Letters To Stina

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