"The difference between Los Angeles and yogurt is that the yogurt has an active, living culture."
~Written in French on a flyer at my University.
When I arrived in Paris in September, I had come pretty much straight from sleeping in an un-air conditioned cabin with twelve girls under the age of seventeen. Between their chatter and the roar of the window fans, I learned to sleep through all outside noise except my own alarm, kept dangerously close to my ear. That fact, combined with the mono that I acquired upon arriving allowed me to sleep through everything during the autumn here.
Thus I had forgotten, or perhaps never properly learned, what happens in Paris when the weather is warm.
Nothing in this city is air-conditioned, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that Paris is a mild temperate climate that doesn’t NEED "climatisation." No, in fact, Paris is... so hot right now. My best explanation is that this is a city of extremes: extreme hot in the summer, extreme cold in the winter, extremely high-priced coffees, extremely room temperature sodas, extremely varied cheeses. It seems this city somehow skipped the necessary springtime middle ground; the weather now is beautiful, but I went from wearing my peacoat a week ago to a tank top yesterday, which I had sweated through before I got off the Metro. I am not complaining, far from it, this is quite amazing. I just don’t know where all the light jacket weather went?
So anyway. Sleeping is this new task now– as soon as the radiators and furnace get turned off, the windows open, and will stay as such until October. My windows are actually very large French doors that open onto a microscopic veranda (more, really, of an extremely large window sill. If someone, for example, were to lock you out there in much the same way he used to lock you into the camp store, you’d be unable to turn around properly until he re-opened the doors). So now I sleep with the windows open, and am awoken unfailingly at least once a night because the wind has blown them partly shut and it is hot, or because the street sweeper is going by downstairs at 4am and making more noise than I know what to do with. But it’s awesome– the night air has lost that icy quality it held all winter, the promise of something warm is in the air, and I love it.
Today I walked to Montparnasse, though I could have just taken the Metro, as much for the exercise as the opportunity to feel sun on my face after a long winter of wishing I could bundle it away. On my way, I pass the Eiffel Tower (on my way ANYWHERE I pass the Tour Eiffel– I live so close to it there is no way to avoid it). I do my best to put on a Parisian uncaring face as I pass it, because otherwise the pickpockets and streetvendors and cartoonists stop me every five seconds. I apparently failed today, because as I was nearing a clump of artists, one of them hopped away from the clump, dodged a tourist family who probably would have paid him, and jumped into my path. "Great," I thought, "here we go." I didn’t take my headphones out, didn’t really even stop walking– think Belle keeping on reading her book as Gaston jumps in front of her to try to woo her.
"Mademoiselle, tu es trop jolie! S’il te plaît, puis-je te dessiner?" (Oh, you are too beautiful for words! Please, can I draw you?)
I shake my head, keep walking, but give him a polite head nod. He switches to English.
"Where are you from?"
I answer in French, to convince him as much as me that I am capable.
"Oh, the US?! I love the US! Where in the US?"
I told him, and of course was responded with "Florida! That is wonderful! I have never been there, but the weather is amazing! I lived in California for 8 months, though..."
I start walking again.
"Oh, please, someone as beautiful as you, you must be drawn!"
Now I start to waver. He wasn’t that sketchy, and I was having a really good hair day, and Paris in the spring just begs for adventures like this. So I resorted to a semi-lie.
"I don’t have any money, though!"
"Oh, that is ok, for you, I charge just two kisses!" he says, pointing to his cheeks. Now before you decide I should have run the other way, let me remind you that the double kiss is not just the way friends greet each other, but also the way strangers are introduced. I’ve kissed the cheeks of an awful lot of people I have never met before. But I must have looked a little sketched out, because he said, "Never mind. I draw you for me! It would be great honor to do it!
An incredible honor for a humble artist like me!"
I grinned. He had me, and he knew it.
We walked over to a wall in the shade, and as I sat down an older artist walked by and said to him, in French, "Oh, you are so lucky with this one, look at those lips! They just beg to be drawn!" About at that moment, I took off my tractor sunglasses, and they both let up this collective theatrical gasp.
"Oh, Mademoiselle, but your eyes! Oh la la, your eyes! How can you keep them covered up! How can such luscious lips belong to such lovely eyes! Oh, yes, it will be such pleasure to draw you!"
It was with that line that I figured out my artist was Italian, but I asked just to make sure. Oh, indeed, I was right. I assured him again that I had no money, and he looked at me as though insulted that I would insinuate he could possibly take anything so gauche as money for the honor of drawing me.
As it turns out, he lives only about a block from me (which I didn’t tell him), but which means he must make a pretty decent living turning those things out– I’m guessing the currency of kisses is not what he subsists on.
He finished the picture, added an Eiffel Tower in the background and a lamppost next to me, then turned it to me with a dramatic flourish. "Voila!"
"Oh, it’s beautiful!" I said, trying to be polite without sounding vain– how do you revel in a portrait of yourself?
"Oh, don’t say that! You make an artist like me blush!" I laughed, and he said, "I give this to you!"
"But..."
"No, it is a gift. You just promise that if you see me here again, you invite me for coffee."
I laughed, he leaned his cheek toward me, and we parted ways, me with a portrait in my hand that doesn’t look exactly like me, but close enough that I was flattered by it.
At one point the older artist asked me if I had a French boyfriend.
I invoked an imaginary American one.
WHERE DO I GET THESE THINGS?
~B
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
Q: Which of the following has NOT happened in the past 24 hours?
A. I spent a record-breaking 8 hours at an American rock festival.
B. I was complimented on my black sparkly ballerina shoes with the rhinestone skull by the lead singer of Aiden.
C. I met Jimmy Eat World’s guitarist and AFI’s drummer.
Answer: B. Though I did wear the shoes, and though I did talk to the lead singer, he declined to comment on the shoes. Probably this was due to the fact that when I met him, the first words out of my mouth were "Who are those guys playing right now, they are amazing!" neglecting the unwritten ritual that, after a band’s set, if you run into them, you are obligated to compliment them on their performance, particularly if you are from the same country as them and no one else at the show is.
Yesterday the Give It A Name festival came to Paris, and I, of course, had had my ticket since February. I got to the venue around 4pm, a couple hours after it had started, but still caught all the important acts. The place was tiny– probably only holds 2000 max, all standing, but last night it held... definitely not more than 800. Which was amazing, considering the bands playing sell out at big arenas in the US. Because it was so empty and because it was veritably crawling with rock stars, every time I turned around I was looking at someone who had just been on stage. I stood close to the side, near the curtain that led backstage, and every time someone walked out from the curtain, it was a bandmember that had already played coming out to watch someone else’s set. In this way, I met Jimmy Eat World’s guitarist, who was quite nice, and surprised I was American. [Later on I was asked by several Brits if I had come from the US for this show– I’m not that obsessive.] The next time I turned around because I heard someone singing loudly behind me, it turned out it was the lead singer of the first act, who pretty much blew, so I didn’t bother giving him the time of day. I was sold a t-shirt by a band member, said hello to a few bassists, etc. Kind of intense.
Also, I realized it is likely I’ve been to too many shows in Paris: the first people I saw after I walked in were the guitarist and lead singer of my favorite French band, who were not playing last night but were just there to watch. Nobody else knew who they were, but I got all starstruck and tonguetied (it’s one thing talking to a rockstar in your OWN language, have you ever had to attempt it in a different one?) and ended up just standing back and staring at them from a distance till the moshers got in my way.
After the show, I walked outside and to the back entrance, which is, incidentally, the same one I sneaked into in October in a vain attempt to get backstage before getting kicked out by Mr. Clean himself. This time, though, proved quite worth it– the headlining band came out (one at a time) and I talked to a couple of them before I realized that it was 1230 and I was in the dead center of the worst area of Paris and had missed the last Metro home. I went flying toward the Metro stop, hoping I would be able to catch the last one, and, wonder of wonders, thanks to an "accidente technique," I made it, running through the station, onto the last one, still sweaty, hair pulled into a ponytail, new tour tee thrown over my shoulder.
(Sidenote: that new tour shirt? Yeah, I chose the one that was only 15Euro instead of the almost requisite 25... There's a good reason it was cheaper than all the others. I liked it the best, so I don't really care, but it's a shirt from Jimmy Eat World's 2005 European tour.
That was two years ago.
I mean, I guess it doesn't matter, except that they didn't even GO to Paris on that tour, so all the dates listed are in a bunch of other places... Lesson learned: If the band hasn't released an album in the last two years, check the back before you buy the merch.)
I got on the Metro, ears still ringing (I have got to buy earplugs, preferably inconspicuous ones), and thought about what a friend’s mom said to me recently:
"Blair, does it ever strike you as... you know... ODD that you, of all people, are so into the rock scene?"
"Not really, why?"
"I just mean, out of all of you girls from high school, you were always the good one, and never into anything bad, and you still aren’t– but the music world is full of all kinds of things like that that you have never stood for. How do you figure that?"
I shrugged.
That was about a month ago, and I still haven’t figured out the answer.
Don’tTalkJustDance,
B
P.S. Immediately before the festival, I had my architecture design class. We met in the gardens of Luxembourg to sketch what my prof insisted on calling the "skyline," only, pronounced with a French accent means you draw out both of the "eye" sounds as long as possible. I assumed perhaps it was one of those weird English words that have made their way into the French language, like "le week-end" or "iPod," but finally, after the end of his 20 minute explanation on what we were to do, a girl raised her hand and said, in French, "But what is this, the skyline?" At which point I realized he had only been using that term because of me. Of all my professors I’ve had since coming here, he’s the only one I’ve heard speak English, and based on the words he knows, he’s got to be either fluent or else had an English tutor like me who taught him only useless words somewhere along the line. He knows "vanishing point," "skyline," and "sunglasses," among others. He walked past my sketch once about a month ago, picked it up, showed it to the class, and critiqued: "See, here you need more of an angle, your horizon is too low, your paper is too small... This belongs to Mademoiselle Parle-Anglais." Little Miss I-Speak-English. Thanks. But, as previously mentioned, he always teases the German kid in the class too, who is much more fluent in French than I am, about being German and asks him all kinds of questions: "Oh, what is the name for the chapiteau in German?" and things like that– I think I’ve escaped the questions only because he either 1) doesn’t think I understand what’s going on or 2) doesn’t think I’d know the English translation. He’s usually wrong on the first count, right on the second.
Lately he’s taken to calling me "notre amie brittanique." "Our little English-speaking friend." Well, really, it’s more like "our little anglo friend." (Sidenote: I’ve had people ask me if there are French WASPs. Think about this one, and you’ll figure out why it is a complete impossibility.) But now I’ve gotten used to it– I’m no longer mortified because now the whole class KNOWS I am foreign, if not exactly where from. Yesterday we were trying to sketch, and I am attempting my best negative-space design (the only art project I’ve ever gotten below an A- on; 8th grade art as an elective and I almost didn’t pass the negative space assignment), and the prof walks by, takes off his sunglasses, hands them to me with a flourish, and says, "Oh, cherie, you have forgotten yours, so here, borrow mine!" I had forgotten mine... it was supposed to rain, and my eyes were killing me from all the squinting... Maybe I shouldn’t be so scared of him after all?
A. I spent a record-breaking 8 hours at an American rock festival.
B. I was complimented on my black sparkly ballerina shoes with the rhinestone skull by the lead singer of Aiden.
C. I met Jimmy Eat World’s guitarist and AFI’s drummer.
Answer: B. Though I did wear the shoes, and though I did talk to the lead singer, he declined to comment on the shoes. Probably this was due to the fact that when I met him, the first words out of my mouth were "Who are those guys playing right now, they are amazing!" neglecting the unwritten ritual that, after a band’s set, if you run into them, you are obligated to compliment them on their performance, particularly if you are from the same country as them and no one else at the show is.
Yesterday the Give It A Name festival came to Paris, and I, of course, had had my ticket since February. I got to the venue around 4pm, a couple hours after it had started, but still caught all the important acts. The place was tiny– probably only holds 2000 max, all standing, but last night it held... definitely not more than 800. Which was amazing, considering the bands playing sell out at big arenas in the US. Because it was so empty and because it was veritably crawling with rock stars, every time I turned around I was looking at someone who had just been on stage. I stood close to the side, near the curtain that led backstage, and every time someone walked out from the curtain, it was a bandmember that had already played coming out to watch someone else’s set. In this way, I met Jimmy Eat World’s guitarist, who was quite nice, and surprised I was American. [Later on I was asked by several Brits if I had come from the US for this show– I’m not that obsessive.] The next time I turned around because I heard someone singing loudly behind me, it turned out it was the lead singer of the first act, who pretty much blew, so I didn’t bother giving him the time of day. I was sold a t-shirt by a band member, said hello to a few bassists, etc. Kind of intense.
Also, I realized it is likely I’ve been to too many shows in Paris: the first people I saw after I walked in were the guitarist and lead singer of my favorite French band, who were not playing last night but were just there to watch. Nobody else knew who they were, but I got all starstruck and tonguetied (it’s one thing talking to a rockstar in your OWN language, have you ever had to attempt it in a different one?) and ended up just standing back and staring at them from a distance till the moshers got in my way.
After the show, I walked outside and to the back entrance, which is, incidentally, the same one I sneaked into in October in a vain attempt to get backstage before getting kicked out by Mr. Clean himself. This time, though, proved quite worth it– the headlining band came out (one at a time) and I talked to a couple of them before I realized that it was 1230 and I was in the dead center of the worst area of Paris and had missed the last Metro home. I went flying toward the Metro stop, hoping I would be able to catch the last one, and, wonder of wonders, thanks to an "accidente technique," I made it, running through the station, onto the last one, still sweaty, hair pulled into a ponytail, new tour tee thrown over my shoulder.
(Sidenote: that new tour shirt? Yeah, I chose the one that was only 15Euro instead of the almost requisite 25... There's a good reason it was cheaper than all the others. I liked it the best, so I don't really care, but it's a shirt from Jimmy Eat World's 2005 European tour.
That was two years ago.
I mean, I guess it doesn't matter, except that they didn't even GO to Paris on that tour, so all the dates listed are in a bunch of other places... Lesson learned: If the band hasn't released an album in the last two years, check the back before you buy the merch.)
I got on the Metro, ears still ringing (I have got to buy earplugs, preferably inconspicuous ones), and thought about what a friend’s mom said to me recently:
"Blair, does it ever strike you as... you know... ODD that you, of all people, are so into the rock scene?"
"Not really, why?"
"I just mean, out of all of you girls from high school, you were always the good one, and never into anything bad, and you still aren’t– but the music world is full of all kinds of things like that that you have never stood for. How do you figure that?"
I shrugged.
That was about a month ago, and I still haven’t figured out the answer.
Don’tTalkJustDance,
B
P.S. Immediately before the festival, I had my architecture design class. We met in the gardens of Luxembourg to sketch what my prof insisted on calling the "skyline," only, pronounced with a French accent means you draw out both of the "eye" sounds as long as possible. I assumed perhaps it was one of those weird English words that have made their way into the French language, like "le week-end" or "iPod," but finally, after the end of his 20 minute explanation on what we were to do, a girl raised her hand and said, in French, "But what is this, the skyline?" At which point I realized he had only been using that term because of me. Of all my professors I’ve had since coming here, he’s the only one I’ve heard speak English, and based on the words he knows, he’s got to be either fluent or else had an English tutor like me who taught him only useless words somewhere along the line. He knows "vanishing point," "skyline," and "sunglasses," among others. He walked past my sketch once about a month ago, picked it up, showed it to the class, and critiqued: "See, here you need more of an angle, your horizon is too low, your paper is too small... This belongs to Mademoiselle Parle-Anglais." Little Miss I-Speak-English. Thanks. But, as previously mentioned, he always teases the German kid in the class too, who is much more fluent in French than I am, about being German and asks him all kinds of questions: "Oh, what is the name for the chapiteau in German?" and things like that– I think I’ve escaped the questions only because he either 1) doesn’t think I understand what’s going on or 2) doesn’t think I’d know the English translation. He’s usually wrong on the first count, right on the second.
