Fezzik In Paris

au revoir, dr gonzo

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May 4, 2015

As stated on this very blog just over a year ago, I bought an iPhone 5c shortly after arriving in Paris. Amongst the things that the Purrito brought me when she came on the apartment hunting expedition was a case for said phone, which featured this image.

The case was passed to the Purrito when I passed the phone to her.

Said case and said phone were left in the back of a taxi on our way back from the Hôpital Americain this afternoon. I chased the cab for approximately five blocks on foot, while the Purrito headed to the nearest cab stand in an attempt to find the driver. Neither of us found the cab (though the Purrito may have caught a brief glimpse of it), and the recovery of her phone was not to be, in any case, as it was already off when we attempted to call it once we had regrouped. The remote data wipe has been initiated, however, and on the positive side, the price of the 5c fell some 200EUR in the year since I originally bought it.

We missed French class, but bought dinner, and the Purrito is currently engaged in performing a restoration of the contents.

Dr Gonzo, however, will not be returning. Long may he be a thorn in the new “owner’s” side.

lunch, interrupted

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April 30, 2015

From last week’s small protest in La Défense.

It’s a bit weird to have to snake through protestors, gendarmes in full riot kit, and then mall security when all I’m interested in is acquiring a sandwich.

Not a common sight for the business district.

Je ne suis pas intéressé….

Purrito

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April 30, 2015

A recent survey asked 600 women in France if they had ever been sexually harassed on the Metro. 100% of them answered yes. 100%. I had talked about it with Geep last week or so, and said that I had never really had a problem in Paris. I am not the ideal parisian shape, I’m a bit chunkier than the stick thin girls here ( but cute!!!), so i figured that was part of the reason I have been left alone. Fine by me. However, today I joined the 100%.

I had a mission to visit Chez Ladurée and acquire a large box of the Marie-Antoinette Thé macarons for Geep. It isn’t far from our flat, but it was raining so I took the Metro. Since I had a lot of errands to run, I had just slapped on a green rain coat, black rainboots, jeans, pulled my hair back with bobby pins, and ran out the door. No makeup, no anything really. I grabbed the train and waited for my stop. A man jumped on at Invalides and stood next to me. He was about 50 years old, well dressed, and on the shorter side. I watched his reflection in the glass door and saw him reading the tattoo on my forearm. Soon, he turned to me and started asking me questions about it. I was polite and answered him, but then turned back towards the door. He kept talking to me, smiling, switching back and forth from French to English trying to gauge what I spoke. Finally, he stopped talking to me until we got to my stop. Now, this is weird in itself, because you don’t talk to people on the metro unless you know them or it’s an emergency. I would have shrugged it off as a strange occurrence, but when I muttered au revoir and jumped off the train, he jumped off behind me. He started talking to me again, telling me about how he was a physics professor at some college and how he was going to Dubai next week for a conference (trying to impress me?). I was still shocked he had followed me off the train, so I listened to him as he rattled on while I was trying to figure out what to do. He started asking a lot of questions: How long will you be in Paris? Where are you learning French, What is your phone number? ( I gave him a fake one after he asked 5 times) Will you call me? Where are you going right now? Can we get coffee? Are you American? He thrusted his business card into my hand and started peppering the questions with ” You are very pretty. You have beautiful eyes. I loooooove blonde hair.” He asked me to please email him so we can get together to help each other “improve our french and english“. I was really uncomfortable, and it was probably obvious since I was caught off-guard. I tried to figure out what to do since he wasn’t being super rude, but he was being aggressive.I had tried to back away and say I had to be somewhere, but he just followed me and kept talking. I thought he was going to follow me out of the Metro. Luckily, he said goodbye, making me promise again to contact him… but then he hugged me. I backed away and said goodbye and walked briskly down the corridor to the exit. He stood there a second, maybe deciding whether to follow me or not, but then hopped back on the train. I ducked inside the C&A near the metro exit to get out of the, then pouring, rain and think about about just happened. I called Geep and told him about it and explained how weirded out I was. I laughed it off as I talked to him, feeling more comfortable knowing he had left. If he had kept following me, I doubt I would have found anymore humor in it. As I milled around the store to wait out the rain and look at summer dresses, I realised he had gotten off the train only to bother me. It wasn’t even his stop.

