Lots of exploring today. The neighborhood in the 17th where I'm staying is fantastic. I'm living right next to a great little open-air market, positively bursting with cafes and other things you might typically find in France. It's also close to the Parc Monceau, which is nice. I took lots of pictures, including a gratuitous shot of the AdT for my homies, just to prove I'm here, and not actually in Budapest or something.

From there, it's about an hour via metro to the IES, which is in an ugly little building. Decent neighborhood, but hopefully I'll be spending more time at the Sorbonne. It's just beginning to hit me that I'll be living here until June, which seems like a very long time, but also like no time at all. Four months is not all that many months.

Dinner tonight with Olivier, who knows every restaurant in Paris. When I was about thirteen he took me to a restaurant that serves only pig. It was a veritable pig-disneyland, with hundreds of different kinds of pig-meats and giant pig-statues smiling cheshire-like over the happy diners, privately sharing a laugh at some ironic meta-narrative commenting on human dining habits. I distinctly remember that Olivier ordered the cheeks of the pig, which I can still only imagine in a cartoonish "Three Little Pigs" rosy-cheeked sort of way.

I have never recovered.