"Enjoy.... the life"

Hey! So right now I'm sitting in the middle of the place des vorges which is a really famous park right next to my apartment known for being perfectly symmetrical and for being surrounded by the house in which Victor Hugo lived in. It is a beautiful sunny day in Paris and I'm loving life.

Yesterday we discovered an outdoor market a few blocks aways that sells fresh fruits, vegetables, cheese and homemade ravioli!!! And its soooo cheap! For the first time in Paris I felt like I could actually afford something!


Here is a picture of the beautiful market



While we were browsing the huuuuuge selection of cheeses, the guy behind us in line gave us a few tips. When we left he looked at us and said in his best english... " Girls, enjoy the life!"

This guy was juggling with a fish bowl containing real fish on his head!


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Later that afternoon, my french friend Aurore and I went to a photography exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was really interesting. The photographer lived throughout most of the 20th century and he took pictures from the american liberation of Paris during WWII to May of 1968 which was when huge social protests and revolts took over paris. So the collection was pretty extensive.

The exhibit got Aurore and I talking about French politics. It is so interesting to hear about politics in a socialist country, coming from the United States. Aurore was talking about how the left party hates Sarkozy for trying to increase the private school option in France by hiring less public school teachers. He is seen as such a right wing capitalist here even though many of his reforms still seem to benefit the state. For example, today we were reading an article about how Sarkozy instituted a law that allowed anyone who is a citizen of the EU and under 26 years of age free access to any of the museums in France.

While in the US this would have been a victory for the left, here it left a huge amount of people were revolted because the law only applied to EU citizens. They blamed Christine Albanet, the minister of culture for instilling a racial discrimination against immigrants that dishonors france. " How can Christine Albanet justify this new law to Anouar, a young egyptian with the disadvantage of being a tourist in the Louvre, even though it is the ancient Egyptian exhibition which attracts the largest number of tourists every year?"

While it definitively makes me smile to think that the question of who gets free admission into already cheap museums ($ 4.50 for students) creates so much public debate, it serves as a reminder that despite the dirty streets and lack of internet, I am in a first world country, where a trip to the museum is a part of daily life, and definitely accounted for in everyday budgets.