pancakes, Velib, Louvre and the Red Sox

In reverse listed order- I just watched the Red Sox game. By watched i mean stared at my computer screen which had the "Red Sox game day" on it- an application that tells you what's happening in the game with a play by play- this, i understand, is not really the same thing as actually watching the game- but it was my only option- and they were about to win the world series- and some natural instinct derived from far too many years of watching red sox games at home with pa and grammy made this strange pseudo- ritual necessary. Thanks to aim commentary from Katie who was actually watching the game it was actually entertaining- and of course they won (4-3 against colorado in the 9th) making it only the second time they've won since 1918- the first being my senior year of high school- so now i can easily remember all the dates since one will be my graduating year, and the next the year i was in Paris. Of course it is now almost 6am and i have been "watching" the game since 1 am.. so i have not got much sleep- but this does not currenlty bother me because I have no classes on Mondays.

The Louvre was my sporadic choice of activity today- I finally received my year pass- so it's now free and quick to go whenever i so choose. So today was to be the first day- I checked out large scale french paintings first- I'm always so impressed by these- and I really like them because it doesn't take any sort of artistic taste to appreciate them- They're just so huge and the subjects are either very dramatic or very majestic- even if you don't understand the subject one can easily just look at them and drool.
Afterwards I moved on to the Italian School- not as big.. but of course no one ever walks up to a De Vinci and says.."well, it's not as big as that painting by delacroix". The thought definitly passed through my mind when i was peeping a look at Mona Lisa - but then I always really liked the character of Leonardo in Ever After- and I did this fairly cool term paper on him my senior year of high school- so I get it.
On my way out I wandered through Roman statues- mostly of emporers- and i couldn't help but giggle at the fact that all of the faces I recognized were due to the fact that we watched I, Cladius as a main activity in our Latin 4 class. I honestly can't remember the family tree- but the names were all familiar.

So yesterday I made pancakes for the first time- a few people came over to revel in the amazingness that is american baking powder- now something i will never take for granted again. And i managed to feed one to my host brother who happened to be spending the night here- he liked it, though he's been to the U.S. before.

and the pancakes were followed by Velib riding through the Bois de Bologne- Velib's are the new parisian public bike system. They're stationed all around the city and with a credit card you can take one for for about 2 euros per hour. The bois de bologne is just south of my house- it's a huge park on the periphery of the city, and there's this water fall that i found once called the "grand cascade", though it is not particularly large and seems to have been perhaps man-made. so the round trip included the waterfall, a pond, some off roading and passing the old men who play petanque and hassle all females who pass. I always think "oh, it'd be so fun to play petanque with these sweet old men- just like we used to in french class" and then i run into these men and i see why that's a bad idea.