Greetings from Santorini, also known as Thira. Santorini is the Venetian name, from when the Venetians used to go around doing things like conquering places in the Aegean and destroying the Acropolis frieze. Thira, I guess, is the original or more ancient name for this island. Either way, we made it to the Cyclades, after some more adventures on mainland Greece and a few days in Crete.

We’re staying in a town on Santorini called Imeroviglia, and it is totally idyllic here, at least at the little condo-type-place we’re staying. It is clean and cool and airy, and while I generally scoff at the concept of sitting by a pool when there’s an ocean (sea?) nearby, I have to say I quite like it here at this pool, looking at the fig treest and shaded by some other type of tree I can’t identify.

Santorini is very pretty, so far, and is evidently the most touristed place in Greece. According to A, the guidebook said something like this about Sanorini: “If you are under 25 years old and you want to meet other people your age and probably have sex with them, this is the place to go.” Oy vey.

 At the ferry port we saw a whole bunch of American kids who can only be described as “dudical,” my favored term to describe fratty white guys who I prejudge because I am a terrible person, but I am probably right about. The guys selling the ferry tickets seemed to prejudge some of those guys too, because they gave them a very hard time and wouldn’t let them pay in cash, for seemingly no reason (we had just paid with a card and they were perfectly pleasant to us. Ha ha.) I am not sure whether this was in resopnse to anything, (maybe the book also said that Santorini was like Spring Break all the time, or maybe one of the kids said it) but Joe kept muttering to himself “Spring break all the time? Really? Is that really necessary?”

We took a cab from the ferry port, and it passed through the larger town of Thira, which seemed to be totally full of souvenir stores and places to rent ATVs. Didn’t seem so fun to me, but I think we’ll go back and check out the town later. For now, I’m glad we’re staying here, where it is very very quiet and breezy. No evidence of permanent Spring Break.

Yes, we are in Santorini now, but here’s some more stuff that happened back in Athens.

Joe stayed with three different people in four nights in Athens, all through couchsurfing. One very hot and humid night, we went with him to meet one of his hosts, a really nice girl named Olga. We met her and some friends at a medium-sized urban park in the Exharria neighborhood with a hill in one corner and a sandlot with a playground in another, and kids around our age or younger hanging out all over the place. It was an incredibly lively scene, and really felt like a SCENE. On the hill, there was a movie screen set up, and some kids started making an announcement, and a movie started. A got very involved in the movie, which turned out to be a 1930’s American movie about union-busting in a mining town. Very intense. I left him to the movie and hung out with Joe and co. The Greek kids turned out to be incredibly nice, and one of the kids with them turned out to be another couchsurfer, an artist from Chicago via San Francisco. People shared their beer with us and a guy walked by, collecting money for some cause. One of the kids explained to me that this park had been the site of a major showdown between students/young people and the city. It had been an abandoned city lot that had been cleaned up and taken over by the youths, and then of course the city decided to build something there. The kids won, and now basically own the spot. They take care of maintenance and clean up and planting plus do things like show movies, and that was what the collection was for. I asked what the park was called, and he said it was just known as “the park that used to be a parking (lot).” It was great.

The day before we left Athens, we stopped by a family-owned sandal shop that is a venerable Athens institution, at least according to the New York Times and Lonely Planet. It has been run by the family for 3 generations. It is touted as the shop of the “poet sandalmaker,” because the father of the current proprietor was a poet. The current proprietor is an artist. When you go into the shop they have a special chair that says “the poet’s seat.” I made Joe sit in it and took a picture, because he is a poet and I am a nerd.

The shop has about 27 styles, all of which are variations on Ancient Greek-style sandals. Some of them are named after celebrities that have patronized the shop (the “Sophia Loren” or “John Lennon” styles) and some are named after important Greeks. We were informed, however, that Socrates himself did not wear the Socrates, because he preferred to be barefoot.

