Hi, how are you!

Hi! Greetings from Paris - and a soon-to-be congratulations to Claire (even though she can't read this) for getting married in a couple days; hopefully I won't run into her and Bill on their honeymoon as she had predicted because that would be very very awkward.

It's great reading about what your rowing lives have been like - and it makes me miss MIT even more than I already am which is a lot. Rowing in France isn't very big, as I was informed by the locals, and the Seine is far from a rowable body of water. I do work in the mornings at a construction site though, for a social housing building complex for handicapped families, but these 10-story buildings still do not have functioning elevators so there's a fair amount of running up and down stairs for me. Go quad power! After that, I go back to the firm and sit in front of a computer for a long time... :o) Food in Paris is absurdly expensive so I'm inadvertently doing a better job at eating vegetarian this summer than I was back at school by virtue of not being able to afford any meat. (For those of you who didn't know, I lost my wallet within 4 hours of arriving in Paris and literally walked the streets, hungry, for the first couple weeks before the moeny situation got resolved...it was très triste.) The city has a really neat bike rental system in which bike stations are placed throughout the city and you can rent a bike for 1 euro per half hour or hour or something like that and when you get to your location you park the bike at the nearest station. So ZipCar but for bikes sort of...They're really nice bikes and the streets of Paris are so beautiful but congested a lot so hopefully it'll catch on more as time goes by.

Anyhow, missing you guys so much. Somtimes I draw pictures of boats in my notebook and the crossed oars and people at work think I'm hard at work. And then other times I'm busily typing away at the computer and they also think I'm hard at work, but really I'm posting on this blog.