Batman and Crème Brûlée

Salut!

Double post again...

Sunday

Today was great. I woke up to violin music. Little French kids playing French songs on their little violins is SO CUTE!

I also discovered that they have a piano downstairs and one of my cousins is a piano prodigy. I would have brought sheet music with me if I had known they have a beautiful Yamaha.

Here is my cousin Tine playing piano and my cousin Ti singing to Skinny Love (the Birdy version not the Bon Iver one)

After lunch we hung out around the house. I joined the girls in doing my nails. For them, the nail is a canvas and they are true artists. I was more of the person who could barely hold a paintbrush, which is obvious in the following pictures:

My cousin's nails

Mine

I ended up ruining my nails two hours later by opening a very difficult bag of chips.
As the older girls were doing their nails, the younger kids were raking leaves; innocently, I thought. Turns out they were gathering leaves to LIGHT THEM ON FIRE!

Angelic smile

Pyros

To give our legs a rest from climbing the endless stairs of the Notre Dame yesterday, we went to the movies today. There are actually more movies shown in the VO, or Version Originale, than VF, or Version Francaise, which means a lot of the population is fluent in English I guess? We saw The Dark Knight Rises, Version Francaise, so my cousins could understand and because I have already seen it in the States. A total of ten of us went; the movie theater person looked horrified at the amount of kids.

Taking up the entire row and flashing the movie theater at the same time

Random Fact: They serve sweet popcorn instead of butter popcorn in theaters.

So I figured I would be able to understand most of the movie because I have watched it before, but they talked too fast for me. The person I could understand best was the villain Bane, who talked very clearly and slowly. Thanks Bane! Weirdly enough, this movie made me homesick for the first time. My cousins LOVED the movie. The older ones asked me about random plot points that they didn’t understand because they have not seen Batman Begins or The Dark Knight.

At home, we found a copy of Batman Begins and we watched it. They are now obsessed with Batman! I must find a copy of The Dark Knight for them.
So ended a wonderful day full of music, Batman, and French.

Monday

Went sightseeing and shopping on La rue de Rivoli, one of Paris’s most famous streets.

La Comédie-Française, the most celebrated theater in Paris

La Bourse, which is the site of the Wall Street Stock Exchange of Paris

A pretty building…

Street Artist

HUGE BUBBLES

I saw a very innocent looking store that said “DVD shop” and was about to go in to see if they had the Dark Knight when my cousin said “It’s not the kind of movies that you will be expecting." The shop should have been named something more conspicuous like this one:

While shopping, I got some scarves (almost every female here wears them, even though it’s summer) and these really interesting pants.

Here’s the design on the pants

The latest fashion craze in Paris: high heeled sneakers!

When we got a bit hungry, we went to a café to eat some dessert. Oh, mon dieu, c'était délicieux! We got crème brûlée and tarte de pomme (apple tart) with toffee ice cream. I am absolutely obsessed with crème brûlée now. It’s like flan cake but with a hard caramelized crust that you have to tap with a spoon to get to the soft, creamy, amazing custard underneath. La tarte de pomme was good too; it’s bit a different from the US in that there is more apple and less of the soupy cinnamony interior. And it was served with toffee ice cream, which was strange.

Tine and her crème brûlée

Ti with her crepe and me with my tarte de pomme

During the metro ride home, we gave ourselves fake mustaches

À demain!