It seems that gladiator-style sandals have gotten very trendy in the past few years, as evidenced by girls all over Paris and New York and Chicago, and definitely all over Athens. I think this has been very good for the Melissimos business, but perhaps has made things a bit tedious, because all the girls seem to want the same styles. I dared to be different, I guess, mostly because the sandals that buckle up your calf seem like they’d be uncomfortable to me, not to mention that they’d take a long time to get on and off, and would probably be kind of unflattering. I got a much simpler style.

We were in the shop for 3 hours, and each emerged with a new pair of leather sandals that had been adjusted exactly to fit our feet. Lest the 3-hours thing discourage anyone, I would say that a lot of that time was spent being indecisive about which sandals to get, and shmoozing with the guys who worked in the store, including the aforementioned current owner, grandson of the original owner. This guy was extremely chilled out and easygoing and friendly, and had lived in NYC for 12 years during the 1980’s, going to Parson’s, so we were asking him about his time in NY and talking about music and art and generally just chatting and watching the goings on in the store. Some of us needed several adjustments to our sandals, so the way it ended up working was that he’d adjust them, then we’d walk around in the store, deciding whether they fit right, and meanwhile someone else would come in and he’d start adjusting theirs, so we’d end up having to wait in order to get the next adjustment. This is probably how it ended up taking 3 hours. But I felt it was time well-spent, because we had fun and emerged with nice, very reasonably priced, custom-fit sandals. Go team!

We spent probably more time and brainpower necessary trying to figure out how to get from Meteora (one of the most beautiful, unusual spots I have ever been to) to Delphi. Our incredibly nice & helpful hotel guy in Meteora explained that the Greek train system is terrible ever since the Nazis bombed it. Stupid Nazis. Before WWII the Greeks had an excellent train system. But ever since those dumb Nazis bombed the tracks, everybody was too dysfunctional to rebuild it and nobody bothered and they now have a subpar train system, and nobody cares enough to make it work properly, up to the point that you can’t even really get proper timetables in advance.

Anyway, to get from Meteora to Delphi by bus, what would be a 3 hour drive turns into an 8 hour ordeal of many, many buses. I hate buses. I get very carsick on windy roads in bumpy, improperly-ventilated buses. Nausea abounds. So we thought we’d figure out a way to do at least some of the trip by train. We took a train to an extremely windy place called Livadia. Actually, we weren’t in Livadia at all really, we were in extremely windy OUTER Livadia, while the bus to Delphi was to be from the bustling center of Livadia. To get to INNER Livadia we had to take a cab or bus. We took the short bus ride to Livadia and as we were pulling into town, saw the bus to Delphi passing us on its way out. In other words, they couldn’t get it together to (a) put the bus and train stations anywhere near each other in this small town, or (b) coordinate the bus to Delphi with the train arriving from the other major tourist attraction of Northern Greece. Oops. The next train would be in 3 hours. We saw a cab, asked him the price, and got in.

I sat in front, to minimize possibility of carsickness. As we drove out of Livadia, heading to the highway, the cab driver asked where we were from. “New York.” Blank expression. “United States.” “Ah! United States! George Bush!” We shook our heads. “No, not anymore! Barack Obama!”

“No!” said the cab driver. “America, George Bush!” At which point he reached down and picked up a large gun. “George Bush!” he said, pointing the gun at his own head, while driving. “Pow! Pow!” Then he laughed. “Um, yes” said I “George Bush does seem to promote violence, doesn’t he?”

At this point I considered demanding that he pull over to the side of the road so we could get out. Then I reconsidered, recalling that he had a LARGE GUN. So on we drove. To Delphi.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, and we found Delphi to be a small tourist town in an incredibly beautiful valley. We took a nice little hike up the side of a hill at sunset and took in a truly incredible vista, the valley and mountains, with olive groves and bushes and trees, ruins of a temple to Athena off to the side of the valley and the gulf of Corinth shining aqua blue in the distance. Gorgeous, really.

All day yesterday I kept saying “ACROPOLIS!” to myself, sometimes out loud.

