Language practice

The next day I continued exploring Paris, this time primarily in the company of other tourists. Early in the morning I hopped a train to Versailles with two Americans and a Peruvian, so for most of the trip I spoke either English and Spanish. Versailles was a disappointment, since it wasn't nearly as pretty as its imitation near St. Petersburg. The fountains weren't on, and the tour of the large palace with an audioguide left me wondering whether the kings who had lived there were as bored with all their things as the tourists who now looked at them.

After a picnic lunch in the Versailles garden I returned to the city and wandered the Champs Elysees, where I came across a couple of Russian girls and ended up hanging out with them for a few hours. Then I went to the Latin quarter to meet Tonie, who was in Paris for a journalism internship. Most of the time she and I spoke in French, which made it a day during which I had to speak 4 different languages for approximately equal periods of time. Needless to say, by the end of the day I had completely run out of words in some of the languages and had to borrow entire sentences elsewhere.