A life lived. (Paris in a Month; A West Coast Trip): We got hustled...

We are starting to feel a little travel weary from sleeping on the pullout bed. It was comfy at first but now our backs are cramping (complaining Americans with our featherbeds and space preferences). Anyway, we decided that today was cemetery day and so we went out into the cooling French weather. All was fine until we went to "sortie" (leave) the metro. A group of men accosted us and would not let us pass. We were forced to give them 50 euro for no discernible reason and finally allowed to leave the metro station. We were both pretty freaked out about the incident and when we ran into some policia we tried to explain to them what happened (this language barrier stuff is something to note). They followed us to the scene of the incident and NOTHING was done. For future travels, we will learn enough of the language, customs, and laws to know what our rights are. In terms of what we learned today, we were hustled and that was that. The lovely policia could care less if a few tourists lost some money.

This experience impacted our wander through the cemetery. We hit the high points. We learned that the French value personal space as much in death as they do in life. Many of the lots were stacked and pushed together tightly. I had never witnessed such a magnificent cemetery. We intended to see Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde but due to our run in with the metro hustlers we felt best to hit Jim Morrison and return to the safety of our teeny tiny super small apartment for rest and recovery. A cautionary tale. However, we can not be sure how to caution against what happened because we can't be sure what happened. We safely took the metro home (incident free). Now we watch a little Tele from the states to make sure we still understand English.

We are really excited for Una to come and bring some Anglais with her! Hopefully she brings very little because, well, there is very little space. This is interesting because Bryan and I lived in a studio when we first started dating. This being said, a studio in the states is 3 times the size of a studio in Paris.