We got to Athens the day before yesterday, several hours later than we’d expected, and were greeted by stifling heat. I think it was about 92 degrees farenheit when we got here, and quite humid. The guy we were renting an apartment from couldn’t meet us because our plane had been delayed and he’d had to go to work. We waited in the shady National Garden, near Syntagma square, and ate some cheese-filled flaky pastries that we’d bought on the street. I was extremely disgruntled about the weather.

Our apartment guy finally called after a little while, and informed us that his mother would meet us with the keys to the apartment. When we arrived, sweaty and wilted, we found her very annoyed because she had been waiting for a while, with a taxi running outside. Of course, we had no way of knowing she was there until the guy called us, so it wasn’t really our fault. She was immediately suspicious of us, and probably rightfully so, because we’d made a reservation for 3 people, then changed it to 2 people when my brother decided to couchsurf instead, but three of us showed up. We said “he’s not staying here, he’s staying with a friend.” She said “where does your friend live?” And he said “I don’t know.” Riiiight.

After we sort of convinced her we weren’t lying, she left and we showered and went out to meet Joe’s couchsurfing contacts for a “traditional Greek music night.” We arrived at a bar/restaurant (taverna?) near Kerameikos to meet some very friendly Greek kids in the general vicinity of our age, who were sitting at a long table in a somewhat empty, large place with a nice garden out back. Thankfully the place was lightly air conditioned. Some Mezedes were ordered and Raki was ordered. Turns out I do not like Raki, even the non-anise-flavored kind. I do, however, like a Greek beer called Fix. More people showed up. The place filled up. More food and drink were ordered and people were all sharing the food and passing it around and the table was improbably piled up with plates and cups and beer bottles. It was agreed that the music would start, and it became clear that it was our tablemates who would be producing it. They started playing greek music with string instruments, and it sounded a lot like Klezmer music I’ve heard all my life. It was really good, what I could hear of it. But the restaurant was still loud and crazy, so rather than a concert this was more of a jam session in the middle of a crowded restaurant. A insists that he cannot think of a place in NYC where this sort of thing could take place — a bunch of people just sit down at a table at a crowded restaurant and start playing music. It was pretty wacky and great, but I am sure that this could happen at various venues in NY. What do you think?

I was getting increasingly exhausted, since I’d only slept 4 hours the night before, our last night in Paris. We decided to catch the last Metro back to our apartment, leaving Joe (my brother) to his couchsurfing Greek traditional musician friends. He told us the next day that they moved to a large park and joined about 50 other people in a big circle and kept playing, and the music got better and better. Amazing. He was out until 5 AM and thus did not join us for the first half of our adventures yesterday.

It remains disgustingly, horribly, stiflingly hot in Athens and apparently throughout Greece this week. I have a really hard time figuring out ways not to get cranky in this weather, but I am working on it. Nonetheless, I’ve been having a fantastic time so far, and I’d venture to say my travel companions have been having a great time too. I am extremely, extremely glad that we rented an apartment with a functional, very strong, air conditioner.

by the way, this is what the sky looks like in paris.

this is what i’m dealing with.

sigh.

Well, this is it. Tomorrow morning we are leaving Paris, after almost 9 months. The past few days have been really great, with hardly a hint of finality, though the fun activities have been punctuated by sadly necessary packing activities. Part of the reason that it has been easy to pretend that we aren’t in fact leaving so very soon is that we’ve had yet more guests the past few days, new ones at that. My brother arrived here Wednesday, after a journey of 6 weeks or so that included sailing across the Atlantic (yes sailing! like on a boat!), taking a ferry across the English Channel and hitchhiking here from the ferry. The next day, my cousin arrived here, the third of three brothers, all of whom will have now visited us during our Paris sojourn.

