Today was devoted mostly to recovering, and I am still not fully recovered... fun and bizarre as this trip has been, it has been a bit exhausting, at least for my legs and my (limited) extroversion.

In the morning, I dragged myself out of bed for a run... this may not have been the best idea, since I felt pretty bad when I woke up and it was an extremely pathetic run - my legs were so leaden that I could barely keep up a non-walking gait for half an hour.  But it did wake me up and (more or less) gave me the energy to petition a coffee shop for some breakfast.  I spent my morning wandering between coffee shops and eating pastries and drinking coffee (this makes it sound like there was a lot more pastry, coffee, and shops than there actually were).  One of the things I'd been meaning to do more of was loiter in cafes, but it is a bit less glamorous than it appears, especially when the weather is imperfect (it was cold) and I am not actually very French.  But, it was a good experience to have, and I tried some new foods.

In the afternoon I walked around the left bank, window shopping, stumbling upon churches, and looking in bookstores.  I've finally figured out how to get English-language books at a reasonable price (rifle through bins outside left-bank shops, where all the "foreign-language books" are shuffled together); the quality is mixed, but there are a few decent things to be found, and I bought one book (Noel Streatfield's Ballet Shoes, a children's book set in England) solely on the strength of a movie character's recommendation (the Meg Ryan character in You've Got Mail... in my defense, I just read Pride and Prejudice - the Ryan character is supposed to be based on Elizabeth Bennet - and finished Northanger Abbey and am halfway through Emma, so I'm having a bit of a British phase).

I also went to a Canadian bookshop, which was pretty excellent.  It's called the Abbey Bookshop, and it is just piled high with books, and the bookshelves slide over each other to hold more books, and there are books on the floor and on tables (I saw a store like this is in Reykjavik, too, but this one was smaller and tidier) and there is a basement with stone walls and more books.  The proprietor was a nice Canadian gentleman who offered me coffee (real coffee!) when I came in, and he had a sort of hanger-on who spent the whole time I was there chattering away about the evils of America (very popular topic among Americans here).  Of course I wanted to buy all the books, but that wasn't possible; I bought a Penelope Lively novel (more Britishness) for five euros, which I justify even if I don't get to it on this trip by the fact that her books are out of print (or were never in print?) in the US.

Around the middle of the afternoon, I started to run out of steam, so I came home for a rest.  I went back out in the early evening and walked around the Louvre des Antiquaires (not related to the museum except by being near it... it's a sort of antique mall... obviously I wasn't doing actual shopping, just walking around looking at the pretty furniture and paintings and jewelry).  I then walked around Paris Plage for the second time but it was much too crowded to stay long.  In fact the whole city seemed to be more mobbed than I'd ever seen it; I don't know if this was my poor timing or if something is going on.  (I just learned that the Tour de France is ending tomorrow on the Champs Elysees... I will be sure to avoid that area of town, not that I am generally in the habit of wandering to the most boring and touristy street in Paris.)

Aside from the physical exhaustion, I've also been having a hard time writing, meaning I haven't done any today, and only did a bit yesterday.  I'm not sure if this is a side effect of being tired (and therefore will be gone by tomorrow, because we all know my legs will be magically recovered by then) or I'm just running out of steam.  It's clear that if I want to be able to keep writing in any sort of consistent fashion I'm going to need to find a meaningful framework; on the other hand, getting one's writing published (the most obvious framework) is generally about as time-consuming as writing in the first place, so doesn't seem worth it; realistically, also, my writing is not that good, particularly since I haven't been practicing, taking classes, etc. in the last several years.  Quandary.