Lately he’s taken to calling me "notre amie brittanique." "Our little English-speaking friend." Well, really, it’s more like "our little anglo friend." (Sidenote: I’ve had people ask me if there are French WASPs. Think about this one, and you’ll figure out why it is a complete impossibility.) But now I’ve gotten used to it– I’m no longer mortified because now the whole class KNOWS I am foreign, if not exactly where from. Yesterday we were trying to sketch, and I am attempting my best negative-space design (the only art project I’ve ever gotten below an A- on; 8th grade art as an elective and I almost didn’t pass the negative space assignment), and the prof walks by, takes off his sunglasses, hands them to me with a flourish, and says, "Oh, cherie, you have forgotten yours, so here, borrow mine!" I had forgotten mine... it was supposed to rain, and my eyes were killing me from all the squinting... Maybe I shouldn’t be so scared of him after all?
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Favorite people of the week: Sara and Celeste, who brought me Dr. Pepper from an African market in La Corneuve, a suburb somewhere north of Paris. SIX WHOLE CANS– I don’t even know what I am going to do with myself! It tastes like everything good in the world, sun and flowers and cherries and bubbles and deliciousness and absolute pure delight.
Favorite conversation from Prague, had between Shoshana and I as we realized we had climbed a mountain but descended on the wrong side and were trapped, meaning we were going to have to climb back up and descend the other side.
Blair: We might as well turn around now before that guard kicks us out...
Shoshana: No, let’s keep going– maybe we won’t get in trouble.
Blair: He’s in full GERMAN military regalia, he’s carrying a rifle, and we’re trespassing on the German embassy’s property– I’m thinking we’re going to be in trouble.
Shoshana: Point taken. But still... I mean... getting yelled at is better than having to climb this mountain again, right? Do you know any German?
Blair: Yeah, ich liebe dicht.
Shoshana: What does that mean?
Blair: I love you.
Significant pause.
Blair, in an effort to redeem herself: WAIT! I know more! Ich bin ein Berliner!
Shoshana: What does that mean?
Blair: ‘I’m from Berlin.’
Shoshana, trying to be optimistic: See? This is good! This is useful stuff! Come on, anything else?
Blair, discouraged: Ehh, strudel?
Shoshana: Ok, let’s stick with the first two... But see, this is good. You just tell him that we are from Berlin and have to go to the embassy, and if he still seems skeptical, tell him we love him.
The first round of the French presidential elections was yesterday. Since I am assuming they aren’t getting THAT much coverage in the US, I’ll explain:
In France (and pretty much everywhere in the world EXCEPT the US), there are too many parties and too many candidates for anyone to EVER achieve a majority in the elections. Thus they have a sort-of primary, only it’s NOT a primary, because in the first round elections, everyone is running for president, and they all belong to different parties– it just so happens that there are 13 or 14 parties that are big enough to support a presidential candidate, some of which are well known (Sarko, Royal, Buffet, Le Pen) and some of which are not (Bove, for example). I asked Madame how she keeps track of all of them and she said "Oh, there are always too many to worry about– one of them this year is from the South and speaks with such a crazy accent I can barely understand him!" "But Madame," I replied, "you understand me!" "I know, cherie, but he speaks so badly..."
So yesterday was the first round– a formality really, since everyone knew Sarkozy and Royal would win, and they did, with 31% and 25% respectively. Two more weeks till the real election, but everyone is waiting on tenterhooks, even me and my ex-pat friends, because there hasn’t been an election this close here since... I don’t know. It’s the French equivalent of Bush/Gore– or Bush/Kerry, I guess... Nobody knows. I’m thinking Sarko is going to win, and despite the fact that I am not as well-informed as I probably OUGHT to be, I am kind of disappointed by that. Most of my French friends and the other students at the University are for Royal– I’ve heard Sarko called a liar, thief, pervert, and pedophile among other things, by students on Royal’s side. I don’t think [most of] that is true, but nevertheless... may the best man (or woman, as the case may be) win...
~B
P.S. In France, I forgot to mention earlier when it would have been more appropriate, the Easter bunny does not bring Easter eggs. No, he doesn’t exist here, which probably does a lot to explain how he makes it through the whole US in just the one night. But since the eggs don’t just hide themselves, they have to have something, right? Yeah– they have a bell. A giant bell (la cloche de Paques) that rings on Easter morning and brings the eggs. The theory is that when the bell rings, the eggs are "called" and fall into their hiding places where you can then go find them and eat whatever is inside.
Favorite conversation from Prague, had between Shoshana and I as we realized we had climbed a mountain but descended on the wrong side and were trapped, meaning we were going to have to climb back up and descend the other side.
Blair: We might as well turn around now before that guard kicks us out...
Shoshana: No, let’s keep going– maybe we won’t get in trouble.
Blair: He’s in full GERMAN military regalia, he’s carrying a rifle, and we’re trespassing on the German embassy’s property– I’m thinking we’re going to be in trouble.
Shoshana: Point taken. But still... I mean... getting yelled at is better than having to climb this mountain again, right? Do you know any German?
Blair: Yeah, ich liebe dicht.
Shoshana: What does that mean?
Blair: I love you.
Significant pause.
Blair, in an effort to redeem herself: WAIT! I know more! Ich bin ein Berliner!
Shoshana: What does that mean?
Blair: ‘I’m from Berlin.’
Shoshana, trying to be optimistic: See? This is good! This is useful stuff! Come on, anything else?
Blair, discouraged: Ehh, strudel?
Shoshana: Ok, let’s stick with the first two... But see, this is good. You just tell him that we are from Berlin and have to go to the embassy, and if he still seems skeptical, tell him we love him.
The first round of the French presidential elections was yesterday. Since I am assuming they aren’t getting THAT much coverage in the US, I’ll explain:
In France (and pretty much everywhere in the world EXCEPT the US), there are too many parties and too many candidates for anyone to EVER achieve a majority in the elections. Thus they have a sort-of primary, only it’s NOT a primary, because in the first round elections, everyone is running for president, and they all belong to different parties– it just so happens that there are 13 or 14 parties that are big enough to support a presidential candidate, some of which are well known (Sarko, Royal, Buffet, Le Pen) and some of which are not (Bove, for example). I asked Madame how she keeps track of all of them and she said "Oh, there are always too many to worry about– one of them this year is from the South and speaks with such a crazy accent I can barely understand him!" "But Madame," I replied, "you understand me!" "I know, cherie, but he speaks so badly..."
So yesterday was the first round– a formality really, since everyone knew Sarkozy and Royal would win, and they did, with 31% and 25% respectively. Two more weeks till the real election, but everyone is waiting on tenterhooks, even me and my ex-pat friends, because there hasn’t been an election this close here since... I don’t know. It’s the French equivalent of Bush/Gore– or Bush/Kerry, I guess... Nobody knows. I’m thinking Sarko is going to win, and despite the fact that I am not as well-informed as I probably OUGHT to be, I am kind of disappointed by that. Most of my French friends and the other students at the University are for Royal– I’ve heard Sarko called a liar, thief, pervert, and pedophile among other things, by students on Royal’s side. I don’t think [most of] that is true, but nevertheless... may the best man (or woman, as the case may be) win...
~B
P.S. In France, I forgot to mention earlier when it would have been more appropriate, the Easter bunny does not bring Easter eggs. No, he doesn’t exist here, which probably does a lot to explain how he makes it through the whole US in just the one night. But since the eggs don’t just hide themselves, they have to have something, right? Yeah– they have a bell. A giant bell (la cloche de Paques) that rings on Easter morning and brings the eggs. The theory is that when the bell rings, the eggs are "called" and fall into their hiding places where you can then go find them and eat whatever is inside.
Monday, April 23, 2007
It seems unfair that some places in the world are as beautiful as Giverny, and others are as ugly as... well... everywhere else in the world.
I went to Giverny today– you know, as in Monet’s Gardens at...? Giverny is actually a small village (too small even to be a town, from what I could tell it was composed of two dirt roads of houses) about an hour by TGV outside Paris. This means that if you were going to DRIVE there, it would probably take you like three hours, because the TGV is the French train system that goes only places within France– it stands for "Very Fast Train" in French, literally. This morning the train left from Gare St. Lazare, which was ironic to me because Monet also did a series of paintings of that train station, back in the day when it must have been a lot cooler than it is now.
So I get to Vernon at 9am, which is the nearest train station to Giverny, 7km away. I took a bus from there to Monet’s house– a fancy charter shuttle thing that just goes back and forth all day with tourists. I was one of the first to get on the bus, and as everyone else boarded, I realized I was singlehandedly bringing down the average age by at least 28 years. And I am not that young. Maybe that makes me a secret old person or something, I don’t know, but I had so much fun I don’t even care.
Because we were so early (the next train from Paris didn’t arrive till 1130), there was almost no one in the gardens, which was amazing. The gardens are divided up into Monet’s normal garden– basically his backyard– and the water garden, where all the famous Nymphéas (waterlily) paintings were done.
I wish I could explain how beautiful everything was... To give you an idea, I’ve been to the Boboli Gardens in Florence, the Tuileries Garden in Paris, the gardens of the palace of Versailles, and lots of others since coming to Europe, all of which belonged to royalty. None of them even compare to this.
There’s not even really any way to explain the concept of European "gardens." It’s not like a carrot patch the way you would think of a garden in the States. And it’s not like a park either, because there are no playgrounds, and the places you are allowed to walk are very specific, usually graveled paths running amidst the strategically planted flowers and white marble statues. (Think the setting of AFI’s "Love Like Winter" video). But this... Monet’s gardens were... unbelievable. Every space where I wasn’t walking seemed to be overflowing with plants, all of them flowering right now. And the cool part is that the only flowers there are the ones we think of as "exotic" and expensive in the US– a rainbow of tulips, irises, lilacs, hyacinths, cottage roses, anemones, wisteria, poppies, lilies, buttercups, daffodils, and more colors of daisy than I knew existed. And thanks to the wisteria and lilacs, it smelled amazing. I wandered his backyard while the morning was still chilly– I call it "backyard," but it was huge... football field size maybe?
Then to the water garden, which is now separated from the rest by a road (how tragic). Again, I have no words. Every bridge I crossed made me want to roll up my jeans and go wading around in the icy-looking water, full of brightly colored fish and, obviously, floating lily pads. The real bridge he painted so many times was the only disappointing thing about the whole day– it looked just like it should have, except that it was made out of kelly green metal. I don’t know what happened to the white wood in the paintings? Ha.
I had brought a frozen water bottle, the makings of a munster-prosciutto baguette, and a carrot for lunch, but unfortunately I seem to have frozen a bottle of SPARKLING water, which then exploded all over me when I tried to open it. I was planning on eating lunch in the gardens somewhere when I got hungry, but I finished wandering before that, and as it got later the garden began to fill with (still old) tourists. So I left the main gardens and wandered down the (dirt) road to some smaller gardens I had passed on my way in. I wandered up and down the hills in the area, finally decided to settle down somewhere, and read my book for awhile, snoozed for awhile on a bench, and then ate lunch, all in a tiny hidden clearing I found. I was probably much less sneaky than I thought– there was a bench in the clearing, so obviously SOMEONE comes there. But the wall of hedge insulated me from the tourists, who I sometimes could hear on the other side of the bushes, but who never saw or heard me. After I got bored, I decided to go wander some more– I still had almost four hours till my train left Vernon, so I needed to occupy myself.
And now is when it gets really good– if the gardens were mind-bogglingly beautiful, what I found afterward was so amazing I wouldn’t be sure it was real except for the mazillion photos I took. I wandered down the dirt road (now called "Rue de Claude Monet," or something) and passed an antique shop, a few quaint cafés set up in old rambling houses, and then the most amazing church. The church may or may not be in use anymore, I am not really sure, but the doors were unlocked and open, though no one was inside. There was a sign sitting on the ground just inside the door asking the reader to "welcome God the way He welcomes you into this house," and from somewhere toward the front soft classical music played. I was the only one inside, so I sat for a moment in the hard wooden chairs, looking at the milky glass window with sunlight streaming in onto the old-fashioned piano sitting dustily in the corner. The altar had been painted fresco-style sometime in the distant past, so there were large gaps of paint missing where the plaster showed through the deep bright colors. I signed the guest book in French, and then left.
Outside I passed a monument to a British plane that was shot down by the Germans just before the Liberation of France. The plane was shot down over one of the adjacent farms, killing all seven of the crew members. The memorial was one propellor of the plane, incorporated into a very post-modern looking statue with a Union Jack flying over it. The church itself was the parish church of Giverny, where Monet and his family are buried, situated at the foot of the rolling green hills that surround the area. I walked all the way around the tiny country-style church, then kept on down the road that had taken me that far. I passed no one else on foot, only one or two cars, and had no idea where I would end up but I figured as long as I knew the Gardens were somewhere behind me I’d be able to make it back to where I needed to get. I passed houses straight out of a fairy tale– I know I probably say that a lot, but I am fairly certain every film I’ve ever seen set between 1300 and 1600 must have been set here.
Imagine: The sky was the kind of blue called Carolina Blue if you are from the US, cloudless except for those white streaks left by airplanes going somewhere far away. Slight breeze blowing just enough to keep my hair off my neck, the smell of lilacs heavy in the air. And to my left, a crumbling stone wall that comes up just to my eye level, beyond which and in the cracks of which I can make out a hillside that slopes downward to pasture land where cows are roaming through the greenest grass I have ever seen. On my right, a lower crumbling wall, covered with soft green fuzzy lichens and trailing ivy, just high enough to sit on, behind which loom imposingly large European "french provincial" style houses– only they really ARE in the French provinces. Sagging terra cotta roofs covered with more green lichen; stucco walls in white or pale beige or pink with ivy or a pink flowery vine I had never seen climbing upward to entwine the windows framed by deeply colorful shutters. Wrought iron gates enclosing the whole thing, with the hills rising greenly behind the houses, still in use after all these years. In front of me, the dusty road winding between the stone walls on each side of it, leading to who-knows-where.
I kept walking and walking, finding myself happier and happier, forgetting the stress of not knowing where I’ll live over the summer, the confusion of my unscheduled next semester classes, the research papers and finals looming heavily ahead of me when classes resume next week. Eventually the road became a path, and then opened up widely at a main road, perhaps the one my bus had come in on. It was only then that I realized I had probably walked two miles or so. I turned around, preparing to walk back, when I realized that I could just walk back to Vernon, the train station. I don’t hike enough in Europe, and I miss it, a lot. Especially in the French countryside, when it feels like a crime to take a bus/cab/whatever. I stopped at a service station at the corner to make sure the pietonne path (a paved one for pedestrians only) I had just seen would take me to Vernon, and was assured I would get there eventually.
I took off down the path, ditching my overshirt and rolling my jeans up to my knees, walking around like I was in the Bat Cave in my wifebeater and golfer-looking pants. There was no one on this path either, and I haven’t felt as relaxed as I did as I walked down it in so long... Relaxed enough, in fact, that I climbed up the steep bank on one side of the trail, fought my way through the brambles, and peed in the woods.
Wow, I can’t believe I just confessed it like that. But the truth is that I was kind of proud of myself for being such an Eagle Scout. (Remember my realization that I don’t have enough logical, Eagle Scoutish friends when I was in Prague? Yeah, well, taking off on a 7km walk on your own when you don’t really know where you are going may not be the ultimate in logical, but peeing in the woods? That’s the pinnacle of outdoorsy Eagle Scouty goodness, in my city girl never-in-the-Girl-Scouts opinion.)
