Letters To Stina

STINA, CHERIE!

[First of all, I have to apologize for the delay. Since the school that I go to is not actually a real school, the wifi broke, and while you’re back-reading these anyway, now you’re a solid 3 weeks behind schedule. I’m trying.]
Have you read Code Name Verity yet (did I get the title right? I hope so.)? Because I keep pretending that I’m a spy from World War II while I’m walking around, and that’s sort of what the book is about, so you should get on that if you haven’t yet.

I am Eva Seiler.

 
I guess you’ve done a little bit of school by now—I hope that they’ve finished with all of the administrative stuff. I never understood why they had to drag that out over a whole week instead of sitting everyone down on the first day and getting it all over with. Have you decided if you’re dropping French yet?
Today’s optional-hell-activity was Sport Day at the Beach, from which I was absent. I really did feel horrible (not only in the usual avoiding things way, that’s different), and I think I’ve figured out what it was: I’ve been eating at very strange times, I haven’t slept properly, and I really haven’t had any time to myself in a while. Despite the griping, I’m having fun and I think I’m adjusted mentally. Not physically, though.

Later on, I went to the Asian Market, which sadly seems to consist mostly of plates and spices instead of vegetables. I did come out of it with some rice, sriracha, a packet of wonderful-smelling spices, and two new acquaintances. You have no idea how happy I am to have gotten my hands on some sriracha. At my last job it was sort of my best friend, because it makes food meant for hangovers totally edible as a normal meal. I’d like an H Mart, though, please. Can you send one for Christmas?

Post-Market, I went wandering. I wander quite a lot, because it gives me something to do and things to look at, and then I won’t get lost later. Not that you could really get lost here—pretty much if you fall into the ocean you’ve gone the wrong way.

I found more things that were falling apart, some train tracks, some bunnies, and the aforepromised Karshed trees. Aforepromised is a word, Microsoft, don’t even. As is Karshed, for that matter. Terrifying militaristic precision that is only barely good enough cannot be ignored. Ist nicht gut.

Sibling to my house

Karshed! Positively Karshed! 

My favourite discovery, though? Garage doors by the docks with En Grève painted on the doors. I’d like it as a shirt to wear on the days when the number of fucks given is sub-zero. Sorry, I’m on strike, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Talk to me after my month-long vacation, but not on a weekend, because I sure as hell won’t be working then either.

Love,
L. de Caps

Dear Stina,

Today the sunset made everything beautifully pink, as though I were looking through the world with rose-coloured glasses. Only the literal kind, though, not the metaphorical one, because I’m quite aware that I’m a student on a student budget in a city that’s frayed at the edges.  I would make all the captions to the pictures lyrics from La Vie en Rose, but I’m hardly in love with anybody so I don’t think it would be terribly fitting.

The adventuring continues. So does Orientation Week, but that’s not particularly interesting. I’ve met some thoroughly decent people. There are a couple of Americans, which means that there’s someone to commiserate with about the lack of ovens and the prices at least.

When I was wandering around, I came across a truck blaring the type of music that one would generally headbang to, not the kind one would expect to find on the edge of a dock behind an abandoned airplane hangar.

      
Said hangar; side views

I decided to walk around the hangar first, since I didn’t want to sneak up on anyone from behind and scare him or her. Startled people are rarely friendly, and it’s best to approach things you’re unsure about head-on, anyway. So I walked around the airplane hangar, and when I had done almost the full circle, I came across three people in a boat, drinking beer, cooking sausages on a burner, and rocking out to the truck music as though it were the most normal thing in the world. They nodded at me and said “Bonsoir” before continuing with the sausages. Here’s the funny thing about the French: They’re not terribly friendly upon initial contact, but they are extremely polite. If you do make eye contact they say bonjour or bonsoir depending on the time of day before moving on. Or if you happen to walk across their secret boat gathering.

Flowers make everything supes attracs

Somehow I don’t think this door gets used very often…

…Nor this bathroom, for that matter. 

I think I live on the very edge of the city, though I like it much better than being stacked on top of people. The town is very cramped, with little alleys and curving and twisting around every which way and people scowling at you on the corners. I do not think the French smile for the general public.