After I got home, I looked online for phrases in French that could be more helpful in situations like that. I have learned a lot of French, but nothing specific to interactions like those. Next time, if it happens again, I have a little more French ammo to use against them when I am uncomfortable, but also to ask for help from others in the event I ever need it. Lesson learned.

gaulthique

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April 29, 2015

Armed with pre-purchased tickets that are supposed to guarantee that the bearer will be admitted at a given timeslot (Leeloo multipass) but which really entitle said bearer to stand in a line that is not marked with signs that state (in French) that the wait time from this point is approximately two hours, we went, via a bouncy bus that took us down a street with even more eye-wateringly expensive shops than even the Champs-Élysées proper, to the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit that we had decided not to stand in line for in the wake of our trip to the sewer museum, which is, in my mind, still a front-runner for museum we’re most likely to remember some arbitrary number of years hence, if only for the reason that said reminiscence will be presaged by the Purrito asking “remember when you dragged me through that Paris sewer museum?”

I should note (actually, there’s no “should” here; the last time I checked, there was no mandatory disclosure requirement for stream-of-consciousness-style trip reports) that I didn’t really know what to expect; my knowledge of Jean Paul Gaultier was limited to the following facts:

he’s a fashion designer
he was the costume designer for The Fifth Element
as a corollary to the first point, he has a line of men’s cologne, a bottle of which the Purrito purchased for me and which I use
as a corollary to the third point, a purchase of his men’s cologne is promotionally accompanied by a duffel-style sack (the military-style cylindrical ones that sailors in John Wayne movies sling around before dying in a presumably noble, but in reality flaming fashion)
corollary the next (yes, I know): promotional duffel bags are useful from a laundry standpoint, which is why I have a laundry basket emblazoned with jaunty sailor stripes and a JPG anchor-style logo.

Unlike the Petit Palais (the place so boring I neglected to post about it; how exactly does one turn the Dutch Bacchanalia movement into something so boring?), the exhibits featured at the Grand Palais have been very well curated, with interesting selections and non-bullshitty explanatory text (Rodin/Mapplethorpe, I’m [still] looking at you), and this one was not an exception; featuring seemingly innumerable runaway pieces, clothes that were produced for a myriad of specific people, photo shoots of people in said clothes (Kurt Cobain in what looked vaguely like a garbage bag as photographed by Annie Leibovitz), strangely disconcerting mannequins, and, as always, an interesting gift shop (I bought a handkerchief), it was well worth our fitful journey to get there.

Our day was rounded out with a trip to Laudurée and the consumption of what is now known as the best macarron known to man (the Marie-Antoinette Thé flavour, if anybody gives a damn, though that could change back to the mint chocolate variety if they would simply deign to make the damn things again), but that is a story for another time.

Very modest.

Mortal Kombat

These incredibly creepy mannequins had moving faces courtesy of a nearby projector. Combined with occasional chatter, they wound up being incredibly disconcerting.

More creepyquins .

Fish out of water?

A photo.

A heavily photoshopped or very old image of the man himself.

Plenty of male designs in here, too.

A dress for the bearded lady.

I wasn’t aware that the quintessential Amy Whitehouse ensemble was a Gauthier creation.

Very neo-Victorian.

Wall art in the stairwell to the upper level.

Fibrous.

This one makes me think of Rouen.

This was, I think, the favorite piece of both me and the Purrito.

have passport, will waddle

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April 28, 2015

It’s spring, which means that for the fuzzy members of our cartel, it’s time for their yearly vaccinations.

We are fortunate to have a very kind, English-speaking vet just down the street, and it was from him that the cats received their checkups. As we suspected, Vorenus is nuts while Aurora is, and this is a direct quote, “perfect.” Fezzik, meanwhile, is simply fat; his current weight is 11.3 kilos, which is just shy of 25 pounds.

