'meuf' is street for 'femme'

I am told that French slang is formed by taking a normal French word apart at its hinges, and reversing its syllables.

***

Thursday: Roia and Sarah invited me to join them on a bike ride this morning. We all wanted to try Paris’s ‘free’ bike system (Velib). The girls suggested the Left Bank, so we jumped on the Metro and made it happen.

While we found a Velib station and figured out how to use the bulky gray bikes, we felt a drizzle; by the time we pedaled, wobbly-like, toward the busy street St. Germaine de Pres, we were dripping. Though the bikes were surprisingly stable and solid, we were unsure of our footing in the rain, and we were being shoved along narrow lanes by large buses. Still, we were biking! In Paris! In the rain!

The unreal romance of the whole thing kept us moving for 20 minutes, but our good sense finally stopped us and led us into a café, wet knees and all.

After downing chocolats et cafés au lait, we moved on by foot. Roia and Sarah are former English majors, and librarians-in-training. We visited a café where Sartre used to take aperitifs, and a bookstore where Hemingway hung with a posse. The ladies had a lead on a William Blake exhibit at Le Petit Palace, so I gleefully joined them in gazing at his picture-sized prints and tiny pages of poetry. I scribbled a few lines in my little red notebook:

‘The eternal body of man is the imagination. It manifests itself in his works of art…’

‘The eye sees more than the heart knows.’

The girls went back to the hostel to change, and I decided to find the Bon Marche, a ritzy department store, by bike. (Velib is in my Paris top-seven.)

Not so interested in the Bon's collection of Yves St. Laurent or Givenchy (although it was tres-fab), I really just wanted a snack from the Marche’s super-luxe Grande Epicerie. Picture: mounds of flour-dusted breads, stacks of tarts sitting on buttery crusts, cheeses in all forms of cream, chocolate squares, tea-tins lining shelves. I took pictures of the delectables at this place. (To come.) And I got yogurt de marron. Nutty, creamy, tasty. You wouldn't believe the yogurt selection in Paris!

(Aside, in sharp contrast: On the other side of this hostel common room, a guy just picked his nose rather conspicuously, and inefficiently. Just saying.)

I did find an art department in the basement of the Marche, and rifled through hanging decorative papers for at least 17 minutes. What came away with me: a couple of delightfully printed veli and an old-style map of Paris.

For a long time, I have esteemed maps.