Do you remember the passage in I Capture the Castle where Cassandra tries to picture America as Neil sees it, then she opens her eyes and has the feeling that everything in England from the sky to the hedges is pressing in on her? It’s exactly like that. It’s harder to build next to the docks, I guess, so I can walk around and feel like I can breathe. Breathe, and look at things falling apart.  Falling and sliding and crumbling apart.

Look, it’s the Eiffel Tower!

Much Love,
L. de Caps

Kære Stina,

This morning was cold and foggy like you wouldn’t believe. It would have been the perfect morning to commit a murder or even an entire invasion—I couldn’t see the end of the sidewalk when I was walking to school. You could have gotten away with anything, disappearing into the grey silence. The good thing about foggy mornings, though, is that those are the kinds that leave you with the sunsets where the sun looks like an egg yolk in the sky.

Brief history lesson: During World War II, the city was completely shelled, for good reason. It’s a major port, with train tracks and boats and factories, and plus it would have been easy to fly planes across the Channel from pretty much anywhere on the coast. That, of course, couldn’t happen. So it was flattened. Thus, this isn’t really the prettiest city—in fact, people make jokes about it being the ugliest, because they had to rebuild the whole thing, and post-war architecture was not kind to the retinas.

Yes, there are parts that are not that great, and no, everything is not charmingly historical. But I think that once you start walking around it, you can find a very rough beauty in it. I have never more regretted not being a mermaid.

Emily Windsnap, I envy you.

Plus, since it’s right on the coast, the sunsets are absolutely gorgeous.

The city is full of little port-things. I don’t know quite what to call them in English, but the French word is bassin. They’re rectangles of water. Thus, even though the Channel is about a twenty-minute walk away, you can always find water. The bassins have signs saying no bathing allowed, but of course lots of people do. On hot days, it smells like something between the Anacostia and the Atlantic. Like salt and industry, maybe? It’s not a horrible smell, but not refreshing either. I don’t know if I could be tempted to jump in. It makes me wish I were doing crew, though.

Is mum still going through her Sail phase? If so, she would find plenty to shout about here.

SAIL!

Lots of the flowers are the same. There’s quite a lot of Butterfly Bush, and Queen Anne’s Lace as well.

You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky / As we walk in fields of gold

Since we’re near the water, there aren’t really all that many trees that grow on their own. There are trees, just they’ve been planted in perfectly straight lines. I don’t fully understand why—just scatter the seeds around and they’ll grow if they want to, or plant saplings at random. None of this militaristic precision. I don’t understand it. I’ll put pictures in the next letter or maybe the one after.

Love,
l.de caps

Profound comment about the futility of restraining nature

SUP YOOOOOOOOOOOO
Come on, ¡vamanos! Everybody, let’s go!
I’ve been exploring.

I don’t like Orientation Week. I’m tired because I haven’t been sleeping all too well, and all I want to do sometimes is lie down, not listen to another speech about how great of a campus it is. I just moved across the Atlantic, for the love of god. I’m fine with the important information-and-lecture bits, but the whole yay-school-spirit-pay-to-join-all-these-clubs crap makes me want to jump in the Channel or hurl my body into the sun à la Amanda.

In addition to the yay-school-spirit crap, we also have the fascinating phenomenon of Ramen Friends, which I just put in a letter to Abigail. Basically, Ramen Friends are like, well, ramen—fast and initially satisfying but with very little nutritional value, leaving you hungry anyway in the end. It’s what happens when you try to be friends with everyone all at once. My general philosophy is that we’re all going to be together for a couple of years, so why not just let things take their natural course and not stress about it? Plus, really, stressing about making friends. Friends are for relieving stress, not causing it.

Regardless, I’ve been having fun all by me onesie and walking the opposite direction as everyone else. I’m not trying to be contradictory, but it’s really quite pretty on the other side of things.

Oh it gets dark! It gets lonely

On the other siiiiiiiiide from you

Heathcliff

It’s me, Kathy, I’ve come home

I’m so cold

Let me into your window

Plus, I know it’s going to get cold and grey quickly, so I’m enjoying the sun while I still can.

SWAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG,
Leonardo de Swagprio

PS: The seagulls here are HUGE. One could probably make a very good Sunday-dinner-for-four with one of them.

Seagull: It’s what’s for dinner.

