I love Paris (even) when it drizzles...

The rain in Paris inspires a wide range of emotions in people. In creative types, this leads to very diverse outputs. Voilà some of my favorite crappy weather pieces:



I love Ella.

Black Stone Lying on a White Stone

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris--and I don't step aside--
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.

César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .

-César Vallejo

Barcelone

The day I arrived in Paris the weather was perfect. Then, fall came a bit late, but come it did and we are in what can only be described as hiver. That is to say yucky weather, and lots of it.

The sun comes up at 7h45 and sets at 17h30. (Oh yes, military time, just to make things exciting, the French like to switch back and forth.) In between it is mostly gray, cold, and pitifully damp. It's like the sky is so depressed it can't even be bothered to rain properly -- either that or it has a cold. It's OK, I keep telling myself, I was prepared for this, but honestly, I've been spending a lot more time on Facebook than I like to admit.

Anyway, my friend Pomegrenade (OK, the pseudonyms are getting a bit tiresome, but switching now would probably get confusing) and I were granted a reprieve from all that last weekend. We originally tried to go to Barcelona Halloween weekend, but with all the grèves, flights were cancelled. So, take two, we hoped on separate Ryanair flights de Paris à Barcelone and landed in the land of sunlight, strange architecture, and tapas.


First Impression of Spain

I arrived first, and found the hotel without trouble, pleasantly surprised to discover that Pomegrenade had wrangled a double room at the 3-star Hotel Gran Ducat for 3 nights for about 100 euro each. Nice. At first I was excited to get to speak the 10 words of Spanish I learned in my year at the Mexican restaurant, but once the concierge had established that he did not want queso with his quesadilla, we were kind of at an impasse. Eventually he just gave me a room key so I would leave him alone. The first thing I did was take a long nap. Then I found some dinner/lunch (it was only 7 p.m., after all) and walked around the square a bit.


First meal: egg and potato "tortilla," grilled veggies, and beef stuffed squid with a tomato sauce.

Our hotel had an awesome location, right next to the Plaça Catalunya, a square with a bunch of lovely statues and fountains, some great restaurants (which I'll get to in a bit) and a lot of young people, since it's near the Plaça Universitat. The square is also a block away from Las Ramblas, which seems to be the heart of Barcelona tourism with street performers, open-air pet shops, little restaurants, boutiques, etc.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Pomegrenade got in around 10:30 p.m. and we went down to the beach to check out Barcelona's famous nightlife, which did not disappoint. We asked some very friendly policemen where to go and they directed us down to the harbor, which turned out to be a gauntlet of doormen literally trying to pull you into their clubs/restaurants/bars. We made it to the end where we sat down for a coffee to recompose before heading back through it (the only way out). Clearly, this was not where we wanted to be. So we tucked our heads and limbs where they were not easily grab-able and dashed out. At the exit, a nice Algerian guy was handing out fliers and when he heard us speaking french, befriended us and escorted us (politely, not forcefully) to a real club, Carpe Diem, which played awesome music and had a cool South Asian vibe. Almost everyone we met that night was French. Strange.

The next day, we woke up early and hightailed it to La Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's chef-d'oeuvre. Started in 1882, the massive cathedral is still under construction. (This is probably why it costs 12/10 euro for students just to get in.) The outside struck me as a little goofy, kind of like a real world construction of Whoville.


The inside, however, is mind-blowing. Walking into the clean, spacious, light-filled sanctuary, all I could think was, "Wow, how great that God outlived the Gothic period!" I don't have anything against the Gothic period, I've just seen A LOT of cathedrals in the last two months. But not like this one. It's beautiful. It is so beautiful. The stained glass, the columns, everything is so clean and un-oppressive. It has been my experience that there are two types of churches: traditional, dark-wood-marble-gold-cross churches and modern, white-walled, if-this-is-God's-house-then-he-moved-to-the-suburbs churches (more commonly "Houses of Worship"). The interior of Sagrada Familia managed to escape the stodgy, suffocating atmosphere of the first without falling into the soulless, painfully simplified style of the later.


















After that we headed over to a cute medieval Spanish town where there were a lot of artisans and awesome hot chocolate. I bought a scarf and some Christmas presents.

That night we got TAPAS!! Deep fried Camembert with red berry sauce. Mini-pan of paella. Stuffed mussels. Sangria. Catalan crème brulée and "Three textures of chocolate with extra virgin olive oil and sea salt" for dessert. We considered never leaving.


Friday, our last day in the city, we walked down Las Ramblas and scouted out Gaudí's Casa Milà, which is very famous for its wavy silhouette and crazy balconies. Leaving that, we stumbled upon his other private residence, Casa Batllo, which might be less famous, but is definitely more awesome.
Casa Batllo. Some people call it "The Dragon House" because the mosaics look kind of scaly and the balconies look like bones.

That night there was more tapas, some more dancing, and a lot of Spanish MTV before our 4 a.m. wake-up call and back to Paris.

One of the best things about Barcelona was all the random wacky art. Examples:

My American Boy

So, a certain someone came to Paris for three days last week and reminded just how wonderful he is.

Because he likes contemporary art, and my knowledge stops short at 1900, I was scrambling to find the right museums to show off, but we made it to the Centre Pompidou (Parisians call it Beaubourg) and the less well-known but equally awesome Jeu de Paume.

The Centre Pompidou is having a very extensive, very intense feminist art exhibit. This stuff is no joke. There's a lot of blood, a lot of nudity, and a couple signs warning that the content of one room in particular "might hurt some viewers' feelings." The Boy didn't even roll his eyes once. What a great guy :)

Even better was that going to see the permanent collection at 5:30 on a Friday, it was free for under 26 year-olds. The museum also houses a library and a very swank restaurant, George, which a friend who went on a date there tells me is delicious and extremely expensive.

Jeu de paume is the old way of saying "tennis" in French. The museum is located in the Tuileries, the gardens of the Louvre, where the royal tennis courts used to be. After wandering through some painfully avant-garde exhibits ("Walking into this small white room affects the dimensions of another white room in Prague" and a 15 minute video of a shack surrounded by trees) and a three story retrospective of one photographer who must have lived to be at least 100, we came to the "Vidéothèque éphémère". It's an exhibit of short videos featuring everything from a made-up conspiracy theory about the Spice Girls, ALF and Princess Diana living in Chile to a silent montage of birds swarming at dawn to Willie Nelson. Definitely one of the most entertaining exhibits I've been to here. Again, under 25's get a reduced tarif of 5.50 euros here.

The Boy is nothing if not a man who knows what he likes, and one of the things he likes is fondue. So after our museum ventures, we warmed up with a big steamy pot of cheese on rue Mouffetard, a low-key little street chock full of bars and little bistros in the 5e arrondissement. A very successful weekend.