"You called me?"

So I didn't have very much planned for yesterday. I was just going to go grocery shopping, watch Friends in French, call one of my contacts for a phone interview, whine about how cold it is, try to figure out how I got all of these bug bites...well I ended up doing that and more.

When I called my first contact, a teacher of Mali-Guinean dance, it was really difficult for us to communicate, so he suggested we meet in person. When? Now. I hopped on the metro to meet Papson at the dance studio where he teaches. However, when I got off the metro and compared the map I had drawn myself to the map of the area...the street the studio was on didn't seem to exist (I found out later it just was off the map, but I didn't know that at the time). I called Papson and he kept telling me to go somewhere that sounded like Madonna's. I was really confused, so he told me to just wait at the metro stop and he'd come find me. I was waiting for about 10 minutes, freaking out that this wasn't going to work out since it was already shaping up to be such a disaster, when this man rides up to me on his motorcycle and says "Tu m'a appelle?" ("You called me?"). He then pointed to McDonald's (what I thought was "Madonna's") and asked me how I didn't know it. Wasn't I American?

We went into a coffee shop, where he got a phone call. He told me he had to go meet someone and asked if I would be able to ride on his motorcycle. I was about five steps away from doing so when he decided that he had time, and we could just do the interview there. I asked him my questions, and he had some very interesting things to say. Like Dragoss, he talked a lot about how dance has become monetized. He also agreed that, while African dance is known and liked around the world, it is not understood. He tries to work against this by telling anecdotes about Africa in his classes, and by taking his students to Mali for a month each year.

When I got back the apartment after the interview, there was a firetruck outside and it looked like they were trying to keep people from going inside. I explained to the firefighter that I was living there. He said to go ahead and enter and not to worry. Lea got back about 15 minutes after I did and said that the firefighters and police had come running through, knocking on doors, telling everyone to evacuate. Apparently someone in the building may have died and they weren't sure which room the tip had been about. Lea and I are still unclear on the details, but hopefully more to follow on this matter.

That night, I decided to go to a Breton Dance that Sylvie had told me about that morning. It took place in the Quais de Seine, a little park-ish area right on the edge of the river. When I arrived, there was a large group of people sitting together, picnic-ing, and playing music. I sat down to watch from a bench, and when the the dancing started, I creepily took this photo:


There was an old man sitting on the bench and we chatted a bit about the dance. He told me that there should also be tango lessons going on somewhere near by (I never saw them, but later on a man came up to me and asked me if I wanted to tango...sadly this man was not James Marsden so I declined.) I was soon joined on the bench by two graduate students, Carla from Mexico and Annabelle from Germany. I overheard them talking about dance and decided to talk with them. They told me that they had read about the Breton dance in a "cheap Paris" guide book. We ended up talking for 3 hours about politics, philosophy, art, and culture as the Bretons danced under the stars.