blue white and red

I have this friend from Guinea, Ian, who decided to visit his family in France after the program shut down, and we'd been talking about maybe meeting up sometime somewhere....until I decided ok enough of that lets do it! So now I'm in Paris :)

I've been here 2 1/2 days so far and it's all the frenchy experience I could have hoped for. The first day I wanted to hit up something big and famous so we went to the Sacre Cour, giant white dome of a church perched on a hill looking over the whole city. After climbing up a couple dozen flights of stairs (man for a mostly flat city there are sure a lot of stairs here...) we got to the top for a glorious view of the city, ancient famous buildings poking their spires up wherever I looked. Then a group of musicians set up and started playing twangy french music so Ian and I just sat on the steps and watched them play against a backdrop of the entire city of Paris...nice.

Today we went to meet up with Monique and Lise, Ian's aunt and cousin, at a rally for Segelene Royale. Well not so much a rally as an event where they were handing out free drinks and crackers. We pushed through the cheerful crowd (I think they'd already been handing out free drinks for a while) to get our cups of wine and sangria. Some guy walked up to us and said "I love you, and I love you, and I love you" pointing at each of us in turn. I asked "what about that guy?" he turned around with a tearfully joyful smile and cried "I love him too!" There was an old man in straw hat, red sweater and bow tie walking around playing french music on an accordian and giving everyone a nod and a smile as he passed by, and another guy holding up a sign that said "Sarkozy's policies are full of [large pile of poo]" and carrying a little fluffy dog in a sling. I like french lefites, tehy're fun! Too bad Sarkozy won, otherwise it would have been a great party in the streets tonight.