To the Co-co-co-co-co-co Pilot, also known as Co⁶-Pilot,

Once again I have to wonder how things are named. The city I’m living in now has a name that translates directly into “The Port” or “The Harbour”, because it is one. I have no clue how they came up with the name. Really, none.
I moved into my box. Initially it was the most depressing thing I had ever seen, all grey and white and empty. It is a pretty big box, though, especially since I’m only three inches tall. Then I started decorating, and now it’s looking much more like a place where I can actually stay.

Wall 2.0

Hanging out on my new desk

All my friends came along for the party

It’s like a little cave. The only thing that I’m really lacking is an oven, which is a pain in the butt because I’m craving chocolate chip cookies like you wouldn’t believe, and trust me, we’re at the point where I would try to make them without brown sugar. There’s no brown sugar here, just sugar in the raw. If I get desperate enough, I might try to make some out of molasses. I also can’t find oats (like for making oatmeal), green onions, broccoli, or baking powder. Soda, yes, but not powder. I think. Whichever levure chimique isn’t.

I might even have to try making them without an oven. I haven’t seen any little toaster ovens, either, or I would seriously consider buying one no matter what the expense. Every time I go grocery shopping it’s highway robbery, seriously. Most things are the same numerical value as Dollars, except no wait, they’re Euros. Tears. Absolute tears. I went into H&M and the jeans were 40 Euros. That’s 60 dollars for H&M jeans.  I’m starting to hate that little E sign.

The first night I mostly walked around and cooked late.

I bought beer. I don’t love beer, but I did not have to be 21, they did not check my ID, and it was Carlsberg.

 DEN BEDSTE ØL. SKÅL TIL ALLE.

There was something very satisfying about eating on the edge of some water, watching the sun set, and drinking a cold beer. It was hygge.

But what did I eat? Well, I’m two burners short of a stovetop, but that still leaves me with 2, which is sort of enough. Here is the recipe. I didn’t put specific quantities for two reasons. One, I don’t really measure, and two, when you’re cooking for yourself, you really just have to go by what you like and how much you’re going to eat. If you don’t like mushrooms, don’t use them. If you think this would be better with potatoes, go for it. If you only want chicken, don’t make the rice. It’s easy.

Two-Burner Chicken
Ingredients:
Rice or Pasta
Chicken
Butter
Smoked Red Pepper (I used the harissa pepper. if you’re wondering where it is, by the way, it’s in France. I took it.)
Salt
White mushroom

1) Start cooking your starch.
-For pasta, boil a large quantity of water with a little bit of salt and put in the amount of pasta you want to eat. Remember that it expands a when it cooks. Boil for about 8 minutes (test periodically to see if it’s done—it might be more or less, though it usually says on the package), then drain when it’s done because it will keep cooking in the hot water. Pasta mush is gross, by the way.
-For rice, boil 1,5 times the amount of water as rice (meaning if you’re cooking half a cup of rice, boil three-quarters of a cup of water). Once boiling, add rice, reduce heat as low as it goes, put a lid on the pot, and let cook for about 15-20 minutes until done.

2) Start cooking your chicken.
-Heat up your pan. Put in a solid amount of butter—probably a tablespoon, or whatever’s going to keep your chicken from sticking to the pan. Remember that you paid for that, and you’re eating it, so if it’s all stuck to the pan, that’s less for you, and you will be hungry, which kind of negates the point of eating. If you need more butter at any point, use it.
-Cut your chicken into manageable pieces. The bigger they are, the longer they take to cook. Remember to cut them all about the same size so they cook at the same rate. You can use a knife of scissors, it doesn’t matter.
-Put your chicken in the pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. You can always add more, but it’s nearly impossible to take away, so don’t go dumping the whole thing of salt in at once. Cook until mostly done, making sure to flip the pieces over at some point. You want them white on all sides, no pink.
-Add the mushrooms (sliced, diced, or generally cut up—but remember to wash them first, because you don’t know where they’ve been) when your chicken is looking like a white person on the first warm day of the year—pasty pale and a little sweaty.
-Keep cooking until the chicken is golden brown and the mushrooms are done. It’s totally fine to cut a piece of chicken to see if it’s done or not. You don’t want it to be pink, but you also don’t want to cook it forever, or it will be tough. Don’t forget about your pasta or whatever you’re cooking either.

