thoughts

l’oeil d’Eiffel et les autres choses

January 21, 2009 by krisis

the eye, searching

the eye, upon us

the sidewalks alternate meat stores with fruit et legume stores every ten steps

then there was this tall guy who was maybe a woman?

this is the shot i saw in my head when we first spotted him/her

then we got slightly lost, because i think every arc is l’arc de triomphe

i am 3 for 3 on my meals abroad, much to Elise’s fascination

This waiter had no patience for our French, which only served to make Elise more persistent. he asked us if we wanted “water with ____.” Elise assumed it to be ice (“glace”), but the only ice cubes we’ve seen here have been supporting said piles of meat, so I correctly determined he had said “gas.” She said “oui, avec,” I said “no, without.” And, see, he subconsciously obeyed the request made en francais, and thus we wound up with an expensive bottle of lukewarm, gassy water instead of the free bottle of lukewarm, tap water I was looking forward to.

le premier nuit

January 20, 2009 by krisis

Google informs me that the titular phrase with “soir,” as I originally phrased it, frequently refers to the question of having sex on the first date.

Funny how they don’t teach you these things in high school.

Here’s gare du nord, where we disembarked.

I took special delight in the fact that Dexter is being advertised as heavily here as it was in the states last fall, but I’m not sure what season they’re on.

I insisted we snap a photo to commemorate the end of our 18 hours of traveling before we went out for dinner.

We turned the wrong way up our street at first and discovered that it terminates in an absolutely breathtaking overview of the entire city, with the Eiffel directly in the center. We were at a loss for words.

(That is, until I remarked that the roving light from the top of the tower is not unlike the eye of Sauron. Because we are huge, married nerds.)

Photo forthcoming; at the time dinner was a higher priority.

Elise made me speak French to our waiter three times. He was extremely patient, and seemed to take delight in the fact that we were struggling not to use English or ask him how to say things.

When we left he said “Thank you, byebye!”

Nous Arrivons

January 20, 2009 by krisis

At the end of explaining the flat, Céline turned on our petite television set.

“CNN,” she said, “for you.”

Her English is flawless; we had to tell her how to say “circuit breaker.” Meanwhile, outside in the cab I barely cobbled together a sentence while Elise rang to have us let into the flat. “Is it okay that you wait for a minute? She finds the number now.”

Elise jumped in with her actual accent to save me, and I went poking about at the door to see about getting us let in. Here I was thwarted by laziness in packing – my bag was supposed to have my tiny maglite in it, but I decided at the last minute it wasn’t worth the bother. Well, standing in the pitch black lobby trying to dial up Céline on the intercom by the backlight of my iPod I decided that, clearly, it would have been worth it.

As Céline prepared to step out CNN broke from commercial back to their Obama coverage. She fixed us with a bemused look and indicated the television.

“So funny, that you have come all this way at this time.”

“But, I want to see it from here! I want to hear what you think.”

“Well,” she said with a grin, “it is great for us as well.”

She promised me an interview tomorrow if I did my French homework tonight.

First, dinner.

frakking jet plane

January 19, 2009 by krisis

So, I know I have to catch you up on the most fantastic wedding ever (i.e., mine), but right now I am primarily concerned with how woefully unprepared I am to fly to Europe in about four hours.

Leaving aside for the moment that I lost my camera at my own wedding, which eliminates about 50% of the things I was planning to do in Europe, and that I don’t currently have any power adapters/converters appropriate for my laptop, which was how we were going to coordinate the other 50% of the things we were planning to do in Europe, I am only about halfway packed and I’m missing some very important items like pants and shoes.

Also, my time to practice speaking French in 2008 was absolutely null, so though I continue to read it at a surprising intermediate level, my speaking vocabulary is basically limited to conjugating lots of verbs – which would be great if I wanted to rudely boss people around the entire time we’re in Paris, but in that case I could just speak English.

Placing that on top of the fact that I really and truly despise extended travel to begin with and will be traveling sans guitar, right now my desire to leave the country – or, in fact, the house – is about equal to my desire to watch a week long marathon of Two and a Half Men, breaking once a day to re-watch all of Donovan McNabb’s worst throws from yesterday’s utterly perplexing (yet entirely unsurprising) loss to the Cardinals.

I’m registering all of this now so that hopefully we can all appreciate the difference when I am delightfully basking in the decadence of my longest vacation ever.

Lest we get too optimistic, please recall that I was requesting an airlift home after about 36 hours of Bonnaroo, which cost about a sixth as much as this international nonsense, and at least there I was surrounded by music.

Back to packing.

here goes…

January 17, 2009 by krisis

Okay, here’s my last post as a bachelor.

Bride aside, I am surrounded by the five most awesome people in my life, and they are in rare, rare form. Ross bottled my special wedding lambic in blue bottles labeled with me! I’m on my bottles.

I don’t think life could be any better than it is at the moment.

See you on the other side.