Paris, Part Two: The Part That Didn't Totally Suck

When we last left our heroine (aka me), she was sulking in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, wondering what she had done wrong in life to deserve such an unrelenting stream of bad luck.

Luckily, things were only going to (mostly) get better from that point forward. After about an hour spent indulging in self-pitying and childishly wishing to be at home wrapped in a blanket, hugging a teddy bear, and quite possibly reverting to thumb-sucking, I picked myself up and walked back toward the Mosquée de Paris with a defiant air and a look of steely determination. "Forget you, Paris," I said in the FCC-friendly version of my inner monologue. "Forget you and forget your mother. I am Renée forgetting Gauthier, and you have not beaten me yet.  Forget, forget, forget."

I arrived at the mosque and found the ticket counter. There seemed to be some sort of hullabaloo; aside from the ticket seller, there were two men standing nearby shouting in Arabic and banging their hands emphatically on the desk. I waited from a safe distance to see how this apparent dispute was going to lay out, but the ticket seller merely smiled at me, took out a ticket, and motioned me forward past the other two men, who were apparently simply having some sort of heated debate rather than engaging in a customer service dispute. 

The upside to this was that the ticket guy sold me a student-price ticket, which I was not going to argue with. Despite the fact that I look about eighteen years old, I have not been able to claim student discounts anywhere because of my lack of a valid student ID. It's been killing me, because every place I go ticket sellers will ask, "Are you a student?" and then I have to say no and pay full price. Adulthood: it ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Anyway, the mosque was cool. It didn't blow my mind with its supreme beauty or anything (the fountains were dry and the gardens were sparse, since it was still rather early in the season), but I'd never been to a mosque before and it was cool to look around.

La Mosquée de Paris

After the mosque I headed toward the Seine to meander in the general direction of Sainte Chapelle. I'd never visited it before but my 501 Must-See Destinations book had recommended it and I'd generally heard good things. Along the way I checked out the stalls of used books along the river and cheered up as the sun finally made an appearance after a morning spent hiding behind forbidding-looking clouds.