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.