26 August 2008

Although it happened in the dark of the night…I was strolling through the streets of Paris, it was cold it was starting to rain...


Jour deux:


I started the day in typical Parisienne fashion with breakfast in a cafe. You can't quite comprehend how much time the French spend in cafes...it borders on unnatural. Granted, the coffee and pastries are really good but still. All the chairs face the street so it's like you’re the audience in some grande théâtre de la vie. I was expecting the waiters to be super rude, not least of all because I could barely speak two words of French. But I think what some people interpret as arrogance is simply efficiency: these guys really know their job and are so good at handling people that language doesn't even factor in to it. They just know what it is you want and get it to you with a minimum of fuss or palaver. I can honestly say that the omelette I had that morning was the single most delicious thing I have ever eaten during daylight hours. I would go further and say that the previous holder of the most delicious crown could have been eaten, digested and crapped onto a plate by comparison. It was like a barely substantial cloud of butter and egg bursting with ham and Gruyere cheese. My mouth had a deliciogasm. Mind you, the three cups of cafe allonge that I had could have influenced my judgement but it was fucking good nonetheless.

As the sun was shining I went for a wander over to the Louvre to take in a bit of culture and shit. France has produced some wonderful artists and some breath-taking art, no question, but I can’t help but feel the Italians just ownzrd the Renaissance. They were able to capture the passion and the fire of the period in a way that makes the French seem mundane and pedestrian by comparison. Although I have to admit I’d never seen so many smiles as upon the French sculpture so they clearly had a sense of humour long before Jerry Lewis came along. And the religious dudes did an awesome job with the demons. The Mona Lisa was somewhat underwhelming; it’s a lot smaller than you imagine it will be and there’s simply hordes of tourists swarming in front of the thing plus the security barriers so you can’t really get very close to it, I gather due to the numerous attempts to vandalise it over the years. Geez, it's hardly Piss Christ, now is it?

Tiring of the indoors I jumped back on the Metro and headed to the Cimetiere du Pare, final resting place of such giants as Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf. Museums and cemeteries seem to be an unintentional constant of my travels, much like squirrels and geese (although you'll be happy to know there was none of the former on this trip, much to my dismay). The cemetery was lovely and peaceful, very gothic with it's winding cobblestone avenues lined with leafy trees and decrepit sepulchres. Predictably there were more people around Morrison's grave than were at the Mona Lisa. He's in quite an out of the way location tucked behind some larger tombs in a very unassuming grave with a modest stone marker. Apparently the headstone has been replaced a number of times due to souvenir hunters and his family pay a large annual sum to remove graffiti from the surrounding graves, but there's still a few gems if you look hard enough.

I finished the day as I'd started it, in a cafe. But not just any cafe...this was Les Deux Magots. Those of you with even a shred of indy street cred will know that this is the cafe where the giants of the artistic and intellectual world would congregate: Hemingway, Morrison, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Picasso. Admittedly it's lost some of it's edge over the years, but even still sitting there as the sun went down and the crowds wandered past and the jazz buskers played across the street, it was hard not to feel inspired. I ordered my double espresso and my Heineken and my cognac and whiled away the hours scribbling haiku on the back of postcards, feeling if not quite a part of the gang then privileged to sit on their coattails, and it was tempting to think that some psychic residue of their collective cool cachet rubbed off on me. And as the alcohol mixed playfully with the caffeine in my bloodstream it became easier to imagine that as the gawking tourists drifting by looked my way perhaps they saw more than just a sweaty tipsy jerk off with sore feet and a broken heart...

À être poursuivi...

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