3) Combine for magic.
-Put your starch in with the chicken and mix to combine.

4) Eat.

Do you think I should make videos out of the cooking bits? Writing everything out takes a whiiiiiile. Then you would also get to see me turning on the wrong burner and wondering why the food is taking forever to cook like a huge moron.

Best of luck,

Your Superior

Co³-Pilot

Dear Sir or Madam Stina,

We’re going to fast-forward a couple of days to when it was actually November in Paris for no apparent reason.

Pre-emptive clarification point: I’m used to DC weather. DC is built on a swamp, which the people have forgotten but the weather hasn’t (nor have the mosquitoes).

Swamp.

This means that August is a perpetual sauna punctuated by the occasional violent thunderstorm. So when August is suddenly 14ºC and raining, well, it’s a little confusing (I’m still working out what degrees Celsius even mean, by the way. Pretty much 40 is more than 100 Farenheit, 30 is hot, 20 is cool, and 14 is ruddy freezing, especially when you add rain and wind.).

That’s what it was in Paris.

Il faisait très fucking froid.

Il y avait beaucoup de fucking pluie.
There was a bedraggled tourist family walking around in sandals. Sandals! Can you imagine walking around in the cold and rain with sandals voluntarily? Rule number one of not having a shit vacation: You adapt to the weather, the weather does not adapt to you. WHICH MEANS NOT DOING CRAP LIKE WALKING AROUND IN SANDALS WHEN IT’S PRETENDING TO BE NOVEMBER OUTSIDE. I AM A DINOSAUR AND I WALK AROUND STARK NAKED MOST OF THE TIME BUT EVEN I KNOW THAT SOMETIMES YOU NEED A COAT. FUCKING HELL.
Part of the FAF (-B, -M, -Mt, -N) and I went to the Centre Pompidou, because of the aforementioned cold and rain. We thought about going to the Musée d’Orsay but there was a sea of umbrellas outside, so we just kept driving.

More of a creek than a sea, comparatively.
We saw lots of art and lots of sleeping security guards. I have lots of pictures of art, but unfortunately no titles, so enjoy in ignorance:

We walked around the Champs-Elysées post-museum. It’s funny to think about how things are named sometimes. Champs Elysées means Elysian Fields, which was kind of the equivalent for heaven for the Greek, I believe. Essentially, it’s paradise. And paradise, in this case, is a lot of very expensive stores with a death trap monument-traffic circle on one end. Are we to assume that upon survival of the circle around L’Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysées with its straight lines and many traffic lights is paradise? Is paradise then order instead of chaos, the linear instead of the circular? Or are we to neglect the circle, and instead view paradise as the (prohibitively priced) material? Ought we to dedicate our lives to amassing enough money to shop exclusively on that street? Questions.

I’m in a parked car/ on a crowded street/ and I see my love/ made complete/ the thread is ripping/ the knot is slipping/ love is blindness
L’Arc de Triomphe was massive, if nothing else. In all the pictures you sort of forget the scale of things, but I suppose nothing says triumph like a giant arch in the middle of the road.

THIS IS SPARTA!

On the way home, we ran into a strike. The French love to do la grève, which is fine, except that it totally ruins the traffic. People seem to be quite used to them. Here, for example, is a Parisian in his natural habitat watching the strike with the same mild disinterest as if it were a boring television programme. Note the glass of wine in his hand.

It’s very French.
Anyway, I hope there are no strikes at home, because there would be so much security that it would be impossible to breathe.

Sincerely,
Leonardo
DUH CAPZ.

Chère Stina,

Day Two I was a princess.
Right, I know, I’m a dinosaur with a metaphorical dick, named Leonardo de Caprio, with no relation to the actor.
But being a princess isn’t really a choice sometimes.
You know why?
Because I went to Versailles.

We (meaning myself and FAF-M) didn’t go into the palace, because everyone else was going into the palace, which was too much of everyone to deal with. So we took the pretty route and walked around the gardens for a while, then explored to town. The gardens were much better than they were in January, although the crop of tourists detracted a little from the aesthetics.

OH. DO YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE DETRACTED FROM THE AESTHETICS NO OF COURSE YOU DON’T I HAVEN’T TOLD YOU.

