One cheesecake, three MIT alums, and an afternoon in Paris

It's important to remember to be a tourist in your hometown when said hometown happens to be Paris. However, when real life-- exams, papers, bills, landlords, and insurance companies-- can cloud the fact that living in a tourist destination city is pretty lucky. Sophie, one of my MIT '09 Biological Engineering friends doing her PhD in Berkeley, stopped over for a day in Paris on her way to Monte Carlo for the début of an autonomous robot opera commissioned by the Prince of Monaco and produced by a team of researchers in the MIT Media Lab, including her boyfriend. (You can't make this stuff up.)

Sophie arrived in the early afternoon. Our first destination was a boulangerie, of course, where I was reminded of all that is wonderful in France: their bread. We caught up with Barrett, an MIT '08 AXΩ (my sorority) who just moved to Paris for a Master's program in thr Paris School of Economics. Together, we crash-toured the highlights of the city: the Eiffel Tower, the Hôtel des Invalides, the Pont Alexandre III, the Grand and Petit Palais, the Place de la Concorde at the end of the Champs-Elsyées complete with the Obelisk of Luxor standing where the guillotine once stood which killed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. From here we walked through the Jardin de Tuileries over to the Louvre, then Notre Dame where we hit up a mass, and finally the Hôtel de Ville (town hall, not the Hotel of the Town as literally translated... I do believe Paris happens to have more than one hotel in town.)

It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day with blue skies, a perfect day for an introduction to Paris. The city is pedestrian-friendly enough that we were able to go between all these sites on foot. In crossing a bridge right before Notre Dame, we noticed lots of padlocks secured onto the fences along the side of a pedestrian bridge. It seemed a bit out of place, and they weren't securing anything in particular. Looking more closely, we noticed that lots of these locks had two sets of initials with the little + between the initials. Apparently instead of carving trees, writing your initials on a padlock and securing it to a bridge is the way to do it these days. It's even practical: when you break up, you've just got to unlock your lock to erase any trace of your failed young love.

As the day wound down, we bid Barrett farewell and best of luck for her first day of math-camp classes tomorrow before catching a metro up to Montmartre for a panoramic view of the city at sunset and a brief tour of the historic bohemian artists' neighborhood around the Place de Tertre. It was here that I finally caught up with Valentin to complete my day's mission. When at the boulangerie, destination #1 when touring Paris with Sophie, I spotted a cheesecake, a dessert Valentin had never tasted. Regular monitoring of the cheesecake throughout the day's travels had alerted me that it hadn't signed up for a crash-tour of an entire city from the inside of a backpack. The final product that reach Valentin did not entirely resemble what I'd purchased several hours earlier, but it still tasted mostly the same. Sadly, he was not thoroughly impressed, but we'll try again in the US. The French make their cheesecake much lighter and fluffier than the American counterpart.

Sophie and I finished the evening off with a heavy traditional meal from the north of France at home with my roommates before Sophie finally began to feel the effects of a journey across nine time zones. (Her energy throughout the day was commendable.) I was glad to have an extra push to be a tourist again in my hometown, especially in good company.