Paris, Vous Etes Okay

I love Paris.


For obvious reasons.


Every second shop here is a boulangerie selling pastries and stone oven traditionally baked bread and every two blocks has a bookstore (called a "librarie" just to confuse the Anglos) and a sushi restaurant next door. There's fresh fruit stalls and flowers in bloom and butchers with meat so fresh you don't have to guess what animal it was and cheese stores entirely devoted to cheese (And if you're like me and have a deep, irrational phobia of exotic cheeses, you have about three blocks smell warning to reroute) and everything is really, really French.


There are bad things about Paris. Like my €4.00 plate of cold fries and the €4.50 bottle of mineral water and my €4.50 cup of tea.

There's also the inability of any French cafe to sell a cup of coffee that is any bigger than a finger bowl. Did they miss out on the metric system or something?


Exhibit A: Sad Jessie with a thimble full of French coffee.


Exhibit B: A Happy Jessie with a person sized cup of Starbucks coffee.


But overall, Paris make you want to skip down the street, clutching a baguette, wearing a beret, singing "Sur le Pont D'Avingnon" and holding hands with a scruffy, vest sporting intellectual who recite Baudelaire and know a lot about red wines.


The advantage of being Surrender Monkeys in the last World War, is that Paris was relativelyunscathed by the bombing and shelling that gutted other major European cities like London or Berlin. The streets and buildings are almost the identical to how they were at the turn of the century.

Except for the "Sex! Sex! Sex!" shop on the corner.


Sights of Paris include the Notre-Dame Cathedral, which is an excellent place to find refuge from the harsh modern world if you find the warmth from the masses of tourists crammed inside pleasing and the incessant camera flashes' strobe light effect soothing.


The Cathedral is staffed entirely by grizzly old Frenchmen who enjoy trolling up and down the aisles terrorizing people who are primarily there for the Victor Hugo connection. I know this because while my traveling companion and I were resting in a pew in the back of the Cathedral, a grizzled old frog started waving his cane and shouting at us in French while ignoring the two teenagers attempting to recreate key scene from Last Tango in Paris on the pew in front of us.


Then there's Les Invalids which started as a glorified retirement home for war veterans and now doubles as freezing cold dome/wind tunnel/"Just you try and find the ticket office, silly tourist. You think it will be at the entrace? Sacre bleu! Not a chance. Hon hon hon."


There's an excellent World War I and World War II museum inside where you learn that all the French Resistance fighters were really snappy dressers and that Vichy France never existed. They also have an Enigma machine.

An. Enigma. Machine.

I literally had to be pried off the glass case by the bewildered security guard. I may have to takemy smelling salts with me to Bletchley Park about because I feel a fainting fit coming on just thinkingit.


Inside, les Invalids is full of the usual tacky French gilt.


But there's one display that makes wandering around a freezing cold dome, tripping over Spanish tourists all worth it.


NAPOLEON'S SARCOPHAGUS!!!

Slightly less cool because it looks like it's made out of chocolate and designed by someone on LSD but that okay because NAPOLEON!!!


NAPOLEON'S JACKET AND HAT!

HAT!


According to the surrounding murals, Napoleon did all of his best administrative work shirtless and surrounded by admiring ladies.


The church of Les Invalids tastefully decorated by the banners from all the people that Napoleon killed.


Oscar Wilde's grave at the Pere Lachaise Cemetary.


Oscar continues to receive a lot of love.


The great Colette. As I was backing up to take this picture, I heard two Australians talking behind me.

"Oh Colette. I've heard of her."

"Who was she?"

"I think she was a dancer."

And because I could no longer see through the tears of despair that were falling from my eyes, it's a little crooked. But I'm sure you'll understand why.


There was a distinct lack of mourning angelic statuary surrounding the final resting place of the "Divine" Sarah Bernhardt so I decided to fill in.


Chopin's grave looking awfully frou-frou. Even for a Romantic.


Tomb of the Top Medieval Lovers of All Time: Abelard and Heloise.

tradition Peter Abelard was hired as a tutor of philosophy for the young Heloise but soon some highly inappropriate student-teacher relations developed and ended with Heloise giving birth to a astrolabe (Astrolabius, her son). They married secretly but not secretly enough; her unclediscovered their relationship and had it arranged that Abelard unwillingly joined the proudof eunuch-hood.

As detailed in his autobiography: "Oh My Life Has Sucked So Much More Than Yours," Abelard went on to become a monk and sent Heloise off to a nunnery where she wrote some love letters and was really bitter and then died.

That story always warms the cockles of my heart.


While walking the extensive graveyard grounds, I got to thinking about my own monument and how there are certain things that you should just not have on your permanent material reminder.

