Tom Gastall

3/21/07 Wednesday & 3/22/07 Thursday
Ursula and I spent the next two days on the right bank with Ursula’s old college pal Huan and his wife Rekha, who were also vacationing and suggested that we take the trip to Paris in the first place. They’re foodies, and pretty intense ones at that. Imagine Sebadoh fans, but replace Sebadoh with truffles, multi-course meals, and lots of snapshots of deserts and dishes. We visited the Left Bank and the Louvre, amongst other places. I had started to take in fashion trends at this point – noticing a lot of women with straight dark hair, three-quarter length wool coats, scarves, and either converse all-stars or jeans tucked into boots (Rekha tells me the boot thing was inspired by Victoria Beckham). The major French pastime seems to be hanging out and drinking cofee and wine in the cafes. Teenagers tend to hang out in the park, playing hip-hop on their sidekicks or making out. For transportation, you see a lot of scooters, mini-coopers, and smarts (amongst other cars) meandering down narrow, cluttered, often cobblestone streets.

Our mode of transportation almost everywhere was the Metro, the underground subway. The Metro is fast and confusing; the network of routes is a spiderweb and most of the stations are very similar, except for one in particular that looked like it was designed by Captain Nemo. The system uses small blue tickets for passage. Security cams are everywhere, and occasionally you see guards with submachine guns. You can hear music throughout the metro- accordion players, harpists, drummers…people will sing a song on your ride then collect change before they get off. The Metro is studded with large poster advertisements. The only two American ads I really saw were Madonna for H&M and Justin Timberlake for Alpha Dog…which triggered the crack-cocaine drumloop of “bringing sexy back” in my head every time I saw it.