Saturday, August 06, 2011

August 7, 2011 -- Paris

I feel very well this morning after a good night's sleep. For once, I didn't stay up until midnight talking but got to bed early and got 10 hours sleep.

it threatened to rain all day yesterday, but it did not. I did get my train ticket to Lille, even though I won't be traveling there until the 13th. After leaving the train station, I visited the Church of the Madeleine, which is built like an old Greek building with many exterior columns. The church's altar is shown in the picture.


I had an interesting chat with a young Indonesian man on the front steps of the hostel on my return. He wants to study philology, which is essentially historical linguists and the study of ancient texts. I minored in philology in graduate school, but I thought no one but weirdoes like me would find it worth studying. He explained however that many of the Indonesian historical documents are written in old Dutch (Indonesia was a Dutch colony), and there were many immigrants from India, who brought Sanskrit with them and left writings behind that almost no one in modern Indonesia can read.

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