They had these random modern art sculpture things that were actually just dead trees with rocks. I took one picture with the overall gardens, just so you can see how awful they are. They’re the stick-things right in the middle of the grass, ruining the landscape. It could have been a very poignant commentary on the interaction of man and nature in, say, a shipping yard. But not Versailles.

Behold the horror.

Had it been 1789 and the women of Paris were harassing the inhabitants of the palace, they would have made great perches. Then they could have sat on them like vultures and catapulted rotten fish at the windows. Not that vultures can throw. Whatever. It would have been beautiful.

But it’s 2013, so not so much.

Versailles had compulsively perfect trees, too. I could totally see why the palace was such a sore point during the revolution, though—you have all these people cutting the trees into triangles and they were probably all Ron-Weasley-you-need-to-sort-out-your-priorities.

Now that your trees are all perfect cones, sir, might I have my bread?

It’s also home to some of the most majestic seagulls. This one, he’s probably the reincarnation of Louis XIV. The guy commissioned portraits of his family as Roman gods, called himself the Sun King. Shit doesn’t get any more majestic than that.

Dad thinks he’s the sun again.
Afterwards, we walked around the town and I ate a very good pastry. The town was pretty and very French-looking, as expected.

Even the pasta was royal. 

Love,
Your Swagjesty

Hi Stina!

You, of course, know who I am. But I have the sneaking suspicion that, this being the internet, somebody else is going to stumble across this conglomeration of nonsense and need a little bit of an introduction. So here we go.

My name is Leonardo de Caprio, or L. de Caps if you so prefer. People always find me in the white pages, call me up, and ask me if I’m Leonardo DiCaprio, which I am most definitely not. He spells his name with an ‘I’, and mine is with an ‘E’, so clearly the illiteracy epidemic is reaching new highs. There’s not remotely a physical resemblance. Look, I’ll even put in a picture of myself:

Swag.

Leonardo DiCaprio can suck my dick.
Do I even have a dick?
Hmm, apparently not.
I’m a six-inch long plastic dinosaur, why would I have a dick?
Anyway. My dick is metaphorical. Leonardo DiCaprio can suck it.
Consider your introduction to me complete.

The plane rides were completely uneventful. We didn’t crash and nobody had to use the oxygen masks, which I’m not sure anyone would even know how to operate, since nobody pays attention to those stupid videos. If the plane were to actually crash, everyone would be more “HOLY FUCKING SHIT THE PLANE IS FUCKING GOING TO CRASH MOTHER FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK SHIT FUCK DAMN PISS HELL I’M GOING TO DIE IN A PLANE IN MY SWEATPANTS WITH COMPLIMENTARY SNACKS THIS WAS NOT THE PLAN” and less “Now let’s remember the steps from the instructional video! Everybody, masks on! No, no, not the children. They come second, remember.”. But maybe that’s just me.

Then I got to France and my baggage was SOAKED because apparently in Iceland they leave your baggage on the tarmac in the rain. Actually, that probably wasn’t a bad thing. Why? Because everything I saw in my 45-minute stint in Iceland was pristine. The airport bathrooms were impossibly sterile. Do you know how hard it is to clean up after a bunch of travellers who haven’t peed for the entire nine-hour flight and then insist on doing crap like brushing their teeth and putting on an entire face of makeup to impress their relatives they haven’t seen for ages and don’t even particularly care about? Extremely. Hell, even cleaning up after someone eats a meal makes me want to jump in a vat of Clorox.

The tarmac probably gets bleach-cleaned on a regular basis.

I got picked up from the airport by two members of my lovely French Adoptive Family (let’s call them FAF. Like the RAF. But without planes.) and promptly went to Montmartre, in Paris. Technically, at least. To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember all too much about it, except that it was hot and I changed in the car and there was a fire somewhere in Paris and we went into the church and you could see all of the city and we passed these guys twice who kept singing “Toi et Moi” and it was good. I don’t actually remember how time worked that day, so let’s not try to do details.

On serait juste toi et moi
Près d’ici ou la bas
Sans règles dignes, sans foi
Quand tu veut on y va
Toutes les couleurs du ciel
Plein de bouteilles
Du rhum du vin du miel
Quand tu veux on y va

Swag Swag,
L. de Caps