Since they were at the vet and being vaccinated anyway, we elected to go ahead and get EU passports for the cats, which greatly eases their movement within the Schengen Zone, something that will likely be of benefit when we all eventually return to the US; while we fly Air France, they’re transported via KLM, which necessitates a stop at the Amsterdam Pet Hotel. While I’m not sure as to how we’re supposed to affix their pictures to their respective passports (particularly hilarious is the requirement that all official French photographs [and believe me, we have taken many official photographs at this point] be taken with “neutral facial expressions”; things not usually observed while wrangling a cat into a Photomaton booth), our resident lunatic, our resident princess, and our resident Michelin man are now ready to have grand adventures on the Continent, should they (read: we) so choose.

Alternately, we may encourage Fezzik to set out on a backpacking trip with the hope that he’d return a few kilos lighter.

Fezzik’s EU Pet Passport.

dumb idea of the week: additional french classes

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April 27, 2015

The Purrito and I are heading off to the Alliance française to begin phase 2 of our formal French education. While we’re still irritated at the system glitches that prevented us from being in the same course, I think that we’re both hoping that attending the evening classes at the same building, at the same time will still provide some of the mutual reinforcement that being in a class together would otherwise provide.

If not, at least we got student IDs out of the deal.

evening wandering

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April 26, 2015

These are from Friday evening’s wandering that featured a cramique, my camera, and a part of the 7e that we’ve never really walked through.

An intimidating statue of Louis Pasteur, the end piece to a long park that begins at the southern side of les Invalides

Side B.

Side cows.

A girl with a flower basket.

The Purrito dug the flowers planted around the base of the statue.

I’m taking pictures of people taking pictures of me from Montparnasse. Heavy.

Napoléon’s Tomb, as seen from behind the Pasteur statue.

A dude.

I found this edifice worthy of the time it took to stop and snap this picture.

Don’t really need a caption here.

turtle power

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April 19, 2015

“That is the most disgusting museum in Paris,” the Purrito said flatly.

Mounting the final few steps that released us from the admittedly smelly subterranean sanctum of Paris’ wastewater, I found that I was having a hard time disagreeing. That said, I had a just-acquired 3€ rat-shaped magnet with the words visite des égouts de paris in my camera bag, so my response was more of a cackle than an agreement.

The Purrito sighed as I laughed again and told me “You know we already have two stuffed rats. We couldn’t buy a stuffed sewer rat because three would be a collection.”

I smiled, shrugged, and noted that the guy at the “gift shop” (in his Paris city services coveralls) looked at us like we were lunatics for wanting to buy something. I further noted that I found his reaction particularly odd, given that we weren’t the only people in the “museum” (which is really a fully-functioning, if very mildly Disneyfied (there are walkways, handrails, and you don’t need to bring your wellies) and labeled stretch of the 2100km-long Paris sewer system).

My lovely wife, who does not share my interest in infrastructure, but who kindly trudged behind me as I said “neat,” “gross,” or “I wondered how they dealt with that” approximately 75 times each shook her head and smiled bemusedly at me.

“Let’s go,” she said, as we headed off to the Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibit, the line for which we would find far too long for our tastes.

I strongly suspect that this will wind up being one of our most vividly-remembered museums.

I don’t know if I should mention this.

The street-level entrance to the cathedral of weird smells. The museum is almost hilariously inexpensive; at 4.40€ per person, it’s certainly the cheapest museum we’ve been to in Paris.

The stairs down…

They (perhaps wisely) ease you into the whole “oh, by the way, you’re under the street and in a sewer now, just in case you, you know, didn’t realize that.”

There was no label on this diorama. Somebody has a sense of humor.

This is Stéphane le Shrimpie (I made that up). He’s the crustacean Waldo of the water cycle posters.

One of the manual(!) devices used to de-sand and de-grit the tunnels.

Both Napoléon I and Napoléon III poured huge amounts of money and manpower into the sewer infrastructure during their respective reigns; it’s something I definitely did not know about, and which the museum noted (Louis XIV was another sanitation champion).

Eww.

Hm.

This section of the museum was loud (just in case it wasn’t obvious, this isn’t waste sewage; that’s handled in non-human-accessible round pipes).

It’s a museum. Learn.

The sewer section in Les Mis is apparently an accurate rendering of the system at the time; per the exhibit, Hugo was a friend of the chief sewer inspector.

