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15.04.02: Le Petit Café, rue Descartes / rue de la Montagne Ste. Geneviève I'm sure that Karolina mentioned hating this café when we sat for a glass of wine at a place across the square, but for me this was a very empowering coffee. It didn't start too auspiciously, since I had sat down here in the midst of indecision over which train ticket to return. You see, because of the month of mousey negotiations with Jaime between my stay in Oxford and his in Paris, I'd wound up buying tickets for at least two distinct travel scenarios -- to wit, travelling with Jaime to Lisbon in an overall shorter timeframe (but one that abandoned his insistence on a trip to the Basque country), or maxing out his travel windowin Spain and then going on to Lisbon on my own. I think in his mind he'd settled on coming to Lisbon with me (which is what I had been insisting was my main goal when he started pushing -- mousily, of course -- for the Basque country), but I finally made the decision just a couple of hours before our scheduled departure to Madrid, and held on to the later Lisbon-Paris ticket, to let Jaime leave Madrid with out me and to let me go on to Portugal without him. Maybe it was the excellent view from my perch at the café that instilled some sort of streak of self-determination. Maybe it was the weekend I'd just lived through.
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