More, more, more.

SO...
It feels like I haven't really updated in a while. Life has been crazy and I've been sleep deprived.

The past two days have been a whirlwind and yet I feel like it's been an entire week. We're in the stage of the research where we're doing two or three hours of research a day. We're mostly doing interviews, but some observations still. We've been getting a lot of good info - most of the artists speak English, or at least enough to answer questions adequately and keep the conversation going. Me and my partner have facilitated seven interviews so far and have talked to quite some characters! We have to write down everything that's dictated, so we've written about how one guy talked about how he had gone to jail, one guy talked about how the pill liberated women to make love and not war, and we've encountered three men who described the artist's square as "sh*t." Definitely the most colorful homework I've ever done. We've also been able to hear a lot of good information for our research, though, so it's been good to see how field research would really go.

Yesterday we got the morning off after we finished coding the last day's interviews, and so we went to get paninis and sodas and ate them in the park. Everyone went back to nap, but my research partner and I sat in the Luxembourg Gardens for hours. It was sunny and nice and what I had been waiting for all week. We came back in time to meet up with the group to go meet a contact Dr. C had made - a dancer named Nikola. She was an American who had lived in Montmartre for six years or something. It was good to hang out with her, but we ended up getting to the research site and about 7:30pm and a lot of the painters were gone. It's strange, you get to know who's usually there and who's usually not when you go every day. The portrait artists were still there and we got two really good interviews. There was a creepy man on the metro who stared at me and Jordan, smiled like a weirdy, took pictures of us even after seeing that we were both "engaged" (hers real, mine just a ring-switch), and then blew us kisses as the metro passed his stop. Let's just say it was not flattering, it was just gross. The man who, when I asked which pastries I could have with my formule (combo), said "These. Or you can have me." and smiled was much less creepy, but just kind of goofy/sweet, so I just giggled and ate my pastry.

Today was Jonathan's birthday, so Kait and I woke up early to buy him some pastries as a surprise. He's always talking about how he wants to sample all of the French lifestyle, so we thought it would be perfect. There was more coding and an hour nap, and then we met to go to Montmartre! We went to a Thai food place first and then headed out. We got more interviews today than we ever had because we were bold. It was great. After that we came back and typed up field notes, which takes a while. We only got through one interview and we decided to eat and then go to a happy hour because we were given permission. I got a jambon (ham) croissant and an Orangina. We went to a Cuban place for happy hour, which is later here, and I got my first mixed drink, a Margarita. We played never have I ever and a game that Dr. C called "The Nutty Chronicles," where you pass around a piece of paper and take turns writing a man's name, a woman's name, a time, a place, what they are doing, what he says, what she says, and an ending - you end up with a pretty funny story sometimes. Fun stuff.

We came back and finished typing up our notes and NOW IT IS BEDTIME!

I love bedtime. My roommates are cool too.

Sophy