What is, in effect, a massive wooden pig (there’s a French name for it that I don’t recall); these are dropped into the actual effluent lines to clean them.

sur le pont d’avignon

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April 18, 2015

I have been mulling over what to write about Avignon and find myself somewhat stuck; it’s not that there’s not much to say (we were there for three days), but I wound up taking a startling number of pictures on this trip, 237, and uploading 30-odd of them in the attached gallery.

As a side note, as someone who shot on film for a non-zero length of time, the digital photography revolution (recursive side note: I hate how fucking everything having to do with a consumer-level technology change is termed “the x revolution;” at best, the vast majority of the changes in question are evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary, but then again, nobody is calling for a pedantry revolution, so I may be out on my own here. Of course, this is pretty much the dictionary definition of a bandwagoning fallacy, so fuck it, we’re back: here comes the pedantry revolution) has done weird things to the number of pictures you take; when I was in Germany during the summer of 2000 (with my spiffy Pentax SLR), I came home with three rolls of film. That’s all of seventy-two pictures (probably 76, given that I always shot to the very end of the film strip, probability of said negatives being interrupted by a large piece of tape be damned); I used a single roll of black and white exclusively in Berlin, a roll of 400 ISO Kodak for general use, and a roll of 1600 ISO film that the father of a friend of mine gave me, the results of which I don’t really remember beyond the fact that the film wasn’t quite as low-light friendly as he’d led me to believe.

I’ve had the Nikon for well under a year now, and there are just over 3300 images in my lightroom library. As any one of the very few people that have access to the raw picture dump know, that’s not to say that these photos are worth anything; there’s three or four versions of the same thing, shot at slightly different angles, with slightly different focal points, or with slightly different framing. There are pictures of things that are hardly photo-worthy (see: stinky mattresses). There are pictures of buses, of pigeons, of window latches, of barges, of things that, before the move to digital, one would not take pictures of. I’m sure the signal-to-noise ratio is worse, but that’s where things are. It’s weird.

In any case, I’d posit that I have a valid excuse for this embarrassment of photographic riches (quantitative, not qualitative riches): for the entirety of the weekend, the light was near-perfect.

A nuclear power plant as seen from the train.

Holy shit! Carrefour comes in biggie size!

The answer to the question: “How exactly does a walled medieval city core work in the age of the automobile?”

The Purrito digs mountains.

The medieval Fort Saint-André. We’ll very likely visit (and go to the abbey behind said fort) should we return to the region.

Atop the city wall.

The remains of Pont Saint-Bénézet, as seen from atop the Avignon wall. The bridge originally terminated at the tower seen in the background.

An interesting drainage pipe.

Old bridge. New cars.

The outer setion of the pont is unfortunately under construction, so we couldn’t peer over the edge.

Pigeon!

Always interesting (and, no, this isn’t sarcastic): the bridge piers.

The city as seen from the pont.

It makes sense that one would build a walled, high-value, river-controlling city on an imposing limestone outcrop.

The Palais des Papes, home to seven popes (and two antipopes) until the papacy was returned to Rome at the resolution of the Great Schism.

Weird.

An inner courtyard.

This guy took a crossbow bolt to the brainstem while defending the palais during one of the sieges.

A random window.

One of the sub-floor vaults in which the church’s loot was stored.

A big damn hallway for big damn services.

Overlooking the courtyard.

If archers used fisheyes to aim.

The view from the papal wave-to-the-unwashed-masses window.

A passage on the south side of the Palais des Papes.

This pipe is awesome.

Very artistic, no?

As the day wore on, the streets were shut to automobile traffic and inundated with people.

…a stop sign?

The path leading up to the gardens on the north side of the papal palace.

The very top of the gardens.

“Get down from there!” “But moooooom…”

Sheep sheep sheep.

This dickmonster was apparently given to the sad archaeology museum by the Louvre.

Avignon’s station is both aesthetically pleasing and surprisingly modern.

That’s my ride home.

sprung

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April 13, 2015

Last week marked the first time since October that it was warm enough to eat on the steps of the grande arche.

As indicated in the photos, spring is the flame and the denizens of the district are most certainly moths.

The arche is a bit popular these days.

Big, isn’t it?

A stadium under construction on the Nanterre side of the arche.

Monsieur Mitterand’s arche is looking a bit worse for wear these days (read: the marble is falling off in places). There’s apparently an effort being made to rehabilitate it.