Paris: Some dates... um, I don´t remember anymore, we´ll have to wait for Lins´post. Anyway, 10 days in Paris!

Well, this won´t be an original sentiment, but I fell in love the instant I landed in Paris. What might be surprising is that my first experience of it was the pee-smelling subway car, but the amour still managed to get through to me. That first impression would soon prove to be more than skin-deep.... My first night I wandered aimlessly into some street performers. The performers themselves weren´t really that exciting- it was just a hacky slapstick sort of show- it was the audience I was impressed with! Every time they asked for a volunteer they got upstaged... they´d do funny walks, dances, sing songs... I thought it was a weird phenomenon of that particular square, but then after some more wandering I ran into this ska concert and more of the same sense of flamboyance and fun. There were minivan moms full-out ska dancing behind their strollers!

Adding to my enjoyment was the now very familiar feeling French everywhere (in contrast with Barcelona). It was so good to get REAL french practice, and people appreciate when you´re both struggling through a more or less equally french-english conversation.

There was once again more to see than I can say, but I will mention that I randomly visited the Pompidou Centre one day and ran into one of my old favourites- Alexander Calder (you can probably find some of his work online, he sort of animates junk- but not like stop motion, he just moves it himself). I had always been a big fan of his circuis movie, and was surprised to see it playing. Then I walked into the next room to see the real pieces from the film right there!!

It wasn´t all fun and games I suppose... At any given moment if you turn 360 degrees in Paris you will see at least one couple making out, so that´s annoying... the keyboard was difficult, as I demonstrated to my sista-friend Allie in an email:

" Right now I'm struggling with this zut-full french keyboard... let me show you what I mean by re- writing this sentence as I normally would. Right noz Iù, struggling zith this wut6full French keyboqrd:::: let ,e shoz you zhqt I ,eqn by re-zriting this sentence qs I nor,qlly zould: Ridiculous, non?"

And food was prohibitively expensive. I mean ALL food, so I went on a crepe and fruit diet to save money. When I heard the walking tour guide talking about all the Van Gogh and Picasso types literally living as starving artists in Monmartre where we were staying, the whole thing felt a little too authentic. By crepe trois you´re pretty tired of crepes.

interlude: actually we´ve accumulated a few travel quirks as a result of the little discomforts like this, maybe they´ll sound familiar:

a) As my friend and travel guru Kerri advised, I´ve left most of the clothes I unwisely brought behind at hostels to lighten up. And it feels great! I recommend paring down your worldly possessions to anyone who needs a life freshen-up.

b) Every once in a while after a particularly grody hostel, Lins and I will suffer a kind of two-perosn mass hysteria and convince ourselves we have lice or some other kind of cooties, which leads to ape-like hair examinations every hour or so, when we feel a suspicious itch.

c) I´m now at least 17% composed of Nutella.

But mostly it was amour. France is the one place I´ve felt a truly burning need to return to so far, and at least I´ll be spending more quality time with our Little France next door in Quebec. But it´s true that it did kind of smell like pee sometimes. Just sayin.

ps- There are so many more truly beautiful pics that I didn´t include, PLEASE request a slideshow on my return.

pps- sorry this is turning into a bit of retrospective vs. a live blog!!

ppps- also sorry for some confusing sentences, I´m stealing some time at night so as to feel less regretful for taking hours on the computer

pppps- sorry for all the ps´s.

Dalida, a famous singer in 10 languages, but not English, so you don´t know her.

Lins and I visited a sewer museum, which was one of the oddest but also most interesting we´ve seen yet. This happy (if lumpy) family of rats for instance... what´s that all about?

It was a very genuine sewer experience. I had to leave early to get some smelling salts.

A pic of Lins forgetting that we were there to see Star Trek!!! Which was AWESOME. We had a great chat with an astrophysicist and her IT boyfriend right before- it was nerd-core TO THE MAX. The max, I tell you.

I spend a lot of time just chillin´ ´n´ parks. This one was unusual (Luxembourg, I think) because there were chairs all over the huge sprawling park, and this one crowded strip where you were permitted to use the lawn for sprawling.

The Calder exhibit was no photography, so I busted out some rusty sketchin´and gave it a whirl. This is a wire sculpture, so, hard to go wrong.
The Pompidou Square, my favourite lounging spot.

Cut that out, jerks.

Les femmes. La lune.

Our opera house experience...

We bought seats for 5 € where you have to crane your neck down to see the stage- it was more of a hole in the ceiling than a seat really. Until...

... they closed down our section and we were moved to the orchestra seats!! It was like being bumped from Ryanair economy class to Air Force One. I meant to have a pic of the improved seating in there, but Lins will have to cover me.