Like steering wheels.


Or anvils.


Or creepy, gormless looking naked boys.


Or the coffin on top of the tomb instead of inside it.


But let us move on to places not entirely habituated by dead people, les Folies Bergers! A music hall with 130 proud years of people slowly taking their clothes off to music and where Josephine Baker introduced the world to edible underwear.


Moulin Rouge - where you can wait all night and Ewan McGregor still won't appear out of nowhere and start serenading you.


The Basilica of Sacre-Coeur which we did not go into because I'd had enough of freezing in domes for a day.


The Cafe de 2 Moulins from the movie Amelie.


This is more what it actually looks like in the movie. In real life, it is staffed by the most surly, unpleasant, rude waistresses in the whole of Paris.


French poodles!


Fountain of the Spitting Sphinxes (Okay, I made that up. I didn't get the official name. I'm sure it something considerable more tasteful and probably more French)


Wasabi Dinosaur!


The Eiffel Tower!


The view from the Second Storey of the Eiffel Tower. I climbed 700 stairs to get this view and it was worth every step (Well, maybe not steps 567 through 572).


Drinking a Munchkin sized cup of coffee on the Eiffel Tower.


Testing the security mesh of the Eiffel Tower.


The shadow of the tower over the great city.

How I Learned to Stop Hating and Reasonably Enjoy Vancouver*

* Technically speaking, I'm not in Vancouver proper but in the city of New Westminister whose separation from the great loathed metropolis is marked only by a sign on the side of the street which says "Welcome to Vancouver." People in New West are very particular about the fact that their mail must read New Westminister and not Vancouver or else things will go horribly awry.

The "Royal City" has for it's motto: "Strong in Tradition. Committed to Service." What it should really read is "Bitter since 1866" as this marked the beginning of their troubles when they were replaced as capital of British Columbia by the sly upstart Victoria and subsequently burnt to the ground in the Great Fire of 1898.

Their current troubles include a lack of Chinatown and the seriously bizarre May Queen... thing.

Oh, and the evil ducks:


The evil, evil ducks. They are evil and they are on the march.



They look like they just want your bread crumbs and leftover yeasty confections, but what they really want is your soul and your credit cards.



New West is full of apartment and condos with water stains but with names that when pronounced out loud, sound like porno titles.



That is possibly the least appetizing restaurant sign in existence. Even beating out Edmonton's famed "Pancakes & Steak" emporium.



For reasons unknown to me, we did not eat at the Hamburger and Sushi odditorium but instead went to Tamarind Hill, a Malaysian restaurant in New West with food that (because I have a cold) tasted like nothing until several minutes later when I had to leave the table because my throat was on fire.

Literally. I was afraid of opening my mouth in case I would start an impromptu re-enactment of the Wendy's commercial and light the restaurant and our very polite waiter on fire.

The Roti Canai (on the right) and the Malaysian Chicken Curry with Steamed Rice had all the colours of my Danger Rainbow but ignored my featherweight taste buds and paid for it with tears much to the delight of my dining companion who considered it just revenge for making her delay her meal for me to photograph the best angle of our food before we ate it.



Next we were off to the Irving House (whose outside decor was too tacky for me to photograph without damaging my camera), where I found the oven of my dreams and immediately felt the urge to wear aprons and bake pies. The stove was just the right height for me to stick my head in when I got tired of the children and my dead-beat husband. Bliss!



I also found the hottest Victoria Cross recipient ever.



This immediately started me chanting that seminal Decemberist hit "Eli, the Barrowboy" and there it is for your enjoyment so that you can sing along.



The reason I look like a googly-eyed female Shaggy is because according to the poster: "The Guardians prophsied to come to earth This is no joke" were coming tonight at 10:30 and the "dotes" would be in a triangle position.

And all these years I thought those blinking dots in the sky were just stars.



There is zero limit to the amount of fun you can have in an army surplus store with an owner who tolerates flash photography.



"Why yes, I am up for some trench hijinks!"

"Oh look, I discovered Atlantis."

Miss Gibson takes a private moment to enjoy the irony of having a bright, colourful target illustrating where the enemy bullet should go on combat hat.

"I say, is that the Hun?"

"Resistance to the resistance is futile, darh-ling."

"Do you want fisticuffs? I have some fresh fisticuffs coming right up, sir."

I do believe that this is my favourite picture of me ever.

But it was not all saucy adventures in the city. There was also contemplation of nature when nature was not actively trying to pursue us in the form of ducks. This is the duck park sans ducks.

Miss. Gibson and I looking extremely ready for an Umbrellas of Cherbough remake.