We’ve had a great time with them — their first day, when my cousin Y was still jetlagged, we walked all around, along the Seine and through the Tuileries gardens, through some of the Latin Quarter and St. Germain des Pres, got great sandwiches at Cosi and went inside Notre Dame and back to our apartment, before going back out to eat the magically delicious falafel and schwarma on offer at L’As du Falafel on rue des Rosiers. The next day we went to the Pompidou Center, and saw both special exhibits which were great, as well as the phenomenal permanent collection. We went to dinner at Cafe Breizh to introduce my cousin to the wonders of Bretagne galettes and cider. Then on Saturday, it being Sabbath, we walked to the Louvre, making one last use of our free entrance cards, and spent several hours there. Cousin Y is a big lover of art and he was seriously wowed by the Louvre– 3 hours probably wasn’t enough for him. He’ll be here a few days longer after we leave town, and I am pretty sure he plans to return and take another crack at it. Saturday night we finally had a picnic by the side of the Canal St. Martin, something I’ve seen people doing many times and always thought would be fun. We had great cheese and salads, with our favorite baguettes from Eric Kayser. Our friends V & M came to say goodbye to us, and my brother J brought his guitar, which encouraged a number of French kids to make friends with us. We met two hilarious girls, Epenine and Margot (I think!), and one of them told us of her dreams of moving to America to be a cowgirl, and informed us that she is not a fan of Guy Debord. We all sang a bunch of songs together, and I somehow drank way, way too much wine.

Then, yesterday, after getting a VERY SLOW start to the day,  we took the train out to Versailles, where we hung out in the massive gardens. We weren’t planning to go inside the Chateau, because we knew the gardens were huge and Y didn’t seem to care to see the inside anyway, but we ended up getting there so late that it was totally free to get in (normally they charge even for the gardens on weekends in tourist season). We only had a few hours there, but it was really great. We sat on the King’s lawns and ate cherries and felt royal, and Y sketched everything in his ever-present sketchbook, and J did a reading from Howl. Then we returned to Paris and had an OUT OF THIS WORLD meal at one of our favorite places to eat in Paris, Le Verre Volé. I’m not kidding — the wine is of course always lovely there (it is inside a wine shop) but they also have a way of making fairly simple food taste incredible. For example, some of the dishes we shared were a heirloom tomato platter (with sea salt, chili flakes, and some other deliciousness), a white asparagus dish with poached egg (versions of which I’ve had and enjoyed at several Paris restaurants) and a platter of mozzarella cheese with eggplant. All of these dishes were fairly simple, but we all agreed that they were also some of the best food we’d each ever eaten. Like, EVER.

Having my cousin & brother here has made everything fresh and new and exciting, and allowed us to feel like it is still “normal life” in Paris, which for us means having guests and running around town with them. Our guests have been a nearly constant feature of our months in Paris, and while I’ve probably allowed it to excuse me from meeting actual Parisians (oops) and doing other work I should have gotten done here, it has been really a wonderful experience, and special on its own terms, to be able to host so many of my friends and family in such an amazing city. That said, I may never have houseguests again.

Just kidding, it has been truly an honor and wonderful to host so many of my friends, and I kind of wish more of my friends could have made it here. I am really eager to be back in NYC soon, after 7 years, where an abundant majority of my friends and family live, so I can start throwing constant brunches and shabbat dinners. What can I say, I really love feeding people! In honor of our revolving cast of characters here at Chez R & A, I am going to do a blog post about all of our guests, a bit later.

For now, I shall say au revoir to Paris, but probably not to this blog. We’re off to spend a month in Greece & Turkey, and I’m incredibly excited for that, as sad as I am to leave Paris. Should I post sporadic updates from the road? What do you think, my 3 readers?

With less than 2 weeks one week left, my thoughts naturally begin to turn to what I will miss about this year, about Paris, because that’s how I work. Rather than living in the moment, I’d always prefer to think ahead to the future about how sad I will be that the moment is over, thereby missing what is left of the moment. Neat trick, right?

Anyhow, you will probably hear (and see) a bit more about this in the coming weeks, and possibly even after I have left, but here are some preliminary thoughts.

First off, What I will not miss: I may not have mentioned this, but they are doing construction again in my building. Yep. On the floor above us this time. hammering, banging, sawing, and that horrible buzzing thing that makes everything in the building vibrate. At least we’re not alone. This apparently is just la vie a Paris — my in-laws were just here for a week and it turned out that nobody told them that there was going to be scaffolding directly outside the windows of the high-class luxury apartment that they were renting. With men on the scaffolding. Doing some kind of (you guessed it) construction! thankfully it wasn’t very noisy. But they did have to rig up some makeshift curtains to put some modest distance between the bathroom window and the construction workers directly outside it.

