"Dude, we're in a jazz club in Paris!"

So, yesterday was one of the best days of my life (I have a feeling I'm going to have a lot of those here). Gerald and I went out around noon to meet up with the 3 other girls in our group for our scavenger hunt around Belleville. Belleville is France's most diverse district (le 20eme arrondissement) as there are lots of immigrants. Some of the streets the paper sent us down were not so pretty and were probably not places you'd want to be walking alone at night, mais ca va. There was some cool grafitti.
Some cool artwork (?) on one of the sketchy streets in Belleville

On our scavenger hunt we saw the house were Edith Piaf was born, we bought croissants, we found this park with a gorgeous panoramic view of Paris (unfortunately it was pretty overcast and we could barely see the Eiffel tower) and we saw a nice church.

Where Edith Piaf was born.

The Panoramic view!

The pretty cool church

The final stop on our scavenger hunt was Pere Lachaise cemetary. This was on my personal list of places to go/things to see while I was here, so I was pretty excited. However, it was not as cool as I expected, and I don't know if I'm going to go back to see the graves we missed yesterday (Chopin, Champollion, Proust, etc.). We DID see: Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde. So that was cool. Although Jim Morrison's grave was uber lame after hearing so much about it and about all the craziness surrounding it. Also, the Doors suck.

Jim Morrison. So unimpressive, right? What's the big deal? Get over it, he was an idiot.

Oscar Wilde, on the otherhand, was an actual genius, and he deserves all the kisses that are planted on his grave.

After our scavenger hunt, we met the rest of the program near Place de la Republique in the 3eme arrondissement and saw a hysterical play, Couscous aux Lardons, which was about a French catholic and Arab couple.

Then Sam, Gerald and I headed out to meet Mark Anthony and Trevor in the 6eme arrondissement for some jazz! Unfortunately, the place we found wasn't opening until 11 o'clock, so we had some time to kill. We wandered around the 6eme, strolled into the 7eme and finally settled down at this pretty upscale restaurant (I hadn't realized it was such a ritzy neighborhood!), where I ordered French fries, a fondant au chocolat and a kir. Delicious.



We killed at least an hour and a half sitting in this lovely restaurant and didn't end up paying that much, which was exciting. We then headed back to the jazz club, which was the coolest place ever! It was a hole-in-the-wall place called Chez Papa, and the atmosphere was incredible! We ordered a bottle of Rose and just sat and listened to this fantastic jazz trio. It was so unreal. And also relatively inexpensive, so we're definitely going to go back!