nawl

Yesterday I kept seeing bookstores. Today it was sex shops. We walked down a fairly long street which was lined with sex shops, strip clubs, and video stores. There were other stores mixed in between, of course, but it was a pretty amazing collection nonetheless. Gabriel also pointed out some random women he said were prostitutes: nice looking ladies around 40, rather conservatively dressed, in my opinion. Odd.

On a totally random note, the number of street performers I saw today made me wonder how fads in street performances spread. During the Cannes film festival, we stopped to watch a man doing impressive airbrush paintings to new age music, and today I saw someone with the exact same setup. As for those statue-people, I don't remember seeing many of them before a few years ago (maybe I just saw less of big cities), but now they're everywhere in the touristy sections of SF, Berlin, Nice, Paris, even Antibes. (The people who choose to do the Egyptian sarcophogus thing have the least interesting job, and count the least as a performance, although they do have the benefit of not having to cover their faces with nasty metallic makeup. We saw one today who had made the unfortunate decision to place himself in the middle of one of the bridges crossing the Seine, where the wind was blowing incessantly, and of course the guy had no excuse to move to warm up.)

We wandered quite a lot. To the Louvre, although we didn't go inside, to appreciate the architecture. On one of the benches in the middle of the courtyard, a couple was kissing passionately, completely absorbed in each other. Earlier today I'd seen a book in a tourist shop entitled Best Places to Kiss in Paris. I bet the Louvre is listed in there.

After that, we walked through a pile of famous places and monuments. I remember remarking that the light at that point was very... Paris. Perhaps it's not unique to the city, but I remembered taking some photos 5 years ago (here and here) where the light had exactly the same quality as the sun emerged out from the clouds, and I don't associate that feeling with any other place. I think the color of the buildings adds to the character.

I'd post up some pictures, but I don't have FTP access.

At one point, we ended up at the place where Lady Di was killed. Gabriel told me that the statue nearby of the flame from the Statue of Liberty became an improptu memorial, where visitors from all over had covered it with messages to her. The flame itself had been repainted since the last time he saw it, but already a new collection of messages in various languages (all dated 2002) was growing on the railing over the bridge.

As it was growing dark, we wandered over to the Champs Elysées. There were a lot of tourists everywhere. For some reason we ended up in Toyota's, and then a Renault's, showrooms looking at weird concept cars. Toyota's exhibition was ok, but whoever was in charge of Renault's design needs to be fired. The room itself was kinda cool. They had this theme of "air d'espace" complete with images of cars and nature projected on a giant screen, weird air cushions in the back of the room where you could sit and read French National Geographic books about dolphins and whales, and a couple of keyboad-less iMacs that were supposed to show a web site or something, but had crashed. The cars themselves were hideous. Impractical, as far as I could tell, and ugly to boot. (This may be "bold" and "unusual" but it also happens to be ugly. With the idea in mind that that's actually their attempt at a luxury car, imagine the concept cars they turn out.)

Today I had the first really good peach I've had in a very long time, bought from some random market that still had its fruit display out at 9 pm on a Saturday.

I remarked a couple in the metro who matched each other so well in their plump and disheveled style that I thought they must be American, until they started arguing in French about something to do with the way others see the woman. She seemed to have a rather domineering nature. There was also a (totally unrelated) very alternative-looking girl with a guitar, earth-toned clothing, and Le Journal du Seducteur by Kierkegaard hanging out of her pocket. I like how cities allow you to see snapshots of people.