Le Goodbye Lesches

27 September - Papi drove me into the station again and I said my goodbye - he's a very lovable old guy, everyone in the town seems to know him and show lots of respect, probably has a good posse to roll with him when he wants to go on a rampage (but, like CJ, don't want to get on his bad side). When in Paris I checked into MIJE, a hostel near St Paul, and I dumped by bag before going for a bit of an exploration. I headed out to one of the best museums i've ever been to, Cite de Sciences and de L'Industrie, a bit like the Powerhouse Museum or the Questacon in Canberra - it had loads of permanent exhibits, light, mathematics, world population, geograhy, astronomy, cars, sound and technology, and most of them were all completely interactive including a very cool flight simulator where I had to take off a plane and then land it, my instructor spoke English but with an outrageous French accent so I was really flying by wire - a lot of the exhibits had English translations but not all so it was a bit difficult to work out what some of them but there was so much that it didn’t really matter (interestingly enough there were sometimes just English and sometimes English and Spanish translations and occasionally other languages but there was nearly always a translation in Braile - rather nice of the Frenh to be so consideratet to the blind but it's interesting that they prefer to cater to that small group rather than their neighbours across the channel) - lots of school excursions were out there and I could have spent a few days there - as it was I spent the entire day.
After the museum I wandered the streets a little before finding myself near Café de la Paix, a café of note near the Opera which my mum was quite enamoured with many year ago, so enamoured in fact that she went to it by herself and not so politely told me not to joinher when we were visiting last. I wanted to know what the fuss was about so I plopped myself down and hoped that my ragged appearance wouldn't result in getting chased off the premises - I ordered a coffee which was alright and then the waiter came back with the bill and I realised what the fuss was all about - 7 euros for a coffee!!! That's like ... I don't even know what it is in Australian dollars because i'm too scared to look up the exchange rate - I just hope that the Australian economy has been booming in the last couple of weeks. Headed back to St Paul to get to my room - MIJE is supposedly a youth hostel (and there were a lot of utes there) but quite a few of the people were really pushing it - my roommate was an old Frenchman (must have been about 50) and judging by his reading material that he'd left on his table he was a communist (maybe he was on the run from something) - the hostel was actually very nice, very clean and the room was quite large - I was on the mezzanine where there were two beds (i was the only one) and a shower and my red friend was on the ground floor with his own shower - far cry from the hostels I stayed in when travellingEurope 8 years ago. Headed out for a drink and found myself in a bar talking to a very Italian Italian - we decided to get something to eat and went to an Italian restaurant he knew (bit disappointed in myself for eatingItalian in France), which was delicious and he knew the owner so we got a prtty heavy discount (which helped because it was super expensive) and we ended up drinking grappo for a few hours with the owner and a couple of locals - he and a Frenchman also had a very heated discussion about the ethics of dropping nuclear bombs.
I got back to the hostel just on my curfew (i felt like a child havinga curfew) and woke up my neighbour as I stumbled into the room (i also woke him up later that night when I tried to find the exit to go to the bathroom and I woke him up again when my alarm went off at half seven) - I hope I haven't ruined his opinion of Australians ...