Oh la la. Je suis tres heureuse etre ici. It has been a beautiful day.
D’accord.
I arrived in Paris late saturday night from Orly(which is a loooong way out of town) and took the RER into Paris, jumping off at Saint-Michel. It is in the fifth, rive gauche, the left bank and I thought because it’s so popular with students and tourists will be a great place to find a hotel late on a saturday for not too expensive. I think it is a better place to find an international crowd of extremely obstreperous drunken 18-25 year olds, with the occasional group of slightly dazed tourist families walking about. I had totally forgotten how little appeal the left bank has for me on a saturday night. Were I 10 years younger, a student, not laden with backpack and exhausted from travelling on minimal food(i’m only day 1 free of the detox at this point, I had eaten 2 salads, an apple and an orange all day. Try finding airport food conduscive to breaking a fast and I will have lunch with you!) then I think I would have smiled and jumped into the fray. But as it was I jumped back on the metro, after walking far too much, and found my way to beaubourg. In Paris, beaubourg is a museum/art gallery/film centre/language library/free internet usuage place/actual library/gift shop and coffee bar. I pretty much lived there the last time I was here, splitting my time between writing emails home and desperately trying to learn french so I could find a job, or at least ask for one.
Familiarity is desirable at times. And sure enough within 2 blocks of the metro (Rambuteau) I found a lowkey, clean, inexpensive hotel that was just a room and shower, no frills. Then I spent the first 20 minutes doing this…
and various other poses. Eventually I got tired of that and realized that some nighttime Paris shots were in order…
and then, as has been said before, successfully went salad hunting at midnight.
I took possession of an apartment sunday early afternoon. The apartment itself is awesome, not just because of the location to friend’s places, metro lines and organic food stores(that was ahappy coincidence) but because the apartment itself is awesome! I don’t know who decorated it, but I think they should come and live at my house for a while, whenever I end up deciding where I’m going to live and find myself a house at the potentially as yet undiscovered location. It’s tiny, but the use of space is great, all of the windows have mirror pieces arranged artistically around them to create light and funky decor action. Plus, one of the windows opens onto the roof of the building next door! Someone’s got a rooftop terrace for suntanning and late night wine drinking…the someone is me. That part was clear, right? It’s a really small window and one has to be slightly acrobatic in order to get out there, more so to get back in, but worth it I’m thinking.
As for my birthday, I was awoken by my new french cellphone ringing around 10 am. (A french sim card can be bought for 30 euros, which includes 5 euros of credit and then pay as you go type amounts can be bought at any tabac for 10-40 euros depending on how much time one needs, providing you have a phone that’s unlocked as I do. I got it done at Foreign Electronics in Vancouver, which is also where I got the plug converters and such. Dude rocks. Seriously. This has been an incredibly long and involved aside. I wonder about asides sometimes, when they take on l,ives of their own as this one has seemed to. Do they continue musing things over in this vein even after the other side of the bracket has cut us off from seeing where they go? ) Aidje was calling me (and singingto me)to find out if I would be in Poitiers where he was playing later that evening. I thought I would go, but once I had removed myself from bed and saw that it was grey and not so nice out, I decided to stay in Paris and go to the catacombs instead. Which would have been awesome, had I arrived there before they closed at 4. I will go. I will see thousands of old dead people under the ground at some point. As it was I met up with a good friend (remi!) for some music (tho I was late and missed most of the show…do you think that asides are connected? Like does this one have knowlege of the one up there? Or do brackets keep the thoughts inside of them isolated from one another? I like the way question marks look when they are right next to a bracket. Can you imagine how exciting it would be to type a question in spanish inside a bracket set?) we went for drinks, somewhere else for food, another place (Le Zorba!) for drinks. I had a rose bought for me, we met some drunken scots one of whom may or may not have been the bass player for the proclaimers, and I’ve wandered home to fall asleep in my clothes.
Which I did end up doing, which is why this didn’t get published on my actual birthday. I was very intoxicated yes. (As though you couldn’t tell what with all the asides) The funny part is little miss clean living had 1 glass of wine with dinner, 2 beers at another bar and a tiny bit of vodka at le zorba. wow! That’s less than the first time I ever got drunk when I was 15 on a bottle of jack daniels (ew.) and threw up all over those garden gnomes next door to jesse’s house and woke up in the bathtub hugging the only gnome who remained unscathed. Mind, this time I neither threw up nor awoke in a bathtub. That’s evolution in action mes amis. Pictures to come (of Paris, not of garden gnomes being hugged in bathtubs…).
Oh, and the reason why spanish questions in brackets would excite me is because they start with an upside down question mark and end with one right side up. Yes, I know I’m wierd.
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