This morning I watched on tv some good looking, muscular men in short shorts pummel each other. New Zealand was playing Tonga in the Rugby World Cup. I've never watched a game besides the one in the movie Invictus. Each team performed the haka dance, a traditional Maori war dance, screaming out their team's anthem and making scary faces. I found the game to be similar to football, where big men run up and down the field with a ball to attempt to reach the "touchdown" line and where players throw themselves on the guy with the ball. But rugby is a much tougher, rougher, quicker, touchier sport. The men don't wear any protective gear and are constantly being slammed and pushed in different directions by other players. They look like they're playing hot potato and doggy pile.
Later in the day I strolled around the hilly neighborhood of Montmartre to check out the Sacre Couer, a white dome-shaped basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I passed by La Cure Gourmande, store selling French sweets and biscuits with multiple locations in Paris. I tried a sample of the strawberry jam-filled biscuit and it was buttery, soft and melted in my mouth but when I bought the one that's sold individually as pictured above, it wasn't soft at all. Wasted calories!
The Sacre Coeur sits on a hilltop so you have to take many stairs to reach the church. Good thing my daily walk up to my fourth floor apartment already strengthened my buns.
Stairs...
More stairs...
Photography isn't allowed in the church. The interior has a huge image of J.C. in the center of the concave dome.
While I was enjoying my lunch on a bench at the lower level of the Sacre Coeur, some gypsy girls were collecting coins in the fountain. These were the same girls who were pretending to be deaf, asking people to sign their clipboard so they can ask for money. I tried avoiding eye contact with the clipboard holders but they always do the two step with me and block my way. The other day my friends and I were sitting at a cafe and some gypsy girls took a leftover water bottle and drank from it. I think it's safe for me to start stereotyping now. And before the gypsy girls approached me, an African man tried to tie a bracelet on me and when I tried to walk around him, he tried stopping me by putting his hand on my arm. My inner bitch came out! Some local person told me that the men will tell you the bracelet is free but once they tie it on you, they'd ask for money.
After the Sacre Couer I walked around the residential neighborhood.
The residential part of Montmartre is quiet. I prefer neighborhoods where locals hang out rather than touristy, livelier areas...too bad I'm a tourist.
The modern apartments are next to cute townhouses with colored window shutters and ivy growing on the walls.
I like looking at the cute houses over the modern apartment buildings but would prefer to live in the latter.
The leaves are changing colors, a sign that fall is near. Sigh...
The Moulin de la Galette, a windmill from the 17th century. I'm lazy to write about its history so Google it.
The Moulin Rouge, a famous cabaret venue and the inspiration for that horrible musical that I stopped watching after the first 5 minutes.
On the same block as the Moulin Rouge are sex toy shops, strip clubs, live sex shows and a sex museum, which exhibits the above chair.
Behind the Abbesses train stop is the Le Mur des Je T'aime (I Love You: The Wall) where "I love you" is written in different languages. Above the mural is a drawing of a woman and a quote reading, "Love is disorder. That's love!" I don't think that was part of the original mural.
I found "I love you" in Vietnamese!
I took the train back home around 5:30pm, thinking I'd avoid some rush hour traffic but it seems that a lot of the French get off of work around 5pm. Those slackers! There's no air conditioning on the train so it was like driving in a hot car with only one window cracked open. Everyone is either looking out the window or has their eyes closed but one guy caught me taking a picture.
When I got home, my aunt took me to the supermarket so I could get food to make nachos for my cousins, who love American food. The supermarket offers hand-held scanners for shoppers to scan their items to save time at the cash register. The long aisles are filled with an overwhelming selection of different types of yogurt, custards, ham, pate, cheese, biscuits and chocolates. Yet when I looked for tortilla chips, they only had one brand of a tiny bag and one big bag of chili flavored tortilla chips. And there were no black beans or taco seasoning either. So I settled for the chili flavored chips, kidney beans and chili seasoning. Mexicans need to emigrate to France so the country can get some Mexican food.
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