nawl

I hadn't realized that all the semi-familiar tourist hangouts around here would be totally transformed in August. June was ok, July the traffic began to worsen, but that was nothing. Everyone here is guaranteed by law something like 5 weeks of vacation time per year, and August is apparently the month to use it. All of Paris is here, as well as significant portions of Germany, Sweden, England, Belgium, and Switzerland, and even a few intrepid Americans and Japanese.

You can't eat a nice dinner outside without being beseiged by musicians and guys selling roses, african wooden carvings, balloons, ugly purses, drawings. The streets of every tourist mecca are full of I don't know how many performance artists recycling the same old shows. I wonder where they come from, and what they do during the winter. On the beach, guys give club flyers to pretty girls in bikinis. People everywhere seem really intent on enjoying their stay in paradise.

Even at night, the beach at Juan is kind of a surreal experience. Teenagers congregate in little groups sprawled along the sand, each with some mix of beer, joints, guitars, and fire. It's like the perfect little paradise that everyone tries to create within their own little clique. Particularly amusing from afar are the random efforts made to pick up a member of the opposite sex when it's clear that neither party has much of a language in common (or, for example, the girl seems to be telling the guy off in Russian).

Well, tomorrow morning I'm off to visit Geneva. Until my next net access...