So I kept on down the path, sun shining down on me, passing only one other person, an man old enough to be my grandfather sitting on the only bench I passed on the whole path. He looked like a cross between my actual grandfather and my brother’s namesake, and when I got close enough he turned and said "Bonjour, Mademoiselle," in the most polite voice I have ever heard, reaching up as though to tip his hat to me.
Eventually houses sprouted up along "my" path, which was good because the path soon ended at a fork and I had no idea where to go. Luckily, though, I have directional instincts like a fox ("They call me Whiskas"), so I followed the way I thought was right and suddenly ended up back almost in Vernon. I made it all the way to the train station, in fact, without asking for directions. All seven kilometers of it. Which is really not that far, only like five miles, but it was hands down the most amazing five miles I’ve walked in... a really long time.
Every time I go somewhere in Europe, I think I’ve discovered where I want some other chapter of my life to take place; I’m always thinking "I want to get married here someday," or "if I get married, I want to come here for my honeymoon." And then I stop and think about it and realize I am too much of a gypsy for that to ever work, and I will spend all the rest of my life searching out new adventures and new places to see, and never visiting the same ones again.
But Giverny? Yeah, I’d like to retire there. On Rue de Claude Monet, among the bed and breakfasts and the église paroissiale.
And I’ll always have a spare bedroom for you...
~B
I was standing on the famous bridge to take this picture.
I went to Giverny today– you know, as in Monet’s Gardens at...? Giverny is actually a small village (too small even to be a town, from what I could tell it was composed of two dirt roads of houses) about an hour by TGV outside Paris. This means that if you were going to DRIVE there, it would probably take you like three hours, because the TGV is the French train system that goes only places within France– it stands for "Very Fast Train" in French, literally. This morning the train left from Gare St. Lazare, which was ironic to me because Monet also did a series of paintings of that train station, back in the day when it must have been a lot cooler than it is now.
So I get to Vernon at 9am, which is the nearest train station to Giverny, 7km away. I took a bus from there to Monet’s house– a fancy charter shuttle thing that just goes back and forth all day with tourists. I was one of the first to get on the bus, and as everyone else boarded, I realized I was singlehandedly bringing down the average age by at least 28 years. And I am not that young. Maybe that makes me a secret old person or something, I don’t know, but I had so much fun I don’t even care.
Because we were so early (the next train from Paris didn’t arrive till 1130), there was almost no one in the gardens, which was amazing. The gardens are divided up into Monet’s normal garden– basically his backyard– and the water garden, where all the famous Nymphéas (waterlily) paintings were done.
I wish I could explain how beautiful everything was... To give you an idea, I’ve been to the Boboli Gardens in Florence, the Tuileries Garden in Paris, the gardens of the palace of Versailles, and lots of others since coming to Europe, all of which belonged to royalty. None of them even compare to this.
There’s not even really any way to explain the concept of European "gardens." It’s not like a carrot patch the way you would think of a garden in the States. And it’s not like a park either, because there are no playgrounds, and the places you are allowed to walk are very specific, usually graveled paths running amidst the strategically planted flowers and white marble statues. (Think the setting of AFI’s "Love Like Winter" video). But this... Monet’s gardens were... unbelievable. Every space where I wasn’t walking seemed to be overflowing with plants, all of them flowering right now. And the cool part is that the only flowers there are the ones we think of as "exotic" and expensive in the US– a rainbow of tulips, irises, lilacs, hyacinths, cottage roses, anemones, wisteria, poppies, lilies, buttercups, daffodils, and more colors of daisy than I knew existed. And thanks to the wisteria and lilacs, it smelled amazing. I wandered his backyard while the morning was still chilly– I call it "backyard," but it was huge... football field size maybe?
Then to the water garden, which is now separated from the rest by a road (how tragic). Again, I have no words. Every bridge I crossed made me want to roll up my jeans and go wading around in the icy-looking water, full of brightly colored fish and, obviously, floating lily pads. The real bridge he painted so many times was the only disappointing thing about the whole day– it looked just like it should have, except that it was made out of kelly green metal. I don’t know what happened to the white wood in the paintings? Ha.
I had brought a frozen water bottle, the makings of a munster-prosciutto baguette, and a carrot for lunch, but unfortunately I seem to have frozen a bottle of SPARKLING water, which then exploded all over me when I tried to open it. I was planning on eating lunch in the gardens somewhere when I got hungry, but I finished wandering before that, and as it got later the garden began to fill with (still old) tourists. So I left the main gardens and wandered down the (dirt) road to some smaller gardens I had passed on my way in. I wandered up and down the hills in the area, finally decided to settle down somewhere, and read my book for awhile, snoozed for awhile on a bench, and then ate lunch, all in a tiny hidden clearing I found. I was probably much less sneaky than I thought– there was a bench in the clearing, so obviously SOMEONE comes there. But the wall of hedge insulated me from the tourists, who I sometimes could hear on the other side of the bushes, but who never saw or heard me. After I got bored, I decided to go wander some more– I still had almost four hours till my train left Vernon, so I needed to occupy myself.
And now is when it gets really good– if the gardens were mind-bogglingly beautiful, what I found afterward was so amazing I wouldn’t be sure it was real except for the mazillion photos I took. I wandered down the dirt road (now called "Rue de Claude Monet," or something) and passed an antique shop, a few quaint cafés set up in old rambling houses, and then the most amazing church. The church may or may not be in use anymore, I am not really sure, but the doors were unlocked and open, though no one was inside. There was a sign sitting on the ground just inside the door asking the reader to "welcome God the way He welcomes you into this house," and from somewhere toward the front soft classical music played. I was the only one inside, so I sat for a moment in the hard wooden chairs, looking at the milky glass window with sunlight streaming in onto the old-fashioned piano sitting dustily in the corner. The altar had been painted fresco-style sometime in the distant past, so there were large gaps of paint missing where the plaster showed through the deep bright colors. I signed the guest book in French, and then left.
Outside I passed a monument to a British plane that was shot down by the Germans just before the Liberation of France. The plane was shot down over one of the adjacent farms, killing all seven of the crew members. The memorial was one propellor of the plane, incorporated into a very post-modern looking statue with a Union Jack flying over it. The church itself was the parish church of Giverny, where Monet and his family are buried, situated at the foot of the rolling green hills that surround the area. I walked all the way around the tiny country-style church, then kept on down the road that had taken me that far. I passed no one else on foot, only one or two cars, and had no idea where I would end up but I figured as long as I knew the Gardens were somewhere behind me I’d be able to make it back to where I needed to get. I passed houses straight out of a fairy tale– I know I probably say that a lot, but I am fairly certain every film I’ve ever seen set between 1300 and 1600 must have been set here.
Imagine: The sky was the kind of blue called Carolina Blue if you are from the US, cloudless except for those white streaks left by airplanes going somewhere far away. Slight breeze blowing just enough to keep my hair off my neck, the smell of lilacs heavy in the air. And to my left, a crumbling stone wall that comes up just to my eye level, beyond which and in the cracks of which I can make out a hillside that slopes downward to pasture land where cows are roaming through the greenest grass I have ever seen. On my right, a lower crumbling wall, covered with soft green fuzzy lichens and trailing ivy, just high enough to sit on, behind which loom imposingly large European "french provincial" style houses– only they really ARE in the French provinces. Sagging terra cotta roofs covered with more green lichen; stucco walls in white or pale beige or pink with ivy or a pink flowery vine I had never seen climbing upward to entwine the windows framed by deeply colorful shutters. Wrought iron gates enclosing the whole thing, with the hills rising greenly behind the houses, still in use after all these years. In front of me, the dusty road winding between the stone walls on each side of it, leading to who-knows-where.
I kept walking and walking, finding myself happier and happier, forgetting the stress of not knowing where I’ll live over the summer, the confusion of my unscheduled next semester classes, the research papers and finals looming heavily ahead of me when classes resume next week. Eventually the road became a path, and then opened up widely at a main road, perhaps the one my bus had come in on. It was only then that I realized I had probably walked two miles or so. I turned around, preparing to walk back, when I realized that I could just walk back to Vernon, the train station. I don’t hike enough in Europe, and I miss it, a lot. Especially in the French countryside, when it feels like a crime to take a bus/cab/whatever. I stopped at a service station at the corner to make sure the pietonne path (a paved one for pedestrians only) I had just seen would take me to Vernon, and was assured I would get there eventually.
I took off down the path, ditching my overshirt and rolling my jeans up to my knees, walking around like I was in the Bat Cave in my wifebeater and golfer-looking pants. There was no one on this path either, and I haven’t felt as relaxed as I did as I walked down it in so long... Relaxed enough, in fact, that I climbed up the steep bank on one side of the trail, fought my way through the brambles, and peed in the woods.
Wow, I can’t believe I just confessed it like that. But the truth is that I was kind of proud of myself for being such an Eagle Scout. (Remember my realization that I don’t have enough logical, Eagle Scoutish friends when I was in Prague? Yeah, well, taking off on a 7km walk on your own when you don’t really know where you are going may not be the ultimate in logical, but peeing in the woods? That’s the pinnacle of outdoorsy Eagle Scouty goodness, in my city girl never-in-the-Girl-Scouts opinion.)
So I kept on down the path, sun shining down on me, passing only one other person, an man old enough to be my grandfather sitting on the only bench I passed on the whole path. He looked like a cross between my actual grandfather and my brother’s namesake, and when I got close enough he turned and said "Bonjour, Mademoiselle," in the most polite voice I have ever heard, reaching up as though to tip his hat to me.
Eventually houses sprouted up along "my" path, which was good because the path soon ended at a fork and I had no idea where to go. Luckily, though, I have directional instincts like a fox ("They call me Whiskas"), so I followed the way I thought was right and suddenly ended up back almost in Vernon. I made it all the way to the train station, in fact, without asking for directions. All seven kilometers of it. Which is really not that far, only like five miles, but it was hands down the most amazing five miles I’ve walked in... a really long time.
Every time I go somewhere in Europe, I think I’ve discovered where I want some other chapter of my life to take place; I’m always thinking "I want to get married here someday," or "if I get married, I want to come here for my honeymoon." And then I stop and think about it and realize I am too much of a gypsy for that to ever work, and I will spend all the rest of my life searching out new adventures and new places to see, and never visiting the same ones again.
But Giverny? Yeah, I’d like to retire there. On Rue de Claude Monet, among the bed and breakfasts and the église paroissiale.
And I’ll always have a spare bedroom for you...
~B
I was standing on the famous bridge to take this picture.
Front door of Monet's house, which is now restored as a museum that, ironically, holds none of his works.
Love this picture, perhaps more in sepia than in color. This was the south corner of the transept of the church I found. Beautiful.
"The Artist's Corner." Bed and Breakfast with an awesome terraced cafe on the bottom floor.
This one is better in color, but I couldn't find my color version of it. All the houses looked like this... the only thing that could make it more authentic would be if the roof were thatched.
I have this extremely loud German friend. I love her. She’s amazing. And she’s also probably the loudest person I’ve ever met. It’s not that she shouts, it’s more that she shrieks, the ultimate in girly.
This is what happened last week at church:
Blair: "What happened to Anais? One minute she was sitting here next to me, and now she’s gone!"
Sindy: "I don’t know, how do you call it? She has bumblebees in her ass!"
(Please remember this was taking place in church)
Blair: "What?"
Sindy: "Yeah, you know, bumblebees, like ‘bzzzz bzz.’ She has them in her ass, I said!"
Blair: "You mean like ‘ants in her pants?’"
Sindy: "No, I said BUMBLEBEES IN HER ASS! They make her not sit still!"
Blair: "I think you mean ‘up,’ and not ‘in.’ No, wait, that’s not the point! You shouldn’t maybe say that quite so loud..."
Sindy: "Why not? She does, look at her, over there talking to that guy when she should be sitting with us!"
Blair: "No, I know... it’s just... in English we say ‘she has ants in her pants.’ Because ‘ass’ is not really something polite to say."
Sindy: "You just said it."
Blair: "I know, I mean, it’s not like a huge deal... there are worse things you could do... I just think... maybe this isn’t the appropriate time to say it?"
Sindy: "Well, then what is the worst thing you could say in English?"
I said it quietly to her, knowing she wouldn’t let it go until I told her. So I leaned close and said it quietly, not wanting the entire crowd to hear us.
Sindy repeated it at top volume, followed by two or three question marks and exclamation points.
"...THAT’S the worst thing you could say in English? How boring! I always thought there would be worse ones. They say that in movies all the time!"
A few weeks ago while hanging out with my Swedish friend, the ultimate in conservative, she dropped her wallet and blurted "SHIT!" Surprised because I had never heard her say anything more serious than "Oh no," I turned to her wide-eyed.
"Are you ok?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Because you just yelled shit. I thought something bad might have happened."
"Oh, it did. I dropped something."
I paused thoughtfully.
"Do you know what ‘shit’ means?" I asked, genuinely curious.
"Yeah. It’s like ‘oh no,’ or ‘rats,’ right?"
"I mean..."
"Because in Sweden that is how we use it."
"You use English curse words in Sweden?"
"SHIT IS A CURSE WORD?"
"I mean... yes."
So in Sweden, that is what they say. Apparently. In everyday conversation.
"Is it really bad to say?" she asked.
"I mean, it’s not the end of the world. People our age say it all the time. But you wouldn’t say it, like, in front of your parents or boss or something."
"Blair! I can’t believe it! I’ve said it to my professors before!"
I’ve also inadvertently learned a lot of French cuss words while here. But the problem is that they don’t directly correspond with ours, so despite the fact that there are a lot I think are probably not serious, I don’t want to use them and end up like my poor unknowing Swedish friend.
~B
P.S. I was at Monoprix (the grocery store) today, and I walked past the butcher counter where I noticed whole... somethings. I walked over to see what they were, out of some kind of morbid curiosity, and I realized they were rabbits. Whole, skinned, raw, and STILL LOOKING AT ME. Somehow they had skinned them, including their eyelids, but not their eyeballs, and they were in their laying on their backs, looking out at me and begging me to stop eating their animal friends. After I go back to the US, no more meat. That settled it. I’m going to have to go back to being a vegetarian after that... It was quite distressing.
This is what happened last week at church:
Blair: "What happened to Anais? One minute she was sitting here next to me, and now she’s gone!"
Sindy: "I don’t know, how do you call it? She has bumblebees in her ass!"
(Please remember this was taking place in church)
Blair: "What?"
Sindy: "Yeah, you know, bumblebees, like ‘bzzzz bzz.’ She has them in her ass, I said!"
Blair: "You mean like ‘ants in her pants?’"
Sindy: "No, I said BUMBLEBEES IN HER ASS! They make her not sit still!"
Blair: "I think you mean ‘up,’ and not ‘in.’ No, wait, that’s not the point! You shouldn’t maybe say that quite so loud..."
Sindy: "Why not? She does, look at her, over there talking to that guy when she should be sitting with us!"
Blair: "No, I know... it’s just... in English we say ‘she has ants in her pants.’ Because ‘ass’ is not really something polite to say."
Sindy: "You just said it."
Blair: "I know, I mean, it’s not like a huge deal... there are worse things you could do... I just think... maybe this isn’t the appropriate time to say it?"
Sindy: "Well, then what is the worst thing you could say in English?"
I said it quietly to her, knowing she wouldn’t let it go until I told her. So I leaned close and said it quietly, not wanting the entire crowd to hear us.
Sindy repeated it at top volume, followed by two or three question marks and exclamation points.
