Today, per the email from MICEFA, I went to the Opera metro station to get tickets and see about getting a Pass Navigo, which seems to be more or less a Metrocard equivalent, except far more complicated to obtain. This involved wandering around for a while before I finally consulted my map near the Jardin des Tuilleries and discovered I’d inadvertently turned myself around 90 degrees.

I checked which metro lines weren’t being interrupted by the transit strike, and went to MICEFA offices. Got mixed up between Rue du Faubourg St-Jacques and Boulevard du Faubourg St-Jacques, wasted 15 minutes going the wrong way, and decided that Paris streets must have been named by the same people who named the ones in Queens, on the philosophy that if it’s good to use the name “X Street,” its even better to have X Boulevard, X Avenue, X Place, X Lane, X Dead End, X Cul-de-Sac, X Plaza, and X Court, preferably in close proximity to one another, with intersections at odd, tangential angles.

The people at MICEFA were all nice and such and I got some preliminary paperwork out of the way. We’re all to gather there at 2:00 PM tomorrow to register for the residence and such.

Here are some pictures of the hotel room:

From just inside the door.

From below the TV.

Plan of the floor. Note this room in yellow! It’s small and generally pleasant. The L shape makes it feel roomier.

The shower has two settings: Ice and Steam. There is no shower curtain and the shower head is mounted on a series of hinges, ingeniously designed to turn around and spray the entire bathroom with water if you so much as look at it cross-eyed.

Paris has a lot of non-car vehicles, which makes sense considering the size of most of its streets.

You see these bike stands all over.

Also Vespas and these kind of 3-wheeler thingies like this one.

And oddly skeletal garbage cans.

Despite what we’ve been warned, Parisian drivers aren’t actually that aggressive towards pedestrians, at least not more so than in New York. Pedestrian traffic lights have no setting between red and green. I’ve taken to dashing across intersections as quickly as possible so that I don’t get caught by surprise.

The Paris Metro is pretty easily navigable. I haven’t had to wait long for a train so far. The cars are smaller than in NYC, but the seats are cozier and more comfortable. Doors don’t open automatically, which is a bit weird. Sometimes the conductors don’t announce what stop you’re at, so you have to look out the window to make sure it’s the right one. At least the signs in the stations are very easy to spot. All in all, it’s about on par with the MTA.

Ooh, and one definitely cool Paris thing: the light-up green cross signs outside pharmacies. There’s something kind of hypnotic and reassuring about them.

That’s all, folks. For today. I think.

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