After checking into our hotel we went to a restaurant named after our hotel. It was six PM. Silly Americans -- dinner doesn't start until 8 PM and you cannot enter until 8 PM. It was a wonderful authentic French dinner. We had a Bordeaux with dinner. I was thinking a lot about Bordeaux at dinner and decided it is the perfect wine to go with everything, sort of. Bordeaux is so smooth, it can take the spice out of Thai food, but if you pair it with something too bland it will overwhelm it. Bordeaux is definitely strong, but at the end of the day I don't think you can be disappointed.
Before dinner, to waste time, we wandered around and stopped at a traffic circle and I took far too many pictures of the monument in the center, but the traffic really amused me. If people drove the way they do in Paris in the US, they would be called aggressive drivers, but everyone here drives that way. Drivers in Paris drive with an incredible amount of faith -- faith in everyone around them, the motorcycles and mopeds that slide around cars, the bicyclists that have a separate lane until they cross intersections, and the other drivers who are likely to ignore lights and push through. There's order and beauty to this chaos.
There are no lanes and, after watching drivers for a while, I figured out the movement pattern. There's one line they stop at for some traffic, and then they pull forward while waiting for the next, and then even if the light is red, but no traffic, they go.
Faith... an interesting way to drive.
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