Ok, with that out of the way.

What I WILL miss (an illustrated partial list):

um, this:

and this:

I will miss the brightly colors of painted storefronts and front doors:

I will miss the pale colors too, the elegance and slightly yellowed tones of the city’s patina, the age of things, and the evidence of what was there before. This is especially a feature of my area, the Marais, and I love it:

Mostly, I know I will really, really miss this.

 

The Seine manages to astonish me regularly, even after more than 8 months of crossing it nearly daily, sometimes multiple times:

What percentage of conversations that take place in Provence are on the subject of how and when to come back to Provence? Or scheming about how to move to Provence? I posed this question to my travel companions this past week. I think about 80%. Maybe that’s a bit high, because I guess people that live there wouldn’t have that conversation. Except they MIGHT, if the other people involved in the conversation do not live there, and are trying to get their advice on how and when to come back to Provence or move there. So I think I will stick to my inital estimate.  80%.

Yeah, so Provence is really all that. I don’t know what it is, maybe the sun just melts your brain a little, but the colors of the sky and the landscape seem more vivid than you would expect, and it has such a great combination of obviously irresistible elements — vineyards, the grape leaves glowing an almost neon green, olive groves, with their gnarled blackish branches silhouetted against the sky, gently covered with silvery green leaves, like a Van Gogh painting come to life. And at this time of year, astonishing splashes of red all around from the poppies growing everywhere. My camera seriously could not do the reality justice, and we marveled at the fact that Van Gogh somehow figured out how to capture it in paint, when it was impossible to frame the amazing scenery properly with my camera. (Yes, I think these pictures are pretty, I am not fishing for compliments on my snapshot abilities — I am just trying to say that in reality it was much, much prettier!)

And the Provencal fabrics, which seem maybe a little bit cheesy when you’re standing in a Williams-Sonoma store in a mall somewhere, make perfect sense when you’re there, and you want to paint your house bright yellow and aqua, and plant purple and red flowers all around.

We saw the papal palace in Avignon, as well as the museum that houses Avignon’s collection of (mostly random) 14th and 15th century Italian art. There was one stunning Boticelli, and a lot of interesting and random stuff. We rented a car and drove to the Pont du Garde, the remnant of a major aqueduct that carried water around Provence for the Romans.

We drove around seeing the countryside and visited Chateauneuf du Pape, a cute little town surrounded by vineyards that produce one of France’s most “prestigious” wines. The whole idea that wine can be prestigious is pretty hilarious to me, and I get the sense that I don’t have a super-sophisticated palate (when we tasted the wines, I often preferred the “immature” wines that supposedly still needed to age more). Sophisticated or not, I definitely enjoyed stopping by different places and tasting wines. This picture was taken at my favorite stop, a “cave” right in the town of Chateauneuf du Pape, where the proprietors spoke no English at all (they did at all the other places), and where they took us downstairs into the actual cave itself, where bottles of wine were aging untouched.

You can see the dust on the 2003 and 2005 bottles in the picture. We asked when the cave was built, and they said “built? what do you mean? it wasn’t built — it was dug right out of the side of the hill!” We bought some wine from them, including a white wine made from entirely grenache grapes, something we had been looking for ever since we tasted something like it in Paris a month or two ago.

We went to St. Remy, the incredibly charming perfectly-situated Provencal town where Van Gogh was committed to a mental institution, and we took an amazing (and sometimes a little too difficult) bike trip through the landscapes that he painted while there.

We also stayed in the most amazing and fancy “farmhouse” B & B and all wanted to move in, but really only could stay there for one night at the prices they were charging. In St. Remy, we also went to the very popular-with-tourists Wednesday market and visited the ruins of Glanum, a Celtic, then Hellenic, then Roman city that is pretty amazingly well preserved.

