Picnic

Today Eli got up early, so he and I walked Ally to work. The Archives d'Outremer is about fifteen minutes from our apartment. It's in the university area west of the old center of town. French university campuses are uniformly awful. The buildings are ugly, in part because they were built cheaply in the sixties and seventies. The only French campuses I've seen that are at all pretty are the Sorbonne (Université de Paris IV) and the original rue d'Ulm campus of the École Normale Supérieure, both in Paris. That's it! Everything else looks, at best, like a very ugly high school or community college. Besides the bad architecture, there's the graffiti and posters. French campuses always seem run down. You just don't get the vibe of youthful potential that an American campus gives off; it's more like, again, a high school where no one wants to be. I hope Eli gets to go to France a lot but I would never want him to really grow up or go to school here, except possibly to follow his parents to Normale Sup'.



Mary and Christopher took Eli to a park north of town for a picnic. He loves going around with them. He really seemed to like the fresh air. He also loved eating fruit. From their picnic spot they could the Mount Ste.-Victoire, the mountain Cézanne painted like a zillion times.



Ally and I got to work on our projects for much of the day. For dinner I made pasta.