"...THAT’S the worst thing you could say in English? How boring! I always thought there would be worse ones. They say that in movies all the time!"
A few weeks ago while hanging out with my Swedish friend, the ultimate in conservative, she dropped her wallet and blurted "SHIT!" Surprised because I had never heard her say anything more serious than "Oh no," I turned to her wide-eyed.
"Are you ok?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Because you just yelled shit. I thought something bad might have happened."
"Oh, it did. I dropped something."
I paused thoughtfully.
"Do you know what ‘shit’ means?" I asked, genuinely curious.
"Yeah. It’s like ‘oh no,’ or ‘rats,’ right?"
"I mean..."
"Because in Sweden that is how we use it."
"You use English curse words in Sweden?"
"SHIT IS A CURSE WORD?"
"I mean... yes."
So in Sweden, that is what they say. Apparently. In everyday conversation.
"Is it really bad to say?" she asked.
"I mean, it’s not the end of the world. People our age say it all the time. But you wouldn’t say it, like, in front of your parents or boss or something."
"Blair! I can’t believe it! I’ve said it to my professors before!"
I’ve also inadvertently learned a lot of French cuss words while here. But the problem is that they don’t directly correspond with ours, so despite the fact that there are a lot I think are probably not serious, I don’t want to use them and end up like my poor unknowing Swedish friend.
~B
P.S. I was at Monoprix (the grocery store) today, and I walked past the butcher counter where I noticed whole... somethings. I walked over to see what they were, out of some kind of morbid curiosity, and I realized they were rabbits. Whole, skinned, raw, and STILL LOOKING AT ME. Somehow they had skinned them, including their eyelids, but not their eyeballs, and they were in their laying on their backs, looking out at me and begging me to stop eating their animal friends. After I go back to the US, no more meat. That settled it. I’m going to have to go back to being a vegetarian after that... It was quite distressing.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Europeans don’t use bedsheets. Have I mentioned that? It no longer seems weird to me, which is the really bizarre part. In hotels (and DEFINITELY in my apartment), you get a fitted sheet and then a duvet.
The thing about Paris is that no matter what the weather is, it has the power to immediately convince you that THIS is the exact way Paris is meant to be– when it was Living Nativity cold here, I wandered about in my knee-length coat, wool scarf, gloves, and knee high boots, it seemed like Paris could never be anything else... that it would never be as beautiful as it was then, with the gray sky and the wind whipping through my hair.
In the fall, when I walked around being hit in the head with chestnut hulls hurled from the trees that line every boulevard in the city, when the leaves were changing and everywhere I went I could smell the roasted nuts sold by street vendors in paper cups, it seemed that the city was just designed to be seen that way, in golds and reds, with the smell of smoke and the light fog that came from the Seine after it got dark...
And now it’s printemps here, and I’ve never seen anything quite so amazing in my life.
Today I went to Paris Plage– the "Paris Beach." When the weather is good, Parisians flock to the banks of the Seine to soak it up while it lasts, because it doesn’t always last long. The "banks" of the Seine, just for the record, are not like the banks of a regular river. The Seine is... paved. I don’t really know how to describe it other than that. The only other river I have ever spent significant time around (though never in) is the Kentucky River, which is not even like a cousin of the Seine. The Seine is probably just as dirty but looks much cleaner because it runs clearish black, whereas the KY River is generally opaque milky green with refrigerators floating down it.
Anyway, the "banks" are concrete walls that rise on each side of the river, leveling out about 4 meters above the water to a flat concrete space about 3 meters wide, then rising again to street level, where cars drive. BUT you can go down to that intermediate level (along most of the river), which is where gypsies and Americans who are more hardcore than I am sleep in the summers, in makeshift gypsy/American camps, where everyone wears their hair in dreads and cooks dinner over a campfire under a bridge, but somehow it is SO COOL and not sketchy. Probably because after dinner they always get out their acoustic guitars and tambourines and have a party. But during the day in the spring, the banks are full of REAL Parisians– the river’s edge becomes a haven for Parisians to get away from the tourists that drive them all crazy.
Today it was just cool enough that I was comfortable in a short-sleeved shirt and skirt– I had the sense not to wear tights in hopes of getting sun on my legs, and I think it might have worked. I brought my book, nestled up against the wall on the Right Bank (the north bank, if you really want to know) where the sun was shining best, and began to read my book through my tractor sunglasses, the ones that make me feel so ridiculously chic and rockstar. On one side of me was a guy about my age asleep on his skateboard with his feet dangling over the water, and on the other side a group of rowdy topless teenage guys speaking a mixture of French and Italian, waving and shouting at all the boats that passed. I read for awhile and sipped my sparkling water, then fluffed my purse and went to sleep with it under my head– the French equivalent of napping on the Quad. I jerked awake when a tourist boat riding by honked at a steamer in its way, and the guy next to me said, "Oh, don’t worry, you can go back to sleep, they weren’t honking at you."
In other news, I’ve heard (through the foreign college student grapevine) that there is talk back in the US of impeaching Bush as a formal censure. I don’t know if this is a LEGIT rumor, or just wishful thinking on the part of the French the way everyone rumored about impeaching Clinton years before it happened, and to be honest I don’t really care. You know how they say "Fool me once..."? Well, shouldn’t it be the same with presidents? Elect one that turns out to be a bad egg, shame on him; elect another IMMEDIATELY AFTER THAT, shame on YOU. You can’t just start impeaching every lame duck president we have; the world would go to hell in a handbasket, or at least the price of gas would.
I was at the Musee Nationale du Moyen Age today (the biggest Middle Ages museum in the world, I think...), where the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry series is hung, and I came across a narwhal tooth in a forgotten display somewhere in the basement frigidarium. I don’t know exactly what a narwhal IS except that it’s not exactly a whale, but something close to it... Anyway, the narwhal tooth on display was very nearly as tall as me, probably slightly over five feet (ok, so still like 8 inches shorter than me, but whatever), and displayed with a plaque that said in the Middle Ages it was treated as a sacred object because everyone thought it was the horn of a unicorn. How weird is that?
Also on display: a reliquary (the fancy boxes that pieces of saints were stored in to be worshipped) containing Jesus’ umbilical cord.
I have no idea how people decided which relics went with which saint, and if something was a relic at all (most common are fragments of bone; pieces of the shroud Jesus was buried in; locks of hair of saints, etc.) but I do know that there was a Renaissance priest quoted in a book I read for class one time as saying that "if you could compile all the relics of the cross in France, you would have enough to build the ark." Which is to say that even back then there was a certain degree of skepticism that went with the collection and authenticity of relics– but a BELLY BUTTON? I mean, really– EWW.
Wasting away,
~B
P.S. I discovered that if I lie down on the futon in my room while it is unfolded, I can see the whole top viewing deck of the Eiffel Tower, whereas usually it is just a piece of it.
The thing about Paris is that no matter what the weather is, it has the power to immediately convince you that THIS is the exact way Paris is meant to be– when it was Living Nativity cold here, I wandered about in my knee-length coat, wool scarf, gloves, and knee high boots, it seemed like Paris could never be anything else... that it would never be as beautiful as it was then, with the gray sky and the wind whipping through my hair.
In the fall, when I walked around being hit in the head with chestnut hulls hurled from the trees that line every boulevard in the city, when the leaves were changing and everywhere I went I could smell the roasted nuts sold by street vendors in paper cups, it seemed that the city was just designed to be seen that way, in golds and reds, with the smell of smoke and the light fog that came from the Seine after it got dark...
And now it’s printemps here, and I’ve never seen anything quite so amazing in my life.
Today I went to Paris Plage– the "Paris Beach." When the weather is good, Parisians flock to the banks of the Seine to soak it up while it lasts, because it doesn’t always last long. The "banks" of the Seine, just for the record, are not like the banks of a regular river. The Seine is... paved. I don’t really know how to describe it other than that. The only other river I have ever spent significant time around (though never in) is the Kentucky River, which is not even like a cousin of the Seine. The Seine is probably just as dirty but looks much cleaner because it runs clearish black, whereas the KY River is generally opaque milky green with refrigerators floating down it.
Anyway, the "banks" are concrete walls that rise on each side of the river, leveling out about 4 meters above the water to a flat concrete space about 3 meters wide, then rising again to street level, where cars drive. BUT you can go down to that intermediate level (along most of the river), which is where gypsies and Americans who are more hardcore than I am sleep in the summers, in makeshift gypsy/American camps, where everyone wears their hair in dreads and cooks dinner over a campfire under a bridge, but somehow it is SO COOL and not sketchy. Probably because after dinner they always get out their acoustic guitars and tambourines and have a party. But during the day in the spring, the banks are full of REAL Parisians– the river’s edge becomes a haven for Parisians to get away from the tourists that drive them all crazy.
Today it was just cool enough that I was comfortable in a short-sleeved shirt and skirt– I had the sense not to wear tights in hopes of getting sun on my legs, and I think it might have worked. I brought my book, nestled up against the wall on the Right Bank (the north bank, if you really want to know) where the sun was shining best, and began to read my book through my tractor sunglasses, the ones that make me feel so ridiculously chic and rockstar. On one side of me was a guy about my age asleep on his skateboard with his feet dangling over the water, and on the other side a group of rowdy topless teenage guys speaking a mixture of French and Italian, waving and shouting at all the boats that passed. I read for awhile and sipped my sparkling water, then fluffed my purse and went to sleep with it under my head– the French equivalent of napping on the Quad. I jerked awake when a tourist boat riding by honked at a steamer in its way, and the guy next to me said, "Oh, don’t worry, you can go back to sleep, they weren’t honking at you."
In other news, I’ve heard (through the foreign college student grapevine) that there is talk back in the US of impeaching Bush as a formal censure. I don’t know if this is a LEGIT rumor, or just wishful thinking on the part of the French the way everyone rumored about impeaching Clinton years before it happened, and to be honest I don’t really care. You know how they say "Fool me once..."? Well, shouldn’t it be the same with presidents? Elect one that turns out to be a bad egg, shame on him; elect another IMMEDIATELY AFTER THAT, shame on YOU. You can’t just start impeaching every lame duck president we have; the world would go to hell in a handbasket, or at least the price of gas would.
I was at the Musee Nationale du Moyen Age today (the biggest Middle Ages museum in the world, I think...), where the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry series is hung, and I came across a narwhal tooth in a forgotten display somewhere in the basement frigidarium. I don’t know exactly what a narwhal IS except that it’s not exactly a whale, but something close to it... Anyway, the narwhal tooth on display was very nearly as tall as me, probably slightly over five feet (ok, so still like 8 inches shorter than me, but whatever), and displayed with a plaque that said in the Middle Ages it was treated as a sacred object because everyone thought it was the horn of a unicorn. How weird is that?
Also on display: a reliquary (the fancy boxes that pieces of saints were stored in to be worshipped) containing Jesus’ umbilical cord.
I have no idea how people decided which relics went with which saint, and if something was a relic at all (most common are fragments of bone; pieces of the shroud Jesus was buried in; locks of hair of saints, etc.) but I do know that there was a Renaissance priest quoted in a book I read for class one time as saying that "if you could compile all the relics of the cross in France, you would have enough to build the ark." Which is to say that even back then there was a certain degree of skepticism that went with the collection and authenticity of relics– but a BELLY BUTTON? I mean, really– EWW.
Wasting away,
~B
P.S. I discovered that if I lie down on the futon in my room while it is unfolded, I can see the whole top viewing deck of the Eiffel Tower, whereas usually it is just a piece of it.
And the rest of the voyage, since I won’t leave you with just that vignette:
Shoshana, I feel I should explain, is a friend who lived next door to me our freshman year, and then pledged the same sorority as me, so we went from neighbors to sisters, and have walked each other through every stressful Greek event ever since. She’s studying in Israel this semester, and so we decided to meet somewhere not exactly halfway (the Czech Republic) for our simultaneous spring breaks.
Prague is divided into four sections, which translated into English are Lesser Town, Old Town, New Town, and the Jewish Quarter. Prague Castle is on a hill on the edge of town, which is where we hung out the first day, wandering through Wenceslas Square in New Town to the astronomic clock with its skeletal representation of Death that rings the bell every hour across the Vltava River via the Charles Bridge to Lesser Town, where we drank Bitter Lemons. Or at least I did– the first day we were there was the last day of Passover, so Shosh shared her kosher chocolate cake with me, and we waited until post-sunset to eat, the grumbling in our stomach squelched by the extra matzo (matzoh?) she had in her bag. But then we got dinner at a tiny "traditional Czech" restaurant, sitting on the terrace next to the bustling Charles Bridge, a haven of quiet after our busy wanderings of the day. The river breeze blew through the trees above us, and we ate Czech food, which resembles German more than Russian: heavy dumplings, lots of sauerkraut, meat in everything, and more beer than I knew existed (which is saying a lot, considering I lived on Frat Row for a whole year). The dumplings were... amazing. Shoshana’s verdict was that they were like uncooked dough, which wasn’t untrue, but they came in the shape of polenta, sliced and smooth and round, heavy and chewy– nothing like American dumplings that come with chicken.
We stayed with a friend studying in Prague for the rest of the week, which was awesome– every morning we went to "Rembrandt Doughnuts," a doughnut shop that, ironically, doesn’t serve doughnuts, on the corner of her street by the tram stop. We went up to the castle quarter one day, where we saw the window that the guy was thrown out of in the Defenestration of Prague and climbed a tower with 287 steps winding in such tight circles that I almost lost my balance and fell all the way down several times on the way up. We saw the changing of the guard (BUT WHAT ARE THEY GUARDING? No one seems to know), and learned that the Czech military dress uniform was designed not even ten years ago by the costume designer for the movie Amadeus. No joke. The country decided they wanted something that looked older than their country, so they hired this guy to make their uniforms. A Hollywood costume designer. Am I the only one that thinks that is weird?
(This is why I am good at Trivial Pursuit/Balderdash and bad at history tests: general concepts elude me, but I can give you every fascinating tidbit from the history of Prague. You should come visit me in Paris and hear my tour of this city. I’ve given it enough times that I have perfected it; it includes a story I made up about the oldest monument in Paris, a mention of the Statue of Liberty flame with the flowers for Princess Di, and the reason French people call their wine openers "DeGaulles.")
So anyway, we saw the castle and the cathedral used by the royal family back in the day, designed by Mucha, the guy who singlehandedly began the Art Nouveau movement. Beautiful. We had heard that there was a monastery somewhere closeby, so we got ourselves good and lost in the process of trying to find it, but pretty soon we emerged in the middle of the courtyard of a monastery. We let ourselves go for a moment of jubilation at having found it (we searched for close to an hour for the place), then we looked at each other and blurted "Now what?"
Because what do you DO at a monastery (if you aren’t a monk)? We attempted to go into their basilica, and found it was actually unlocked– we walked in to find the monks chanting at the front of the church, an iron gate pulled across the back to keep the rest of the world out of the main part of the sanctuary. But we were allowed in the back, so we stood there and listened to the white robed monks chant in a language we couldn’t understand, until they filed out the north side of the building.
Prague’s goal, as a city, apparently, is to be the eastern European version of Paris– the largest street in the city, where all the fancier stores are, is called (in Czech) Paris Street, and lined with trees just like the Champs-Elysees here. There is also, on a high hill outside town, a "replica" of the Eiffel Tower, which Praguers claim is just as good as the real thing. They claim it’s the same size as the real one, since it’s built on a hill, but the size of the actual THING is... well... petite, to say the least. Everyone kept telling me I "had to see it," since I live in Paris... Maybe I am just cocky now, since I can see the real one from my window less than a ten minute walk away, but the Prague version is nothing like the real one. I mean, if you’re gonna claim it’s a replica, at least MAKE IT A REPLICA. It’s light blue (as opposed to the Paris version’s brown); it has 112 anchor points all the way around it, to the original’s 4; it’s constructed with single steel bars instead of the reinforced (spelling? That’s the French way...) square trusses like the real one; and since it just sits squarely on the ground instead of having pillars, there is a spiral staircase that leads to the top (it’s short enough that there isn’t even an elevator). I’m not saying it’s lame, it was quite pretty. BUT I am saying that, had no one told me it was meant to be the Czech version of the Eiffel Tower, I probably wouldn’t have picked up on it myself.
