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J’aime Paris Chapter II: From the floor to the getto
Sunday bloody sunday. You know you’re young if the morning after having collapsed on your friend’s bathroom floor you feel all sparkling and cool. Well, at least I’m young. But, according to the evidence, my thirty-something years old cousin E is way younger than me. At 9.30 she rang at the door and, as soon as C opened the door, the Tazmanian Devil entered the room, opened the windows letting:
- 100.000 volts sunrays enter our eyeballs
- a gateau au framboise enter our throath
-1.000.000 words enter our soaring ears
In about 10 minutes we were all dressed up and ready to go ( everyone except C, that stood home struggling with an aching teeth. It’s moving observing a man and its relationship with his aching teeth. They have their indipendent lives, but still they influence each other, a little like Woody Allen and Mia Farrow at the old times).
…to be continued
J’aime Paris Chapter II – From Chinatown to the floor
In the desperate effort to ease the digestion of tandoori-Ganesh-knows-what that we had had in the Indian quarter, we headed to the Paris Mosquee to meet C’s best friend V for a shisha. Smoking the shisha together is, for the three of us, a little like buiding sticks huts for the three little pigs, but it felt a little strange for me experiencing my friends of the “Alexandria period” ( we spent 2 weeks together in Egypt organising a training session on blogs addressed to Mediterranean women journalists. You should have seen them, the only men in a total-girly envoronment…their satanic look, as a kid in a candy shop…anyway) in their everyday environment. When, after a long, pleasent walk across the Jardins de Plantes ( wow!) we got to the Musquee, V., his cell phone in one hand, the other one hand scribbling something on a notebook, was ACTUALLY working.
After having smoked our ass out remembering the old good times, P. decided to continue our tour in the Paris you don’t expect: we grabbed a metro till Place d’Italie, and then we walked all the way till the hugest Chinatown I’ve ever seen. We politely refused when P. proposed to sit somewhere and have some Chinese soup ( it was 6.00 pm, for Buddha’s sake!..or saké..), and we wondered like 4 Alices in Wonderland in some crowdy, funny-smelling shops, looking for some ( any) furniture to put in C’ apartment and for those nice porcelain cats that say hallo! with the hand.
On our way home ( the bus passed by Notre Dame, and we couldn’t help to say Oh! as always happens when you pass by Notre Dame), we went to the Monoprix ( huge French Supermarket) to get some very french Cheese, very French paté and very Italian Negroni ( aweful cocktail that tastes like gas) and we rushed home for our Parisian dinner.
I have very cloudy souvenirs of what happened after my 6th Negroni, but I can still feel the happiness I felt being surrounded by my friends, lying in C’s bathroom floor.
J’aime Paris, Chapter II – To Delhi and back
When you think about Paris, first thing that comes into your mind is of course the Eiffel Tower, but the second one should be a flock of couples almost making out all around. Well, you’re not that wrong. Paris is the Sweethearts Capital, but it can also be much more than this. Last weekend M and I went to Paris at our friend C’s and, even if we’d already been in the Ville Lumiere more than once, it had been able to surprise us as if it was a completely different town we were visiting.
C. lives close to Place de la Republique, and I couldn’t imagine a better neighbourhood for him to live in, as he – who’s in love with the Arab world, or, at least, with the Arab food, the Arab tobacco in the Arab pipe and, of course, the Arab women – can find there many kebab restaurants ( the smoke coming from the windows smelle greasy enough, but I wouldn’t swear that the brown stuff turning round and round was actual lamb meat …well, only the braves…) and even a Hammam, a Turkish Bath, to spend the afternoons at ( unless you don’t like mushrooms…neither to drink nor under your feet).
Saturday morning we met P for breakfast ( trip tip: if you’re Italian and you can’t start your morning without an espresso, you’d better ask for a café serré, or you’ll end up depressed, forcing yourself to sip dirty hot water from a huge cup, that will automatically lead you to the closest toilet to eject what you’ve just ingested…let’s consider it some kind of natural colonscopy ). P is a handsome, smart middle-aged man with an astonishing predisposition for foreign languages, and he entertained us with jokes in German and Greek as we relaxed in a small café, lazily staring at a mill-run that made the whole scene look as if it was settled in Amsterdam. When one of the waiters started to fight with the clochard that has permanently settled in the cute, fancy kiosk right in front C’s apartment, we decided it was time to go, so we left Amsterdam and headed towards Paris Indian quarter.
P brought us in a super weird roofed street, where we walked for a while taking thousands of pictures to carnival suites shops and to huge papier-maché Indian elephants. There were also many Afro hairdressers, and grocers that sold varieties of fruit we couldn’t recognise, and the everything looked and smelled of India in such a way that you could expect a baboon jumping on your head all of a sudden.
Regardlessly to our stomach we asked for some original French Tandoori chicken and basmati rice, while a young guy tried some scarves on in the shop en face, jiggling as P gave him suggestion to the colour that better suited him.
Life can be a mess, but if you are in Paris, you don’t care.
