I like Paris. I do. This is my third or fourth time here, and as cities go, I like it. Wide tree-lined streets, a language I speak well enough to understand 90% of what’s said around me by strangers at outdoor cafes, thus feeding my eavesdropping obsession, and culture by the bucketload.
Now, it even has free WiFi near the metro stations, but that’s going up to €10 an hour in September, so I’ll just take advantage while I can.
On the other hand, it’s ridiculously expensive, the coffee is abominable and there’s sooo much going on it’s almost impossible to choose. Living here would make it possible, but I don’t like it enough to want to live here.
I’m trying to get in touch with the various people I know here but that’s proving… interesting. Local calls are pay-per-minute, and expensive, and guess what? You pay to *receive* mobile calls too, so I lost €10 on a call from Australia without knowing it.
Backtracking a bit, I went to Bayonne after Bilbao. My guidebook said the Fête de Bayonne started the first Wednesday of August. Excellent, I thought, that’s tomorrow. But this year, they decided to make it the week before because the first Wednesday was so late…The centre of Basque country, I expected it to be more quaint, but since the festival had just finished, it was grotty and tired. The museum of the basque culture was interesting.
Then I went to Carcassonne again, a place I went with hawkeye last time. I loved it last time and wanted to buy some things in little shops we’d seen last time. Most were still there, but the shop where he bought me the gorgeous silk scarf was gone.
And then to Nîmes, which was beautiful. Music on every street corner, open squares, lovely food, a tower to climb and see the world, roman ruins, and a generally good atmosphere. Not too many tourists, a festive space, with buildings old enough and trees enough to make me feel at home.
I was trying to find the Castellum because the map was atrocious and stopped some people. “Do you know how I get to the Castellum?” I asked them in French, “because the map is shocking. It looks like these streets go there but they’re all… I don’t know how you say it in French…” Pause. In English: “Dead ends.” They look at me blankly. Slow grinding sound as the memorybots call up another word for dead-end and pass it to the english-to-french translatorbots for processing. The word is very acceptable and with slight adjustments for accent is passed onto the mouth which says “cul-de-sacs”. The boy nods, repeats the word and tells me the way there. I miss most of it due to the alarming distraction as the french-to-english translator bots, which are apparently always on duty even when I’m not aware of it, report screaming emergency halt signals that I have just said “bag bottom”. The crunching noise in my head as the actual meaning of the phrase and its connotation are reassigned a new place in the language hierarchy has a pleasant side effect of endorphin release.
I really should get on and do some work.