We went to Josefova, the Jewish Quarter, on our last day in Prague, to see the synagogues, the museum, and the memorial to the Czech Jews killed in the Holocaust. The biggest synagogue in Prague is known as the Spanish Synagogue, and is based on the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (which I thought was a mosque?). It was beautiful, full of all kinds of art that I couldn’t begin to comprehend, all decorated in reds and golds and navy. In the Jewish Museum, the names of every Jew from Prague killed during World War II is listed on the walls. Three rooms are filled from floor to ceiling with names, and that is in Prague alone. The whole neighborhood was pretty much the opposite of the Paris Jewish Quarter (Le Marais), which is in the center of the city, adjacent to and melded with the gay quarter, less historic and more contemporary, with far fewer synagogues and monuments, and many more streetside falafel vendors.
We decided to go on a daytrip out of Prague one day, and chose, as our destination, Plze . Plze (pronounced PILL-zin) is the birthplace of Pilsner beer, and as such is a semi-touristed destination among both studying abroad frat boys and European high school students on school-sponsored trips, which I don’t completely understand. The hour-and-a-half long train ride was 200 Koruna for us together, or about $5/each, through some of the most beautiful countryside I have seen since my last visit to Kentucky. The rolling green hills were full of beaten-up slightly ramshackle houses, but somehow it just romanticized the whole view even more. We arrived in the town and walked to the beer factory just in time to catch the 2pm tour. They walked us through the process of making beer, and at the end they gave us freshly matured beer out of a wooden barrel, which we drank while standing in their cellars over an upturned barrel.
After the beer tour we wandered the town some more, debated jumping into the river that divides it in half (Shoshana: "You’ve jumped off bridges before right? Come on, how bad could it be?" Blair: "Yeah, I’d like to... the problem is that we need a boy to go down there and make sure it’s deep enough first."), and bought gelato from the only vendor we could find.
Actually, we ate a lot of gelato. It’s probably good the two of us didn’t decide to go to Italy together, because we wouldn’t have done anything but look for gelato..
One at a time,
B
P.S. There’s this statue on the Charles Bridge that you are supposed to rub and make a wish, and if you don’t tell anyone the wish, it will come true. As a consequence of this, the entire middle portion of the statue has been rubbed smooth gold where it was once sculpted black. I put the art history student in me aside for the sake of a wish and rubbed it anyway, knowing it’s awful for the statue but justifying it because it’s probably less bad than the acid rain that falls on it every year. Now all that’s left to do is wait for the wish to come true...
Shoshana, I feel I should explain, is a friend who lived next door to me our freshman year, and then pledged the same sorority as me, so we went from neighbors to sisters, and have walked each other through every stressful Greek event ever since. She’s studying in Israel this semester, and so we decided to meet somewhere not exactly halfway (the Czech Republic) for our simultaneous spring breaks.
Prague is divided into four sections, which translated into English are Lesser Town, Old Town, New Town, and the Jewish Quarter. Prague Castle is on a hill on the edge of town, which is where we hung out the first day, wandering through Wenceslas Square in New Town to the astronomic clock with its skeletal representation of Death that rings the bell every hour across the Vltava River via the Charles Bridge to Lesser Town, where we drank Bitter Lemons. Or at least I did– the first day we were there was the last day of Passover, so Shosh shared her kosher chocolate cake with me, and we waited until post-sunset to eat, the grumbling in our stomach squelched by the extra matzo (matzoh?) she had in her bag. But then we got dinner at a tiny "traditional Czech" restaurant, sitting on the terrace next to the bustling Charles Bridge, a haven of quiet after our busy wanderings of the day. The river breeze blew through the trees above us, and we ate Czech food, which resembles German more than Russian: heavy dumplings, lots of sauerkraut, meat in everything, and more beer than I knew existed (which is saying a lot, considering I lived on Frat Row for a whole year). The dumplings were... amazing. Shoshana’s verdict was that they were like uncooked dough, which wasn’t untrue, but they came in the shape of polenta, sliced and smooth and round, heavy and chewy– nothing like American dumplings that come with chicken.
We stayed with a friend studying in Prague for the rest of the week, which was awesome– every morning we went to "Rembrandt Doughnuts," a doughnut shop that, ironically, doesn’t serve doughnuts, on the corner of her street by the tram stop. We went up to the castle quarter one day, where we saw the window that the guy was thrown out of in the Defenestration of Prague and climbed a tower with 287 steps winding in such tight circles that I almost lost my balance and fell all the way down several times on the way up. We saw the changing of the guard (BUT WHAT ARE THEY GUARDING? No one seems to know), and learned that the Czech military dress uniform was designed not even ten years ago by the costume designer for the movie Amadeus. No joke. The country decided they wanted something that looked older than their country, so they hired this guy to make their uniforms. A Hollywood costume designer. Am I the only one that thinks that is weird?
(This is why I am good at Trivial Pursuit/Balderdash and bad at history tests: general concepts elude me, but I can give you every fascinating tidbit from the history of Prague. You should come visit me in Paris and hear my tour of this city. I’ve given it enough times that I have perfected it; it includes a story I made up about the oldest monument in Paris, a mention of the Statue of Liberty flame with the flowers for Princess Di, and the reason French people call their wine openers "DeGaulles.")
So anyway, we saw the castle and the cathedral used by the royal family back in the day, designed by Mucha, the guy who singlehandedly began the Art Nouveau movement. Beautiful. We had heard that there was a monastery somewhere closeby, so we got ourselves good and lost in the process of trying to find it, but pretty soon we emerged in the middle of the courtyard of a monastery. We let ourselves go for a moment of jubilation at having found it (we searched for close to an hour for the place), then we looked at each other and blurted "Now what?"
Because what do you DO at a monastery (if you aren’t a monk)? We attempted to go into their basilica, and found it was actually unlocked– we walked in to find the monks chanting at the front of the church, an iron gate pulled across the back to keep the rest of the world out of the main part of the sanctuary. But we were allowed in the back, so we stood there and listened to the white robed monks chant in a language we couldn’t understand, until they filed out the north side of the building.
Prague’s goal, as a city, apparently, is to be the eastern European version of Paris– the largest street in the city, where all the fancier stores are, is called (in Czech) Paris Street, and lined with trees just like the Champs-Elysees here. There is also, on a high hill outside town, a "replica" of the Eiffel Tower, which Praguers claim is just as good as the real thing. They claim it’s the same size as the real one, since it’s built on a hill, but the size of the actual THING is... well... petite, to say the least. Everyone kept telling me I "had to see it," since I live in Paris... Maybe I am just cocky now, since I can see the real one from my window less than a ten minute walk away, but the Prague version is nothing like the real one. I mean, if you’re gonna claim it’s a replica, at least MAKE IT A REPLICA. It’s light blue (as opposed to the Paris version’s brown); it has 112 anchor points all the way around it, to the original’s 4; it’s constructed with single steel bars instead of the reinforced (spelling? That’s the French way...) square trusses like the real one; and since it just sits squarely on the ground instead of having pillars, there is a spiral staircase that leads to the top (it’s short enough that there isn’t even an elevator). I’m not saying it’s lame, it was quite pretty. BUT I am saying that, had no one told me it was meant to be the Czech version of the Eiffel Tower, I probably wouldn’t have picked up on it myself.
We went to Josefova, the Jewish Quarter, on our last day in Prague, to see the synagogues, the museum, and the memorial to the Czech Jews killed in the Holocaust. The biggest synagogue in Prague is known as the Spanish Synagogue, and is based on the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (which I thought was a mosque?). It was beautiful, full of all kinds of art that I couldn’t begin to comprehend, all decorated in reds and golds and navy. In the Jewish Museum, the names of every Jew from Prague killed during World War II is listed on the walls. Three rooms are filled from floor to ceiling with names, and that is in Prague alone. The whole neighborhood was pretty much the opposite of the Paris Jewish Quarter (Le Marais), which is in the center of the city, adjacent to and melded with the gay quarter, less historic and more contemporary, with far fewer synagogues and monuments, and many more streetside falafel vendors.
We decided to go on a daytrip out of Prague one day, and chose, as our destination, Plze . Plze (pronounced PILL-zin) is the birthplace of Pilsner beer, and as such is a semi-touristed destination among both studying abroad frat boys and European high school students on school-sponsored trips, which I don’t completely understand. The hour-and-a-half long train ride was 200 Koruna for us together, or about $5/each, through some of the most beautiful countryside I have seen since my last visit to Kentucky. The rolling green hills were full of beaten-up slightly ramshackle houses, but somehow it just romanticized the whole view even more. We arrived in the town and walked to the beer factory just in time to catch the 2pm tour. They walked us through the process of making beer, and at the end they gave us freshly matured beer out of a wooden barrel, which we drank while standing in their cellars over an upturned barrel.
After the beer tour we wandered the town some more, debated jumping into the river that divides it in half (Shoshana: "You’ve jumped off bridges before right? Come on, how bad could it be?" Blair: "Yeah, I’d like to... the problem is that we need a boy to go down there and make sure it’s deep enough first."), and bought gelato from the only vendor we could find.
Actually, we ate a lot of gelato. It’s probably good the two of us didn’t decide to go to Italy together, because we wouldn’t have done anything but look for gelato..
One at a time,
B
P.S. There’s this statue on the Charles Bridge that you are supposed to rub and make a wish, and if you don’t tell anyone the wish, it will come true. As a consequence of this, the entire middle portion of the statue has been rubbed smooth gold where it was once sculpted black. I put the art history student in me aside for the sake of a wish and rubbed it anyway, knowing it’s awful for the statue but justifying it because it’s probably less bad than the acid rain that falls on it every year. Now all that’s left to do is wait for the wish to come true...
Friday, April 13, 2007
The thing about the Czech Republic is that the only history I ever knew about it was the story of the Defenestration Of Prague, which made me think it must be the coolest place in the world. After having spent the last week there, I know that there probably is more history to the place, but the Defenestration Of Prague is really the only bit that matters.
(In case you don’t know [which you may not, since I only know because of an AP class I took from the coolest teacher in the world in high school], the Defenestration Of Prague is what sparked the 30Years’ War in what was then part of the Hapsburg Empire. Some of the details are missing, since I haven’t really studied this since 11th grade, but the important part is this: the peasants were mad about something [probably lack of food/feudalism/the church], as peasants are wont to be, so they chased an Important Government Official into a tower in the palace in Prague, backed him into a wall, and basically he was left with no choice but to jump out the window. It’s about a two-and-a-half story drop. He did it, and landed in a wagonload of horse poop, which was being used as fertilizer. The peasants were quelled, for the moment, thinking that perhaps it was enough to just throw someone into horse manure, but alas, he didn’t learn his lesson, and eventually they had to go to war over it.)
The other important thing to understand about the Czech Republic is that... well, it’s not really a developed country. I guess, perhaps, in the grand scale of things, it MIGHT count as "developed" on the UN’s scale, maybe, but it’s definitely as close to "developing" as any country I’ve ever spent significant time in.
I mean, there are definitely countries that are worse off than the Czech Republic: Croatia, for example, Nicaragua, and pretty much all of Africa with the probable exception of Egypt.
But it’s not the same as being in France, or England, or really anywhere else. I mean, come on, it’s not even been a country for MY entire lifetime, and I am really not that old.
But since history classes never get past World War II, my knowledge of the Cold War comes completely from Hollywood, and since I generally avoid movies set between 1950 and 1980, I really know next to nothing about the Cold War/Soviet Bloc/Velvet Revolution. A lot of the important recent events of the Czech Republic (like the fact that it became a country at all) happened within my lifetime, which makes it really kind of dumb that I don’t know anything about it, but I was too young at the time to remember it, and it’s still too current to be taught in school.
Other than the Defenestration Of Prague, the only other bit of Czech knowledge that I had prior to going was how to spell Czechoslovakia, which I learned in 1st grade when a kid I beat in the spelling bee asked me if I knew how to spell it. I remember looking at him and saying "I don’t even know what it MEANS." Being able to spell it, however, is a slightly obsolete skill, given that it hasn’t existed since about the time I was IN first grade.
All that said, I spent the last week in the Czech Republic, which was a lot of fun, a little bit scary, and quite an experience. First of all, NO ONE in that country speaks Russian– everyone my age and above knows how to (they were forced to learn it when they were under Communist control) but speaking it is completely taboo– signs are written first in Czech, then German, then English, then any other random European languages, usually Italian, Spanish, and Greek, in that order, but never ever Russian. Furthermore, I had this mistaken idea that crime in Prague/the Czech Republic is significantly worse than everywhere else in Europe– it’s probably about the same as all other big cities in Europe (though the size of Prague as compared to Paris is unbelievably small), but somehow Prague is a city where, no matter how much fun you are having, you never feel quite... safe. I’m not asking for Cathedral Domain safe, but it would be nice if one could just feel as comfortable there as in any other European city. Maybe it’s because not only is everything in a different language, but they even use different letters than us. Maybe it’s because I was raised with this Western idea that Eastern Europe is a place not quite civilized, a step above China if you are going on vacation, but a definite step below Western Europe/Hawaii.
So I was excited to go, to see what it was like, to buy things cheaply (they aren’t on the Euro yet, they still use Koruna [crowns], and I went through about 2500 of them while I was there, which is to say about $125 US dollars), and to see my friend Shoshana from Emory, who I haven’t seen since May.
But then this is what happened: my flight was supposed to get in at 23h10, which meant I had 50 minutes to make it to the hostel before public transportation shut down. So I was going to rush (cabs, obviously, being for the faint of heart). But then the luggage got delayed and I wasn’t leaving the airport until 23h40, and I knew I wouldn’t make it, given that I had to take a bus, then switch to a subway, then switch to a tram. Plus I still, at this point, was feeling not 100% safe in a country which has only been a country for as long as I’ve been a vegetarian, and used to be ruled by the KGB and people who wear furry hats with earflaps. So I gave in, and walked to the cab stand. I had been warned (from multiple guidebooks and the more reliable firsthand accounts of friends) that Czech cabbies are extremely unreliable/dishonest, don’t run the meter, take roundabout long ways of getting places, etc., so I knew to ask how much it would be before I got in. I pointed to the address I had written down, and the guy told me, in a voice copied straight from the Russian space station hero in Armageddon, that it would be "five, no six, yes maybe seex hawn-tred crown" to get me to the hostel. Fine. Whatever. At this point I still wasn’t completely sure how much they were worth (for the record, there is between 20 and 25 Koruna to a dollar). What I hadn’t been warned about was the fact that Czech buildings all have two addresses– one is the normal street address, like we would have in the US, or France, or ANYWHERE ELSE in the world, and the other is a completely random number that has something to do with the order in which the building was incorporated into the city, or made official, or something. One set of these numbers (I was never sure which) is on red signs in white letters, the other is on white signs with blue letters. I gave the guy the address, and we took off, listening to really old-school Celine Dion all the way.
And I hadn’t changed any money over yet. And Czech cabs (proof this is a developing country) do not have credit card machines.
We got over that glitch, and he dropped me off at what appeared to be an empty store front, perhaps an old hardware store, now empty, with no buzzer and no hostel sign.