We went up to Les Baux, a town on top of one of the Alpilles (‘mini-alps’) in the region. R.A., who drove the rental car did NOT ENJOY the winding, uphill-downhill, “really, this is a two-lane road?” drive up to Les Baux. Not at all. The town was pretty cute, even if it was totally full of groups of people deposited there en masse by tourbuses. I have NO IDEA how the buses drove on that road, and the tourbussers didn’t seem nearly as fazed by the drive as we were. The main reward for the drive was a visit to the “chateau” which was really a mostly ruined medieval fortress, rather than the empty old castles we’d seen in the Loire valley. We declined the audio tour and hurried past the guys in period costumes doing some kind of fake-dueling schtick for a group of enraptured junior high students, and climbed around on the ruins, looking out on an amazingly vast view of the Provencal countryside, picture perfect with squares of lighter and darker green, greenish brown, and monopoly-sized farmhouses dotting the whole.

A thought he could see the Mediterranean, and we asked an older man if that was right. He didn’t think so, but we calculated the distance the next day when we went to Arles, and we still think it is possible.

Arles is a somewhat bigger, seemingly less affluent city than we expected. Both it and Avignon felt very much like Italy to us. In Arles we had a hotel room which, to our surprise, had a view RIGHT into the Roman arena across the street. It was a pretty spectacular thing to see out the window when I woke up to get some water shortly after sunrise, and I started taking pictures out the window instead of going back to bed. I think I worried A, who asked if I was ok. I don’t normally wake up that early in the morning. But the view totally stopped me in my tracks.

Yeah, Provence. Pretty good.  Indeed, I am already trying to figure out when and how I will get back there.

The last few weeks have been really full. Filled with explorations of new parts of Paris with good friends, filled with good food and wine. Also, they have been filled with mostly chilly & damp weather, grey skies, and a HUGE dose of frustration. C’est la vie, et à Paris, c’est comme ca.

Why the frustration? Well, as you may remember from my last post waaaaay back 2 weeks ago, we returned from a few days away to find that our cable service was dead. This meant that we had no internet, no land-line phone (our way of calling the U.S.) and no TV. Getting it back involved numerous long phone calls, 1 trip to the cable company’s store to exchange our router, 1 “missed” appointment where the cable guy claimed he showed up and we weren’t there (we were there — HE wasn’t), and TWO WEEKS of waiting. The most awesomely amazing part of the whole thing was finding out from our landlord that the neighbors had also lost their internet, since they have the same provider. Unlike us, however, they chose not to repeatedly try to call the cable company or set up appointments or go into the store. Instead, they chose to wait and do nothing at all. The assumption, I suppose, was that eventually it would be resolved. Yes it would, by US making a lot of phone calls and waiting around all afternoon twice for the cable guy. That is how it would be resolved.

Anyhow, on to the good stuff! Our friends M & J were in town and we had a great time with them, running all around town (despite the mostly gray, damp, cold weather), and seeing lots of architecture and art.

We witnessed the May 1^st celebrations, a huge parade consisting of representatives from various unions and labor groups, including the newly-formed Anticapitalist Party, which was met with a small amount of success in the last election and raised headlines by running a candidate for local office who was a Muslim woman who wears a headscarf. Contemporary French culture has more than its fair share of racism against North Africans and Arabs, with an added dose of post-colonial entitlement and virtually no political correctness to restrain the “debate.”

My favorite banner at the rally said “Greve des Chomeurs!” which I am pretty sure means “Strike of the Unemployed!” I like it, but how does that work, exactly?

While our friends were visiting, we also visited the flea market and antique markets at Clignancourt, in (or just outside?) the 18^th arrondisement. I have been wanting to go to the market there for a while, and it was impressively huge. First you walk through a very large market selling contemporary junk (belts, Obama T-shirts, jeans, sneakers), and only then do you reach the blocks and blocks of antique malls. We were totally unprepared for the endless hugeness of it, and sort of just bumbled around looking at stuff. It was neat though.

