There's a level set in the Notre-Dame and I was able to recognize most of the building (especially the stained-glass windows, which you have to break in a minigame) from the game. I felt quite cultured.

When we weren't looking at art and monuments we were wandering around town. We bought baguettes and panini and crepes (I spotted all the expected French stereotypes, but my search for certain stereotypical French dishes (read: frog legs) was unsuccessful) and had wine with dinner the first night, when we still felt like we had money.

One night (they've already blended together) we went to the Latin quarter, south of the Seine (I think I spotted where they filmed the key-throwing scene in the movie version of Les Miserables) and had a round at a bar with a live band.

As we walked in, three televisions showed Saddam Hussein, captured, with the helpful subtitle "Saddam Captured" in case it wasn't clear already. We learned that he was hiding in a hidey-hole with some guns and money and rats…

And then the bartender turned the television off, so people would pay attention to the band. I prefer pubs without bands, I think. But that was incredible.

I always wonder, when I'm separated from my usual sources of news (The Daily Show, A.L. Daily, campus gossip…) if something really incredible, unbelievable, has happened in my absence.

This was best stated by Flo, my old foreign exchange student, in the following imaginary scenario:

Airline Person: Where would you like to go?
Our Bold Hero: New York.
Airline Person: You want to go where?!?

In any case, we couldn't find out any more until The Politician bought a paper at the train station. I thought he was dead. Good for "us."

We also went to the Moulin Rouge, in Montremarte (an area north of the Seine which, I suspect, I can neither spell nor pronounce correctly). Just to the Moulin Rouge, not inside, that costs at least $200. Also, the hordes of tourists were there, and we were sick of them.

The Moulin Rouge is in a red-light district, and we were accosted by those guys on the sidewalks outside of clubs (though they weren't wearing huge placards, which was too bad). It was very seedy.

All in all, I think we got the whole Paris experience, all the high and low culture. Now to hustle over the library before I waste any more time.