But the address I had was "7/19" written like that, and the only address sign I saw on this building was 19, so I thought, illogically, "Maybe I should be at 7... I’ll walk down a few buildings." I got to 7 and it was a bar. A bar that had just kicked out the last patrons. Nothing else on the street was open. I wouldn’t say it was a bad neighborhood, but it was not a part of the former Soviet bloc that I relished being abandoned and alone in at 00h15 at night, with a large beat-up yellow duffel bag marking me from a mile away as a tourist. Armed with an address I couldn’t pronounce in a language I had never seen, I walked into the bar, the bartender tried to kick me out, and I somehow made it clear I needed directions, and he said, "Hostel, yes, plus two that way" and pointed the opposite direction down the street. "Ok," I thought to myself, no big deal, got it. "Plus two that way" turned out to be a closed grocery store with a [locked] church next to it. I began to get nervous. I walked to the end of the street, which was a pinwheel of 5 streets, and took the one next to where I was, terrified I would get confused and not be able to figure out where I was at all. I wandered down that street, trying to act like I knew where I was going, but despite the fact that each building has two addresses, they are also not placed systematically, so I could only find them on about every fourth building. And I didn’t know about this two-address system yet, so I couldn’t find any direction that seemed to be appropriate for me finding "7/19." I walked back onto the street where the cab had left me and wandered to the OTHER end of it, checking every buzzer for anything that looked like "ht haus," the name of the hostel. (Hostels here tend to be not like hotels– they don’t usually take up an entire building, just a few floors, so you find the buzzer and buzz up, just like an apartment.) I found nothing, but on my way back toward the direction I had come, I saw a sign for a church pension. I followed the sign and buzzed, but no one answered (it may have been the sign for the church pension fund office, and not a place to stay for all I know). By this time I was starting to get worried. I kept telling myself not to panic, but I knew if I didn’t get to the hostel to find the girl I was meeting right then, I wouldn’t find her (neither of our phones worked there). And there was no taxis in sight, no hotels, it was after midnight, I was alone, and suddenly I was really quite uneasy. Especially when I heard a large group of guys behind me, who started yelling something at each other (or perhaps me, who knows?) in Czech. I wouldn’t say I panicked, exactly, because there was no hyperventilating and I didn’t cry, but my new European "take-it-into-stride-and-it-will-be-a-great-story-later-on" mentality left me, along with my cool.
But I was still thinking clearly. The thought process, at that point, was something like this:
"Ok, B, you are 21 years old, you can handle this... You may be in the former USSR, but they have to have hotels, right? Ok, just start walking... this direction... because there are more lights this way. And more sketchy people. Yeah, but what are sketchy people going to do to you in the light? And there are probably strangers the other direction too, you just can’t see them because it is dark. Ok, this way. Dang it, that bar is closed, now nothing is open... and it’s really dark. And I’m cold, shivering... Alright, if you were an Eagle Scout, what would you do? What kind of a hypothermia-induced question is that? If you were an Eagle Scout you wouldn’t be in this situation because you wouldn’t be staying at a hostel, you’d be building yourself a shelter out of palm fronds and Q-tips. I don’t think they have palm fronds this far North... WAIT, FOCUS, B: you’re not an Eagle Scout. But you are FRIENDS with logical people, so what would THEY do in this situation? Think, think, who do I know that is logical... intelligent... Eagle-Scoutish... street-smart... NO ONE. STOP WALKING, THINK, YOU MUST HANG OUT WITH PEOPLE WHO WOULD KNOW HOW TO GET OUT OF THIS EASILY. Yeah, if they had me with them– if we were in a group. But it’s not nearly so glamourous/adventuresome when you are alone. Why don’t I have more friends in the Boy Scouts? Oh, because I’m 21. Boy Scouts expire sometime before college, I think... I should really get to know some, they could probably teach me some things... like, how to start a fire with a stick and a leaf, or how to tie a Windsor knot. No, that’s not Boy Scouts, that’s prep school boys. Ok. I got it. I’m going to the end of this street, by the lights, and I’m walking toward the light until I find a hotel or a cab, and then I am going to get a room at the hotel or a ride to the nearest one, and go to bed. I got this... just find a... taxi... in this abandoned forsaken country... Maybe I should get some food too... did I eat dinner?" By this time I had been wandering for quite awhile, though it was probably only 20 minutes or so, it seemed like hours.
I checked the doorway where I had been dropped off for the third time, but this time I saw, low down in the corner of the buzzer, a marker-ed in word over the scratched metal. Barely readable, almost scratched over, something-something HAUS. But there was not a button next to it. HAUS! THIS HAS GOT TO BE IT! (Never mind that it’s one of the most common words in the Czech language, or that I couldn’t read the letters before it, I was convinced.) I began frantically pushing every button on the panel until I heard a low static noise just as a car drove by blasting the bass so thumpingly loud that I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t realize just HOW MUCH of my cool I had lost until I heard my voice after the car passed.
"Hello? Hello? Hi, I have a reservation, for tonight? I am very late, this is the HT Haus, right? Do you have any vacancies tonight? Hello? Can you hear me?"
Nothing. I keep pushing the button again, refusing to let this chance get away. Finally a light inside came on, and someone opened the door a tiny crack. "I think I have a reservation for tonight? Is this is HT Haus?"
"Uh, yeah, yeah..." said the voice on the other side, and I would soon learn that this was about all the English the owner of the hostel knew. But no matter, I was there, and I was safe. And when I made it to the room I was going to share with Shoshana, someone had already made my bed, and there were two bars of Israeli chocolate waiting for me on the pillow from Shoshana, since that is where she is studying this semester.
Chasing liberty across Europe,
B
(In case you don’t know [which you may not, since I only know because of an AP class I took from the coolest teacher in the world in high school], the Defenestration Of Prague is what sparked the 30Years’ War in what was then part of the Hapsburg Empire. Some of the details are missing, since I haven’t really studied this since 11th grade, but the important part is this: the peasants were mad about something [probably lack of food/feudalism/the church], as peasants are wont to be, so they chased an Important Government Official into a tower in the palace in Prague, backed him into a wall, and basically he was left with no choice but to jump out the window. It’s about a two-and-a-half story drop. He did it, and landed in a wagonload of horse poop, which was being used as fertilizer. The peasants were quelled, for the moment, thinking that perhaps it was enough to just throw someone into horse manure, but alas, he didn’t learn his lesson, and eventually they had to go to war over it.)
The other important thing to understand about the Czech Republic is that... well, it’s not really a developed country. I guess, perhaps, in the grand scale of things, it MIGHT count as "developed" on the UN’s scale, maybe, but it’s definitely as close to "developing" as any country I’ve ever spent significant time in.
I mean, there are definitely countries that are worse off than the Czech Republic: Croatia, for example, Nicaragua, and pretty much all of Africa with the probable exception of Egypt.
But it’s not the same as being in France, or England, or really anywhere else. I mean, come on, it’s not even been a country for MY entire lifetime, and I am really not that old.
But since history classes never get past World War II, my knowledge of the Cold War comes completely from Hollywood, and since I generally avoid movies set between 1950 and 1980, I really know next to nothing about the Cold War/Soviet Bloc/Velvet Revolution. A lot of the important recent events of the Czech Republic (like the fact that it became a country at all) happened within my lifetime, which makes it really kind of dumb that I don’t know anything about it, but I was too young at the time to remember it, and it’s still too current to be taught in school.
Other than the Defenestration Of Prague, the only other bit of Czech knowledge that I had prior to going was how to spell Czechoslovakia, which I learned in 1st grade when a kid I beat in the spelling bee asked me if I knew how to spell it. I remember looking at him and saying "I don’t even know what it MEANS." Being able to spell it, however, is a slightly obsolete skill, given that it hasn’t existed since about the time I was IN first grade.
All that said, I spent the last week in the Czech Republic, which was a lot of fun, a little bit scary, and quite an experience. First of all, NO ONE in that country speaks Russian– everyone my age and above knows how to (they were forced to learn it when they were under Communist control) but speaking it is completely taboo– signs are written first in Czech, then German, then English, then any other random European languages, usually Italian, Spanish, and Greek, in that order, but never ever Russian. Furthermore, I had this mistaken idea that crime in Prague/the Czech Republic is significantly worse than everywhere else in Europe– it’s probably about the same as all other big cities in Europe (though the size of Prague as compared to Paris is unbelievably small), but somehow Prague is a city where, no matter how much fun you are having, you never feel quite... safe. I’m not asking for Cathedral Domain safe, but it would be nice if one could just feel as comfortable there as in any other European city. Maybe it’s because not only is everything in a different language, but they even use different letters than us. Maybe it’s because I was raised with this Western idea that Eastern Europe is a place not quite civilized, a step above China if you are going on vacation, but a definite step below Western Europe/Hawaii.
So I was excited to go, to see what it was like, to buy things cheaply (they aren’t on the Euro yet, they still use Koruna [crowns], and I went through about 2500 of them while I was there, which is to say about $125 US dollars), and to see my friend Shoshana from Emory, who I haven’t seen since May.
But then this is what happened: my flight was supposed to get in at 23h10, which meant I had 50 minutes to make it to the hostel before public transportation shut down. So I was going to rush (cabs, obviously, being for the faint of heart). But then the luggage got delayed and I wasn’t leaving the airport until 23h40, and I knew I wouldn’t make it, given that I had to take a bus, then switch to a subway, then switch to a tram. Plus I still, at this point, was feeling not 100% safe in a country which has only been a country for as long as I’ve been a vegetarian, and used to be ruled by the KGB and people who wear furry hats with earflaps. So I gave in, and walked to the cab stand. I had been warned (from multiple guidebooks and the more reliable firsthand accounts of friends) that Czech cabbies are extremely unreliable/dishonest, don’t run the meter, take roundabout long ways of getting places, etc., so I knew to ask how much it would be before I got in. I pointed to the address I had written down, and the guy told me, in a voice copied straight from the Russian space station hero in Armageddon, that it would be "five, no six, yes maybe seex hawn-tred crown" to get me to the hostel. Fine. Whatever. At this point I still wasn’t completely sure how much they were worth (for the record, there is between 20 and 25 Koruna to a dollar). What I hadn’t been warned about was the fact that Czech buildings all have two addresses– one is the normal street address, like we would have in the US, or France, or ANYWHERE ELSE in the world, and the other is a completely random number that has something to do with the order in which the building was incorporated into the city, or made official, or something. One set of these numbers (I was never sure which) is on red signs in white letters, the other is on white signs with blue letters. I gave the guy the address, and we took off, listening to really old-school Celine Dion all the way.
And I hadn’t changed any money over yet. And Czech cabs (proof this is a developing country) do not have credit card machines.
We got over that glitch, and he dropped me off at what appeared to be an empty store front, perhaps an old hardware store, now empty, with no buzzer and no hostel sign.
But the address I had was "7/19" written like that, and the only address sign I saw on this building was 19, so I thought, illogically, "Maybe I should be at 7... I’ll walk down a few buildings." I got to 7 and it was a bar. A bar that had just kicked out the last patrons. Nothing else on the street was open. I wouldn’t say it was a bad neighborhood, but it was not a part of the former Soviet bloc that I relished being abandoned and alone in at 00h15 at night, with a large beat-up yellow duffel bag marking me from a mile away as a tourist. Armed with an address I couldn’t pronounce in a language I had never seen, I walked into the bar, the bartender tried to kick me out, and I somehow made it clear I needed directions, and he said, "Hostel, yes, plus two that way" and pointed the opposite direction down the street. "Ok," I thought to myself, no big deal, got it. "Plus two that way" turned out to be a closed grocery store with a [locked] church next to it. I began to get nervous. I walked to the end of the street, which was a pinwheel of 5 streets, and took the one next to where I was, terrified I would get confused and not be able to figure out where I was at all. I wandered down that street, trying to act like I knew where I was going, but despite the fact that each building has two addresses, they are also not placed systematically, so I could only find them on about every fourth building. And I didn’t know about this two-address system yet, so I couldn’t find any direction that seemed to be appropriate for me finding "7/19." I walked back onto the street where the cab had left me and wandered to the OTHER end of it, checking every buzzer for anything that looked like "ht haus," the name of the hostel. (Hostels here tend to be not like hotels– they don’t usually take up an entire building, just a few floors, so you find the buzzer and buzz up, just like an apartment.) I found nothing, but on my way back toward the direction I had come, I saw a sign for a church pension. I followed the sign and buzzed, but no one answered (it may have been the sign for the church pension fund office, and not a place to stay for all I know). By this time I was starting to get worried. I kept telling myself not to panic, but I knew if I didn’t get to the hostel to find the girl I was meeting right then, I wouldn’t find her (neither of our phones worked there). And there was no taxis in sight, no hotels, it was after midnight, I was alone, and suddenly I was really quite uneasy. Especially when I heard a large group of guys behind me, who started yelling something at each other (or perhaps me, who knows?) in Czech. I wouldn’t say I panicked, exactly, because there was no hyperventilating and I didn’t cry, but my new European "take-it-into-stride-and-it-will-be-a-great-story-later-on" mentality left me, along with my cool.
But I was still thinking clearly. The thought process, at that point, was something like this:
"Ok, B, you are 21 years old, you can handle this... You may be in the former USSR, but they have to have hotels, right? Ok, just start walking... this direction... because there are more lights this way. And more sketchy people. Yeah, but what are sketchy people going to do to you in the light? And there are probably strangers the other direction too, you just can’t see them because it is dark. Ok, this way. Dang it, that bar is closed, now nothing is open... and it’s really dark. And I’m cold, shivering... Alright, if you were an Eagle Scout, what would you do? What kind of a hypothermia-induced question is that? If you were an Eagle Scout you wouldn’t be in this situation because you wouldn’t be staying at a hostel, you’d be building yourself a shelter out of palm fronds and Q-tips. I don’t think they have palm fronds this far North... WAIT, FOCUS, B: you’re not an Eagle Scout. But you are FRIENDS with logical people, so what would THEY do in this situation? Think, think, who do I know that is logical... intelligent... Eagle-Scoutish... street-smart... NO ONE. STOP WALKING, THINK, YOU MUST HANG OUT WITH PEOPLE WHO WOULD KNOW HOW TO GET OUT OF THIS EASILY. Yeah, if they had me with them– if we were in a group. But it’s not nearly so glamourous/adventuresome when you are alone. Why don’t I have more friends in the Boy Scouts? Oh, because I’m 21. Boy Scouts expire sometime before college, I think... I should really get to know some, they could probably teach me some things... like, how to start a fire with a stick and a leaf, or how to tie a Windsor knot. No, that’s not Boy Scouts, that’s prep school boys. Ok. I got it. I’m going to the end of this street, by the lights, and I’m walking toward the light until I find a hotel or a cab, and then I am going to get a room at the hotel or a ride to the nearest one, and go to bed. I got this... just find a... taxi... in this abandoned forsaken country... Maybe I should get some food too... did I eat dinner?" By this time I had been wandering for quite awhile, though it was probably only 20 minutes or so, it seemed like hours.
I checked the doorway where I had been dropped off for the third time, but this time I saw, low down in the corner of the buzzer, a marker-ed in word over the scratched metal. Barely readable, almost scratched over, something-something HAUS. But there was not a button next to it. HAUS! THIS HAS GOT TO BE IT! (Never mind that it’s one of the most common words in the Czech language, or that I couldn’t read the letters before it, I was convinced.) I began frantically pushing every button on the panel until I heard a low static noise just as a car drove by blasting the bass so thumpingly loud that I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t realize just HOW MUCH of my cool I had lost until I heard my voice after the car passed.
