sightseeing

Today was a little bit more of the kind of day that I worried about when I worried about this trip. In the morning, I thought about Sarah, who used to be my best friend, and toyed with the idea that we might run into her in front of the glass pyramid at the Louvre or crossing the Place de la Concorde. I wondered if her little girl's eyes were the same pale blue as Sarah's and if she would look at me through her lashes with her head tipped back, the way Sarah used to do. I remembered how I would call Sarah when I was sad and how she always knew exactly the right thing to say. But I told myself that there's no reason to think that Sarah's in Paris and every reason to think that she's not, and made myself read a book about the Thirty Years War that I found on the bookshelf in the hall.

In the afternoon, we wandered in widening circles through most of the 7th arrondissement. When, finally, we ended up at the river, we walked along the left bank and crossed at the the Pont Neuf, whose name means "new bridge," though, in fact, it's the oldest bridge in Paris. We passed the huge ferris wheel and noticed a statue at the edge of the Jardin de Tuileries of a lion mauling a crocodile. We sat for a while at a cafe just across from Notre Dame and had dinner at a pretty little Italian restaurant that we remembered from a couple of years ago when it used to be a pretty little Italian restaurant with a different name. I didn't want to take the Metro home, but L talked me into it, and, somehow, we timed everything perfectly and caught both trains without even having to wait.