Jen: Free Museum Day!

Every first Sunday of the month is free museum day in Paris!  Today we met with Heidi (the assistant director of the UConn Program) at 10:30 at St Michel station.  I woke up the earliest I have in like a week... I need to work on that.  The museums were really cool- we went to two all together with her and then the group split up and went to different museums.  We saw the prison where Marie Antoinette was held as well as a ridiculously large church.  I could look up the names of these places, but meh.
I also made some pretty cool findings at the third museum that I went to with 3 of the girls.  There was a tombstone which was in hebrew.... which I found way interesting.  It was basically a super catholic museum with tons of statues of Jesus and Mary as well as the Saints and other famous Christian figures.  I'm not sure what the tombstone was doing there or who it belonged to.  It was sort of in the back corner almost behind a curtain where I think they were restoring things... so it wasn't really meant to be on display.   It definitely said something-or-other (it was faded and hard to read) 'bat miriam' ... but that really isn't to helpful or descriptive.  The second awesome finding was upstairs in the same museum.  There was tons of jewelry on display, which clearly I looked at very closely.  One ring had hebrew letters on it... and when I looked at the little description block it said it was a jewish engagement/marriage ring.  The ring came to a point at the top and had 6 different faces on the side- which made it harder to understand what was written on it.  I had to basically move in all different angles to see all the letters.  I was elated when I realized that it said "mazal tov."  Pretty darn cool.  I even went back to look at it again and I saw that it was from Italy in the 1300's I believe.
After that, we were pretty excited to go to starbucks, which is a pretty rare find in Paris.  Not only that it is a starbucks, but that you can get a legit coffee to go- with a disposable cup AND lid.  This is fairly uncommon.  We met Artheur there, who I wrote about a couple times in previous blogs (usually along with Charlele).  This time it was just Artheur.  It was actually a really wonderful afternoon.  We walked with him through the gardens and had some wonderful conversations.  He also is pretty into taking pictures so he was our photographer for the afternoon.  Later, he showed us a pool hall and we sat down for a cup of coffee.  I will probably be WIRED tonight after drinking so much coffee!  At the cafe there was a waiter who was wearing a chai (hebrew for 'life'... it's a jew thing) necklace... I reallllllly wanted to go over and say hi or something... but I was too embarrassed/shy.  I told them that when we return to play pool, we MUST go back to the cafe so I can work up the courage to say hi.  It probably won't happen.
I just got back and took a shower... and decided to blog.  Tonight should be nice as well... time to figure out the clothing situation (and maybe call up the fabulous women to find out how her date went last night)!

Bonsoir : )