"Hello? Hello? Hi, I have a reservation, for tonight? I am very late, this is the HT Haus, right? Do you have any vacancies tonight? Hello? Can you hear me?"
Nothing. I keep pushing the button again, refusing to let this chance get away. Finally a light inside came on, and someone opened the door a tiny crack. "I think I have a reservation for tonight? Is this is HT Haus?"
"Uh, yeah, yeah..." said the voice on the other side, and I would soon learn that this was about all the English the owner of the hostel knew. But no matter, I was there, and I was safe. And when I made it to the room I was going to share with Shoshana, someone had already made my bed, and there were two bars of Israeli chocolate waiting for me on the pillow from Shoshana, since that is where she is studying this semester.
Chasing liberty across Europe,
B
Monday, April 09, 2007
I went to Fabrice’s this week to tutor him as usual, but since he just had a big test, there was nothing for us to go over, so we ended up just trying to have a conversation for the hour that I stayed. I asked him questions, and he would try to respond, but usually he couldn’t understand the question, so I’d have to help him translate it into French, and then sometimes translate the answer.
And I know that translating is not the way to learn a language (trust me, I know), but the kid is 11, and I am 21, and neither of us is fluent in the other’s language, and we do the best we can. So I was trying to ask him interesting questions, and finally I hit on what I thought was a good one... this is exactly the conversation that went down.
B (english): "Fabrice, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
Fabrice, in French: "Ça veut dire quoi?" "What does that mean?"
B (french): [repeats the question]
Fabrice: "Mais, je ne– I don’t know." [Said in a tone of voice to indicate that it was kind of a lame question, because who really knows that kind of thing at 11?]
So I try to think of something that everyone wants to be when they are 11... and I say:
"You could be a..." [insert realization that I don’t know the word for astronaut]... "man who goes to the moon?"
Fabrice looks at me, not in a rude way, but with a face that clearly reads, in any language, "wow, you really aren’t French, are you?" and he says, in French, "We don’t go to the moon in France. We don’t even try to do it." I just looked at him, trying to figure out how to respond, and he adds, not wanting to seem like he just shot down my suggestion, "Plus if I was going to do it, I’d have to learn English first."
I brightened. "But that’s what we’re doing now! So you can be an astronaut if you want!"
But really– I hate flying almost as much as I hate math, but even I went through a stage where I wanted to be an astronaut. In the US, it’s a sure thing that at some point you’ll want to.
But think about it– NO Frenchmen has ever been to the moon; I am fairly sure they haven’t even put one in space. So why would it ever be their dream? It would be like an American kid dreaming of... hmm... I am at a loss. The best I can come up with is "owning a Vespa," but that doesn’t really work.
And the weirdest part was (here comes a new revelation of my own awareness of myself as an American) that my first instinct was to feel sorry for him. How cocky is that? He doesn’t want to go, and America (last I heard) was not planning on sending anyone else to the moon for awhile because it’s prohibitively expensive and what’s the point anyway? We don’t really do anything once we’re up there, except hide the Russian flag. But it’s just so weird to think about, that he has never even considered being an astronaut.
In a related story, in my photography class this week, the prof lectured on some photos of September 11. Most of the images he used were well-known, at least in the US, though I hadn’t seen a lot of them in years. Ground Zero the morning after with a flag flying in it; Giuliani wearing a dust mask; the newly-empty skyline the night of; and one that I had never seen of a man sitting on a bench checking his email, but the bench was in the middle of the rubble of a building next to the Towers. But the weird part was trying to dissociate all the loadedness of the photos and just study them as photos; especially odd as the only American in the class. Because this was just such a bizarre thing– I can’t imagine in an Art History class in the US a professor throwing in a 15 minute interlude about September 11. But it’s weird that I feel that way, because everything else we studied in class meant the same thing to someone else as September 11 does to Americans...
Born in the USA,
~B
And I know that translating is not the way to learn a language (trust me, I know), but the kid is 11, and I am 21, and neither of us is fluent in the other’s language, and we do the best we can. So I was trying to ask him interesting questions, and finally I hit on what I thought was a good one... this is exactly the conversation that went down.
B (english): "Fabrice, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
Fabrice, in French: "Ça veut dire quoi?" "What does that mean?"
B (french): [repeats the question]
Fabrice: "Mais, je ne– I don’t know." [Said in a tone of voice to indicate that it was kind of a lame question, because who really knows that kind of thing at 11?]
So I try to think of something that everyone wants to be when they are 11... and I say:
"You could be a..." [insert realization that I don’t know the word for astronaut]... "man who goes to the moon?"
Fabrice looks at me, not in a rude way, but with a face that clearly reads, in any language, "wow, you really aren’t French, are you?" and he says, in French, "We don’t go to the moon in France. We don’t even try to do it." I just looked at him, trying to figure out how to respond, and he adds, not wanting to seem like he just shot down my suggestion, "Plus if I was going to do it, I’d have to learn English first."
I brightened. "But that’s what we’re doing now! So you can be an astronaut if you want!"
But really– I hate flying almost as much as I hate math, but even I went through a stage where I wanted to be an astronaut. In the US, it’s a sure thing that at some point you’ll want to.
But think about it– NO Frenchmen has ever been to the moon; I am fairly sure they haven’t even put one in space. So why would it ever be their dream? It would be like an American kid dreaming of... hmm... I am at a loss. The best I can come up with is "owning a Vespa," but that doesn’t really work.
And the weirdest part was (here comes a new revelation of my own awareness of myself as an American) that my first instinct was to feel sorry for him. How cocky is that? He doesn’t want to go, and America (last I heard) was not planning on sending anyone else to the moon for awhile because it’s prohibitively expensive and what’s the point anyway? We don’t really do anything once we’re up there, except hide the Russian flag. But it’s just so weird to think about, that he has never even considered being an astronaut.
In a related story, in my photography class this week, the prof lectured on some photos of September 11. Most of the images he used were well-known, at least in the US, though I hadn’t seen a lot of them in years. Ground Zero the morning after with a flag flying in it; Giuliani wearing a dust mask; the newly-empty skyline the night of; and one that I had never seen of a man sitting on a bench checking his email, but the bench was in the middle of the rubble of a building next to the Towers. But the weird part was trying to dissociate all the loadedness of the photos and just study them as photos; especially odd as the only American in the class. Because this was just such a bizarre thing– I can’t imagine in an Art History class in the US a professor throwing in a 15 minute interlude about September 11. But it’s weird that I feel that way, because everything else we studied in class meant the same thing to someone else as September 11 does to Americans...
Born in the USA,
~B
Friday, April 06, 2007
Why, you may be asking, was I so excited that Cliff was coming to visit?
Because of conversations like this one, which took place on Saturday morning:
Cliff: "Joey is probably my favorite person in the whole world."
Blair: "Really?"
Cliff: "Well, after myself, obviously."
Or this one, on our way into the Catacombs:
Blair: "You know, I’ve already done this once before. It’s pretty scary. When we get down there, if something drips on my head, I’ll probably pee my pants."
Cliff: "If something drips on my head, I’ll probably pee your pants too."
So Cliff is a guy I worked with on a mountain that would become my second home. And this
semester he is studying in South Spain, which is kind of a cooler (or warmer, as it were) place to be studying than Northern France at this time of year, when Paris weather is still completely unpredictable. Anyway, I got to do the tourist thing here, playing tour guide and hitting up all the places I’ve gotten so used to seeing.
We went to Montmartre, the artist’s district, which was awesome, because it’s kind of a not good neighborhood, so though I fancy myself tough and rugged, I tend to stay away from it when I am alone. But when you are with a guy who is 3/4 mountain goat and 1/4 Kentucky-bred corn-fed mountain man, you can go wherever you want and noone is going to mess with you. Which is what we did.
And we ended up lost, at a café on the top of the highest hill in Paris, the Hill Of Martyrs, where we sat next to a floor-to-ceiling window, wavy with age, that looked onto a rainy cobbled street, drinking hot chocolate out of bowls (which is probably my favorite thing about France). Kind of not exactly unlike Belle.
On Saturday we decided (at 930pm) that we were hungry, so we made a frozen pizza. But not only did it take forever to cook, but it turned out to be not a pizza but some weird German thing we fondly referred to as notpizza, because we had no idea what it actually was, except that it was quite small and left us both as hungry as when we began. But it was Saturday night in Paris, so we decided to go to a piano bar (live music AND food? Does life get any better? I submit that it can not!)
And now came Cliff’s real initiation into the way of (my) life in France, because of course it couldn’t be simple.
We went to Harry’s Bar, a place Hemingway used to hang out, that claims to have singlehandedly invented the Bloody Mary. I’ve been there once or twice, it’s a fun really old-school kind of place with swinging doors and college pennants on the walls and a piano bar downstairs. I had never been to the actual piano room, but as we walked in we could hear soft jazz coming from the basement, so we asked to be seated down there. We walked down the tightly spiralling staircase, a woman took our coats, and suddenly I knew we were in way over our heads. Because as we walked in, not only was the waitstaff in bowties, but everyone was smoking their pipes (and not 3-foot long indian peace bubble pipes either) and wearing their furs and suddenly we went from the Casablanca bar upstairs to a scene from The Great Gatsby, and we were dressed like a scene from She’s All That. But I’ve gone to my fair share of events dressed inappropriately in France, so I thought we’d be ok... I sat on the wall side of our table, pinned between the wall and the tiny two-top, completely impossible to make a quick getaway, which would become a problem after we looked at the menu and realized that, even if we didn’t want a glass of wine, a soda was 8,50 Euro. Which is about $11. And I can pretty much guarantee there are no free refills. We looked at each other helplessly, and Cliff said, "I’ll pull the table out, you slide out and find that woman that has our coats and tell her we had an emergency." Which is exactly what we did, and apparently it’s not an odd excuse for a place with $11 sodas, because the lady just smiled at us and handed us back the coats she had only hung up 10 minutes before. Slightly disappointed but still thinking we had beat the system, we left. But we were in the Opera district, which is gorgeous at night but also (other than where I live) the most expensive area in Paris. But we found a cheap café, walked in, asked for an apple tart, and were told that the kitchen had closed 10 minutes before. But the lady pointed us in the direction of Hippopotamus, a restaurant she swore was still open. We walked into Hippo, got a table, sat down, (it was packed– I was wedged between the window, a large ficus, the table, and a making-out couple at the next table) and decided what we wanted. We were going to share two appetizers and two desserts, had our WHOLE plan figured out, and when the guy got to our table, he wouldn’t take our order. He kept telling me we couldn’t order the thing I kept trying to say, so I tried something else instead, and he just kept saying (in French, so that neither Cliff nor I really had any idea what was going on) "NO, no no no, Mademoiselle, you can’t have that." I thought maybe they were out of it, so I tried something else, and got the same reaction, but it wasn’t apologetic, it was just mean, as though I had tried to order his left arm for my dinner. Everyone else in the restaurant was eating, so I couldn’t figure out the problem. Finally he sent someone else over to us, who yelled at me some more, much to the annoyance of the interrupted couple next door, and who finally explained to me that they wouldn’t serve us unless we were ordering meat. But they were out of all their meat except the Viande Haché Cru. Raw ground beef, served in a mound about the size of a cupcake with a raw egg on top.
We looked at the picture on the menu, and I said "Aren’t you not supposed to eat raw beef?" to which Cliff responded "Aren’t you not supposed to eat raw eggs?"
So basically the guy was telling us that either we eat their salmonella salad or we don’t eat at all (Beauty & The Beast, anybody?). So we left. Again.
Now we’re standing on Boulevard Haussmann, it’s just after midnight, and we have to be ON the Metro on our way home in 40 minutes or we’ll miss it because it closes. And we’re starving.
Think think think, late at night in Paris, think think think, if I were in the US I’d be at a diner somewhere wolfing eggs and toast, apple pie a la mode, and a bottomless cup of coffee, but in Paris you have a better chance of finding the Easter bunny than a diner. Think think think, what do I usually eat when it’s this hour in Paris... think think think...
"Cliff, how do you feel about crêpes?"
"If it’s food, I’m in."
To the St. Michel Latin Quarter restaurant district we go, flying across the Seine in front of Notre Dame and through winding alley streets lined with Shawarma restaurants and Lebanese bakeries, to the first crêpe stand we see. Nutella for me, ham and cheese for Cliff, and straight away onto the last Metro of the night to eat them.
WHO gets kicked out of three restaurants in one night? Honestly. Luckily Cliff is cool, so he didn’t care– it probably doesn’t hurt that he’s been living in Spain for the last three months, where he probably has the same cultural misunderstandings as I do here.
Sunday we went to the Louvre ("That’s the Mona Lisa? It’s so... so... unattractive." A valid response considering the 16x20 inch portrait is in a room with a fresco as large as the floor plan of the cabin I lived in all summer). And then walked home, passing the Arc de Triomphe ("It’s so... huge.") and a woman dressed in red tights with a black Speedo over them, a blue shirt, and a fanny pack. I don’t know if she was trying to look like a superhero, but she definitely succeeded.
We walked to the Eiffel Tower to see it in the daylight, and noticed the crowd of police under it.
"Umm, Blair, are there always this many guards armed with semi-automatic machine guns under the Eiffel Tower?"
"Oh yeah," I waved him off, "It’s the most touristed landmark in the world, they keep it under pretty close watch."
No. That is a lie. I was completely wrong. Someone had jumped off. I was completely shocked, and Cliff (who lives in a tiny town in Spain, remember?) looked at me and was like, "It’s the most famous building in the world– it’s gotta happen kind of frequently, right?" He overheard a tourist family talking about it– the 9-year-old kid said, "Yeah, we saw the body falling through the air, and then heard it hit the ground over there..." Apparently it does happen kind of often, because this was how they handled it: body hits ground, guard hears noise it makes, blows secret code whistle, all guards go into action, some surrounding the body, calling for an ambulance, some coming over with buckets of water to wash away... well... you know. NO ONE EVEN FLINCHED. The elevator lines weren’t interrupted, they didn’t shut down, even for half an hour to get the body out of the way. I was flabbergasted.
We went to the Gardens Of Luxembourg, where we hung out at my favorite fountain, eating Magnum bars (some kind of ice cream I had never had that changed my life) and watching some Boho chicks play guitar in the grass.
We went home, and, at about 11pm (we have acclimated to the European lifestyle a little too well... who am I kidding, we spent all summer eating second dinners at midnight in the industrial-size kitchen of the place we worked) decided to make dinner– a box of PastaRoni from a US care package and half a package of mozzarella prosciutto tortellini with lardons. I don’t think I have had a meal as good as that since moving to Paris. I have never been more satisfied in my life. We somehow managed to devour an entire bottle of sauce with it (by the way, when I am at any family gathering in the US, whether in FL, NC, or KY, I am always the last to finish eating. ALWAYS. It used to make me feel like a fatty until I realized I eat the same amount as everyone else, just at half the speed. Fortunately, Cliff eats the same amount as everyone else but at only 1/4 the speed, which meant all of our meals took HOURS, and it was amazing).
Since the weather was nice for a few days, we ended up spending all our time outside; we ate breakfast from the boulangerie in a park near my apartment, drinking milk from a one-liter jug we passed back and forth the way most people would a bottle of wine. We went to Pere LaChaise cemetery, since we had seen all the other parks– and spent an hour looking for Jim Morrison’s grave:
Blair: "Ok, let’s follow these people– that guy looks like a total hippie, you KNOW he’s gotta be going to see ol’ Jim."
Cliff: "Yeah, unless he’s seen him already, in which case we’re just following him to the exit, you know..."
Since I had been to the cemetery once before, you’d think I’d know where I was going– and you’d think wrong.
We cooked more pasta, more lardons, more sauce, and this time ate it with a baguette to feel like real Italians.
