The day I’ve been dreading for the past years has finally arrived – we are packed up and counting the hours until we hand over the keys to our apartment and put a closing bracket on four years of living in France.
Journal
Oct 262011
Jan 222011
I’m not a huge board gamer, but after a recent discussion about the topic, I made a list of games I remember from college — more for my own reference than anything else. Yes, this is a totally random post.
Nov 102010
“So, like, Jen was telling me about the party at Alex’ before class and it’s like soooo boring and, like, where are we going tonight?”
All French men are born either hipsters, or truck drivers. While our research cannot comment on truck drivers due to insufficient observational data (after all, they are driving trucks rather than riding the Métro), the hipsters are omnipresent, and frequently enter the serious workforce. Because, you see, unlike hipsters, they are not hipsters by choice, [...]
Park rangers strongly advise visitors to not smoke in the vicinity of booze-sodden clochards slumped in a corner of the subway car — they may be extremely flammable.
Long months of observation have culminated in the definitive scientific conclusion that “get a goddamn haircut, you look like an idiot”.
Usually traveling in packs, or at least in wide-eyed couples, these aging denizens of the suburban wastelands have come to pay their second respects to the city (the first time having been at some point in their 20s, the point at which they still believe they learned French, as attested by their aboveground fumbling attempts [...]
Straight from the banlieue, this stylish young fellow sports the latest in fashionable track and field wear. Unwilling to sully the soles of his Nikes with whatever horrors infest the floors of Parisian underground trains, he happily places his feet on the seat opposite him.
The doors close, and Edith Piaf begins to waft through the train car. Except that it is not Edith Piaf, it is her Bulgarian counterpart and a car-battery-powered portable loudspeaker mounted on a shopping trolley. Suffering Métro patrons can expect a bombardment by at least two, three stops of the musical arts, usually followed by [...]
“Mesdames et Messieurs, je suis désolé de vous déranger…” oh hell, push the ear buds in further, crank up the volume a notch or two. The Métro beggar is a common species, so much so that few rides go by without his (or, rarely, her) appeal to the charity of commuters.
