Too shy for a cafe

I slept well last night. The sun woke me up around 5 something, but I quickly fell back to sleep and didn't get out of bed until 10:30 am. I decided to do a short run around the park across the street. I haven't been exercising very much lately, and I thought that a little run would lift my spirits a bit. It was cold and rainy again today, but the park was filled with intense looking runners. The strange thing was that everyone seemed to be running around the park in the same direction, except me. Now, I understand that typically there is a defined running direction on tracks, but I never knew that such a thing existed in a park. I did see one other person who was running the same direction as me, but there must have been hundreds going the other way. Nonetheless, I didn't want to cave to the norm halfway through my run, and nobody yelled at me, so I just kept going the "wrong" direction until I had done a full lap.

A rainy day.

When I got back home, I ate an apple and a yogurt for breakfast and worked up the nerve to go out in search of a cafe. First, I stopped by the cafe in the Cité Internationale to see what they had to offer. I waited in line for a few minutes, but noticed that the coffee was served in little paper cups. I have nothing against little paper cups, but I really wanted a coffee that was served in a cute ceramic mug. The mug is half the experience of coffee drinking for me. So, I stepped out of line and set out to find a more charming cafe. I found that a surprising number of cafes were open for a Sunday. Très bon!

I passed about three cafes before I worked up the nerve to go into one of them. The one I chose was filled with people drinking delicious looking coffee in quaint little mugs and eating tasty looking pastries. When I went in the front door, I noticed that there was a line extending out of a side door to the cafe. So, I went back out and took my place at the end of the line. As the line progressed, I noticed that none of the people ahead of me were ordering coffee. They all seemed to be ordering bread of some sort -- the place was also a bakery. That's when I started to get anxious. What if this was the bread only line? What if I tried to order a cafe au lait to only have the cashier politely tell me that this was the bread only line? Maybe she would tell me that I needed to go to a different line to order coffee. I did notice another counter that had a shorter line. But what if she was actually trying to tell me that I needed to take a seat and then order coffee from a waiter? I felt so helpless because regardless of what she might say, I would just have to stare at her blankly without any understanding. And then, all of the bustling French people behind me in line would surely be perturbed that I had slowed their Sunday baguette-purchasing ritual. My imagination went wild with an angry mob armed with baguettes yelling at me in French and me screaming out from the corner, "All I want is a cafe au lait!" So, right before it was my turn to order, I chickened out and left. 

Oh well. I'm a bit too shy.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I guess the cafe experience left me feeling a bit defeated. It was rainy, so I didn't feel like wandering around outside or reading in the park. I watched the season 3 finale of Downton Abbey and talked with German Tina on facebook for awhile. I'm planning to visit her in Hamburg next weekend so we chatted about the best ways to get there. I think she may even come out to visit me here the following weekend. It would definitely be nice to have a travel buddy for a weekend! In the meantime, work starts tomorrow. We'll see how that goes!