And then, on Cliff’s last day here, we walked from my apartment to Les Invalides, the gold-domed building where Napoleon is buried; former military outpost, veteran hospital, garrison, etc. We found the garden of the Rodin Museum, and from the street we could see the back of The Thinker... much less attractive than the front.
We ended up at the Musée d’Orsay, miles from my apartment, just before dusk, with nothing to do but drink café crèmes in a café with frescoes on the walls and acoustic American music playing on the stereo. The chairs were purple velvet, the bartender ignored us just enough to make it feel really French, and we sat in there for hours while all the rest of the world came and went, watching it get dark and not really paying attention to the fact that it was suddenly almost 9pm, we were miles from my apartment, AND we were each wearing nothing more than a light jacket (NOT helpful in blistering 50-km/hour wind gusts). But we walked to my apartment, bundled up, and went back to the Eiffel Tower, which was awesome. I have been up it once– years ago, in the daylight, so this time we opted for night, and it was basically amazing. The moon was full, the sky was clear (I saw my first Parisian star– they are always invisible here), the wind was freezing, but we wandered the whole top level, taking pictures and being freezing. I realized that, from the top of the Eiffel Tower, I can identify landmarks all over the place– Notre Dame, Sacré Coeur, l’Eglise Americaine, the Pantheon, the Arc, Louvre, Invalides– I’ve never had a better grip of the geography of where I live than I do in Paris. AND I even spotted my apartment building. (Not hard, considering it’s literally just across the Seine river from the Eiffel Tower.)
We got back to the bottom at half past midnight– nothing open to eat, and we had eaten all the pasta at my apartment, so it was either go home and make pancakes or find something to eat. We managed to find a panini counter, so we bought those and took them home to eat with hot tea. We played and dawdled until we realized it was 230am, and Cliff had to leave my apartment at 340 to make his bus to the airport to fly back to Spain. (This, mind you, is the kid that convinced me to stay up all night and hike Wolf Pen at sunrise when I was in the US at Christmas.) But we decided (stupidly) to go to bed– we had crossed the threshhold when it would be better to stay up, but we were fighting a losing battle, so we slept for an hour before the cab arrived to pick him up. An hour. That is the most useless amount of sleep EVER.
After he left, I went back to bed, but still managed to make it through my 3-hour soc class awake on only 3.5 hours of sleep. (I also drank a pot of coffee before I left my apartment, which probably helped.)
I can’t explain the weirdness of seeing someone that I know from the US here in Europe... wandering the streets of Paris with a guy I spent all summer with was especially weird, since all we did all summer was sweat through our clothes in the Eastern Kentucky heat and bicker like siblings. And now all of a sudden I am showing us around, speaking another language (that doesn’t include the words "ain’t" "reckon" or "yonder."), and wearing skirts and dress shirts instead of camo shorts and uniform t-shirts. It feels like going home...
Sweet we rock and sweet we roll,
B
The stupid thing about taking pictures on top of the Eiffel Tower is that all you see is the two of us standing in front of a metal grate.
Because of conversations like this one, which took place on Saturday morning:
Cliff: "Joey is probably my favorite person in the whole world."
Blair: "Really?"
Cliff: "Well, after myself, obviously."
Or this one, on our way into the Catacombs:
Blair: "You know, I’ve already done this once before. It’s pretty scary. When we get down there, if something drips on my head, I’ll probably pee my pants."
Cliff: "If something drips on my head, I’ll probably pee your pants too."
So Cliff is a guy I worked with on a mountain that would become my second home. And this
semester he is studying in South Spain, which is kind of a cooler (or warmer, as it were) place to be studying than Northern France at this time of year, when Paris weather is still completely unpredictable. Anyway, I got to do the tourist thing here, playing tour guide and hitting up all the places I’ve gotten so used to seeing.
We went to Montmartre, the artist’s district, which was awesome, because it’s kind of a not good neighborhood, so though I fancy myself tough and rugged, I tend to stay away from it when I am alone. But when you are with a guy who is 3/4 mountain goat and 1/4 Kentucky-bred corn-fed mountain man, you can go wherever you want and noone is going to mess with you. Which is what we did.
And we ended up lost, at a café on the top of the highest hill in Paris, the Hill Of Martyrs, where we sat next to a floor-to-ceiling window, wavy with age, that looked onto a rainy cobbled street, drinking hot chocolate out of bowls (which is probably my favorite thing about France). Kind of not exactly unlike Belle.
On Saturday we decided (at 930pm) that we were hungry, so we made a frozen pizza. But not only did it take forever to cook, but it turned out to be not a pizza but some weird German thing we fondly referred to as notpizza, because we had no idea what it actually was, except that it was quite small and left us both as hungry as when we began. But it was Saturday night in Paris, so we decided to go to a piano bar (live music AND food? Does life get any better? I submit that it can not!)
And now came Cliff’s real initiation into the way of (my) life in France, because of course it couldn’t be simple.
We went to Harry’s Bar, a place Hemingway used to hang out, that claims to have singlehandedly invented the Bloody Mary. I’ve been there once or twice, it’s a fun really old-school kind of place with swinging doors and college pennants on the walls and a piano bar downstairs. I had never been to the actual piano room, but as we walked in we could hear soft jazz coming from the basement, so we asked to be seated down there. We walked down the tightly spiralling staircase, a woman took our coats, and suddenly I knew we were in way over our heads. Because as we walked in, not only was the waitstaff in bowties, but everyone was smoking their pipes (and not 3-foot long indian peace bubble pipes either) and wearing their furs and suddenly we went from the Casablanca bar upstairs to a scene from The Great Gatsby, and we were dressed like a scene from She’s All That. But I’ve gone to my fair share of events dressed inappropriately in France, so I thought we’d be ok... I sat on the wall side of our table, pinned between the wall and the tiny two-top, completely impossible to make a quick getaway, which would become a problem after we looked at the menu and realized that, even if we didn’t want a glass of wine, a soda was 8,50 Euro. Which is about $11. And I can pretty much guarantee there are no free refills. We looked at each other helplessly, and Cliff said, "I’ll pull the table out, you slide out and find that woman that has our coats and tell her we had an emergency." Which is exactly what we did, and apparently it’s not an odd excuse for a place with $11 sodas, because the lady just smiled at us and handed us back the coats she had only hung up 10 minutes before. Slightly disappointed but still thinking we had beat the system, we left. But we were in the Opera district, which is gorgeous at night but also (other than where I live) the most expensive area in Paris. But we found a cheap café, walked in, asked for an apple tart, and were told that the kitchen had closed 10 minutes before. But the lady pointed us in the direction of Hippopotamus, a restaurant she swore was still open. We walked into Hippo, got a table, sat down, (it was packed– I was wedged between the window, a large ficus, the table, and a making-out couple at the next table) and decided what we wanted. We were going to share two appetizers and two desserts, had our WHOLE plan figured out, and when the guy got to our table, he wouldn’t take our order. He kept telling me we couldn’t order the thing I kept trying to say, so I tried something else instead, and he just kept saying (in French, so that neither Cliff nor I really had any idea what was going on) "NO, no no no, Mademoiselle, you can’t have that." I thought maybe they were out of it, so I tried something else, and got the same reaction, but it wasn’t apologetic, it was just mean, as though I had tried to order his left arm for my dinner. Everyone else in the restaurant was eating, so I couldn’t figure out the problem. Finally he sent someone else over to us, who yelled at me some more, much to the annoyance of the interrupted couple next door, and who finally explained to me that they wouldn’t serve us unless we were ordering meat. But they were out of all their meat except the Viande Haché Cru. Raw ground beef, served in a mound about the size of a cupcake with a raw egg on top.
We looked at the picture on the menu, and I said "Aren’t you not supposed to eat raw beef?" to which Cliff responded "Aren’t you not supposed to eat raw eggs?"
So basically the guy was telling us that either we eat their salmonella salad or we don’t eat at all (Beauty & The Beast, anybody?). So we left. Again.
Now we’re standing on Boulevard Haussmann, it’s just after midnight, and we have to be ON the Metro on our way home in 40 minutes or we’ll miss it because it closes. And we’re starving.
Think think think, late at night in Paris, think think think, if I were in the US I’d be at a diner somewhere wolfing eggs and toast, apple pie a la mode, and a bottomless cup of coffee, but in Paris you have a better chance of finding the Easter bunny than a diner. Think think think, what do I usually eat when it’s this hour in Paris... think think think...
"Cliff, how do you feel about crêpes?"
"If it’s food, I’m in."
To the St. Michel Latin Quarter restaurant district we go, flying across the Seine in front of Notre Dame and through winding alley streets lined with Shawarma restaurants and Lebanese bakeries, to the first crêpe stand we see. Nutella for me, ham and cheese for Cliff, and straight away onto the last Metro of the night to eat them.
WHO gets kicked out of three restaurants in one night? Honestly. Luckily Cliff is cool, so he didn’t care– it probably doesn’t hurt that he’s been living in Spain for the last three months, where he probably has the same cultural misunderstandings as I do here.
Sunday we went to the Louvre ("That’s the Mona Lisa? It’s so... so... unattractive." A valid response considering the 16x20 inch portrait is in a room with a fresco as large as the floor plan of the cabin I lived in all summer). And then walked home, passing the Arc de Triomphe ("It’s so... huge.") and a woman dressed in red tights with a black Speedo over them, a blue shirt, and a fanny pack. I don’t know if she was trying to look like a superhero, but she definitely succeeded.
We walked to the Eiffel Tower to see it in the daylight, and noticed the crowd of police under it.
"Umm, Blair, are there always this many guards armed with semi-automatic machine guns under the Eiffel Tower?"
"Oh yeah," I waved him off, "It’s the most touristed landmark in the world, they keep it under pretty close watch."
No. That is a lie. I was completely wrong. Someone had jumped off. I was completely shocked, and Cliff (who lives in a tiny town in Spain, remember?) looked at me and was like, "It’s the most famous building in the world– it’s gotta happen kind of frequently, right?" He overheard a tourist family talking about it– the 9-year-old kid said, "Yeah, we saw the body falling through the air, and then heard it hit the ground over there..." Apparently it does happen kind of often, because this was how they handled it: body hits ground, guard hears noise it makes, blows secret code whistle, all guards go into action, some surrounding the body, calling for an ambulance, some coming over with buckets of water to wash away... well... you know. NO ONE EVEN FLINCHED. The elevator lines weren’t interrupted, they didn’t shut down, even for half an hour to get the body out of the way. I was flabbergasted.
We went to the Gardens Of Luxembourg, where we hung out at my favorite fountain, eating Magnum bars (some kind of ice cream I had never had that changed my life) and watching some Boho chicks play guitar in the grass.
We went home, and, at about 11pm (we have acclimated to the European lifestyle a little too well... who am I kidding, we spent all summer eating second dinners at midnight in the industrial-size kitchen of the place we worked) decided to make dinner– a box of PastaRoni from a US care package and half a package of mozzarella prosciutto tortellini with lardons. I don’t think I have had a meal as good as that since moving to Paris. I have never been more satisfied in my life. We somehow managed to devour an entire bottle of sauce with it (by the way, when I am at any family gathering in the US, whether in FL, NC, or KY, I am always the last to finish eating. ALWAYS. It used to make me feel like a fatty until I realized I eat the same amount as everyone else, just at half the speed. Fortunately, Cliff eats the same amount as everyone else but at only 1/4 the speed, which meant all of our meals took HOURS, and it was amazing).
Since the weather was nice for a few days, we ended up spending all our time outside; we ate breakfast from the boulangerie in a park near my apartment, drinking milk from a one-liter jug we passed back and forth the way most people would a bottle of wine. We went to Pere LaChaise cemetery, since we had seen all the other parks– and spent an hour looking for Jim Morrison’s grave:
Blair: "Ok, let’s follow these people– that guy looks like a total hippie, you KNOW he’s gotta be going to see ol’ Jim."
Cliff: "Yeah, unless he’s seen him already, in which case we’re just following him to the exit, you know..."
Since I had been to the cemetery once before, you’d think I’d know where I was going– and you’d think wrong.
We cooked more pasta, more lardons, more sauce, and this time ate it with a baguette to feel like real Italians.
And then, on Cliff’s last day here, we walked from my apartment to Les Invalides, the gold-domed building where Napoleon is buried; former military outpost, veteran hospital, garrison, etc. We found the garden of the Rodin Museum, and from the street we could see the back of The Thinker... much less attractive than the front.
We ended up at the Musée d’Orsay, miles from my apartment, just before dusk, with nothing to do but drink café crèmes in a café with frescoes on the walls and acoustic American music playing on the stereo. The chairs were purple velvet, the bartender ignored us just enough to make it feel really French, and we sat in there for hours while all the rest of the world came and went, watching it get dark and not really paying attention to the fact that it was suddenly almost 9pm, we were miles from my apartment, AND we were each wearing nothing more than a light jacket (NOT helpful in blistering 50-km/hour wind gusts). But we walked to my apartment, bundled up, and went back to the Eiffel Tower, which was awesome. I have been up it once– years ago, in the daylight, so this time we opted for night, and it was basically amazing. The moon was full, the sky was clear (I saw my first Parisian star– they are always invisible here), the wind was freezing, but we wandered the whole top level, taking pictures and being freezing. I realized that, from the top of the Eiffel Tower, I can identify landmarks all over the place– Notre Dame, Sacré Coeur, l’Eglise Americaine, the Pantheon, the Arc, Louvre, Invalides– I’ve never had a better grip of the geography of where I live than I do in Paris. AND I even spotted my apartment building. (Not hard, considering it’s literally just across the Seine river from the Eiffel Tower.)
We got back to the bottom at half past midnight– nothing open to eat, and we had eaten all the pasta at my apartment, so it was either go home and make pancakes or find something to eat. We managed to find a panini counter, so we bought those and took them home to eat with hot tea. We played and dawdled until we realized it was 230am, and Cliff had to leave my apartment at 340 to make his bus to the airport to fly back to Spain. (This, mind you, is the kid that convinced me to stay up all night and hike Wolf Pen at sunrise when I was in the US at Christmas.) But we decided (stupidly) to go to bed– we had crossed the threshhold when it would be better to stay up, but we were fighting a losing battle, so we slept for an hour before the cab arrived to pick him up. An hour. That is the most useless amount of sleep EVER.
After he left, I went back to bed, but still managed to make it through my 3-hour soc class awake on only 3.5 hours of sleep. (I also drank a pot of coffee before I left my apartment, which probably helped.)
I can’t explain the weirdness of seeing someone that I know from the US here in Europe... wandering the streets of Paris with a guy I spent all summer with was especially weird, since all we did all summer was sweat through our clothes in the Eastern Kentucky heat and bicker like siblings. And now all of a sudden I am showing us around, speaking another language (that doesn’t include the words "ain’t" "reckon" or "yonder."), and wearing skirts and dress shirts instead of camo shorts and uniform t-shirts. It feels like going home...
Sweet we rock and sweet we roll,
B
The stupid thing about taking pictures on top of the Eiffel Tower is that all you see is the two of us standing in front of a metal grate.
If I could hold the camera still, you'd have a good view of Paris behind us. Please note the stupid hats: we were cold enough that we didn't care.
"Your arms are longer than mine, YOU take the picture."
"It's YOUR camera, YOU take it."
"Actually, it's Joey's camera."
"Anyway, I don't have monkey arms you know."
"Yeah, but it stands to reason that yours would be longer, since you are taller. But you know being short is pretty cool... we're always the last to get rained on."
Annnnnd this showed up twice and I can't make it go away.
A very 80's looking picture taken under the Eiffel Tower at approximately 130am, Greenwich Mean +1 time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)