We also took walks around pretty new parts of Paris and saw very weird and un-Parisian architecture, which I’ll post about later with pictures.

Other things we did with M & A when they were here:

went to the Quai Branly museum for the second time (still totally creepy as far as I’m concerned, though it seems our architectural historian friend liked it more than I did), went to the Musee Guimet again (I still love it – and STILL haven’t seen everything there!), went to the Musee Cernuschi (another collection of Asian art, not quite as awesome or nearly as large as Guimet), had a picnic in Parc Monceau (which is much more pleasant in the Spring than in the Winter, went to the Parc de la Villette (totally odd modernist fairground/park), walked along the Promenade Plantee (sort of like the highline, a park along the top of a former railway line, stretching from the Bastille to the 12eme. Actually I can’t say it is like the high line, since I’ve never been to the high line, but it’s the same idea), went to see a ballet with last minute obstructed-view seats at the Garnier Opera house, and ate a bunch of meals with our friends, both at home and out at restaurants and wine bars.

Phew. I feel like we’ve been kind of lazy and not doing much, but that list makes it seem pretty impressive.

I just wrote up a list of things I still want to see and do before we leave in about 5 weeks, and it is a lot. I can’t believe we haven’t seen more of France. But we have a trip planned to Provence in a few weeks, and maybe we’ll be able to squeeze in a day or overnight trip to Champagne.

people always ask us what we’re doing in paris. A has the respectable explanation about his “fellowship” in “philosophy,” which seems to satisfy people well enough. but i used to say “nothing!” because i was embarassed to say “sort of trying writing?” it seems to make people uncomfortable when i am brutally honest about what i am up to. i learned this when i was working in Chicago and people would ask how i was doing and i’d say “Horrible! My job is killing me.” people don’t like this, especially near strangers.

here in paris, i’m doing great. but the truth is, of course, i don’t really know WHAT i’m doing, although some writing is being done, and i do want to do more. i learned some french, but not as much as i’d have liked.

anyway, what people seem to WANT me to be doing is “sitting at cafes and writing.” that is the dream people have of paris, it seems.  they say “oh, you should sit in cafes all day long” or “oh, i’d be sitting in cafes all day long.” and they get a dreamy look.

but as i may have written before, i am not totally comfortable doing that. for one thing, i don’t fully understand the culture of cafes here. there are many categories and subcategories. there is the Bar Tabac, which generally seem kind of run down, tabac-stained, if you will,  but they do seem to have regulars sitting around there at all hours. i utilize these solely to buy minutes for my cellphone, because the counters there sell phone minutes and lottery tickets and such, in addition to the tobacco products after which they’re named.

then there are cafes, but i can’t totally tell the difference between these and the cheaper brasseries that exist. and i can’t at all tell which ones would welcome me sitting and writing or blogging for hours, only purchasing one or two things.

anyway, i write to you today from a cafe on Rue Reaumur, a big Haussmanian street near our apartment. we’re here out of necessity — the internet is dead in our apartment.

i think this cafe setting is what people have in mind when they say i should sit all day in cafes, though i can’t say for certain — it isn’t a very bohemian cafe. more a “regular people” cafe, if there is such a thing. i am sitting at a table outdoors, however, on a big boulevard with very parisian buildings all the way down it. so i think it fits the bill.

the waiter is singing along to “what’s goin’ on” (4 non blondes, i think?) very loudly. i have grown to very much enjoy this waiter over our 2 hours here. his main job seems to be to observe the women who walk by the cafe on the boulevard, and discuss them with his colleagues. every time ladies walk by he calls in to his colleagues for “help.” they have like 5 people “working” here, but mostly they seem to be drinking wine, smoking, and flirting with patrons and passersby.

hmm. another waiter just came by and asked us to pay. i don’t know if this is a sign we’re supposed to leave? i’ve read (yes i have read this) that sometimes you’re asked to pay because someone is switching shifts. there are certainly plenty of empty tables all around us. there’s also a guy trying to go around to the tables selling some kind of very annoying wind-up squeaky dog toy.

and that is my report for today on livin’ the dream.