sometimes life is just about making a fool of yourself

So this evening, instead of going to conversation club, Brianna, Vanessa and I performed a little sociology experiment. Near the opera house, there is a roundabout - essentially there version of a four way stop, except that it joins 6 streets, is a heck of a lot more confusing, and has this little grassy circle in the middle. actually, it's a pretty big grassy circle. Since it was a nice, sunny, warm evening, we decided, for lack of anything else to do, to sit in the middle of this roundabout center. So for a good hour, we sat around talking - and people watching from the middle of Place Graslin.

After a few minutes, we turned it into a game. French people can be very...stubborn about showing emotion in public. They live in their own little bubbles - getting a smile on the street from a stranger is UNHEARD of, believe you me. I'm personally convinced that they WANT to smile - they just don't. So we started trying to MAKE them smile. We started by just waiting to make eye contact with people in the cars and smiling. Sometimes they smiled back...and then we started waving. The idiotic, overexcited little kid wave. And trust me, we got more than one laugh out of people!! The best ones were the people that saw us...and then we saw their facial muscles twitch, trying not to laugh. And sometimes, they even waved back! The best ones were the buses that drove by...we got some of the BEST reactions out of the passengers. You could practically see them thinking "what on EARTH are they doing?!"

and it was one of the best spent hours in a long time =)
(a couple more pictures, by the way!)

à+!