I'm still mad that they scared away my duck.

After dropping of the Girl at school yesterday I decided to walk home (to get some exercise and ration my metro tickets) and happened to walk by the Galleries Lafayettes, Paris' massive department store (look up a picture since I didn't take one...it's crazy).  I also ended up near the Madeleine Church (originally a "Temple to the Glory of the Great Army" built by Napoleon, inspired by  the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, now a Catholic church in the 8th).  It's really odd because it looks so old but is in the middle of a much more modern area, not like the historic center at all.

I kept thinking, though, that even though I was walking by all this beautiful architecture in one of the greatest, most historic cities int he world, I wasn't appreciating it.  In Tallahassee I used to walk around campus or drive down the canopy roads and think about how lucky I was to be in such a beautiful place.  Here, all I could think about was how loud it is, how obnoxious the tourists are (as if I wasn't one of them), how fat French women make me feel (partially why I was walking), and how the hoarde of Asian tourists with their oversized cameras scared away my duck at the Tuileries earlier today.  Tallahassee felt like home almost immediately; I'm still waiting to fall in love with this place.