Okay, sorry about that. Between the crazy pregnancy stories and the planetarium flashbacks, I managed to overly postpone my plans to tell you about my time in Paris.

So, I got there Wednesday -a week ago - after a typically restless sleep on the train. It’s mostly the rocking and rolling and related jostling, but it’s partly the subpar bunk-style Murphy beds.

Mister Corn. My new best friend.

And possibly they’re pumping poison gas into the air during the wee hours.

I have no actual proof.

But I do have suspicous anecdotal information.

Here’s the story:  As you may or may not remember, back in August on the train from Lisbon to Madrid, I accidentally slept with my ‘Day and Night’ contacts in. Supposedly you can wear these contacts for a month straight without issue, but my eyes will have none of that.

Anyway, I woke up in the middle of the night that night and my eyes burned like sulfuric acid, and I took the contacts out and didn’t put them back in for three weeks…just to be safe. And then when I did put them in, all hell broke loose, and I actually thought I may have scratched the cornea or something, but happily it all worked out in the end.

With the Louvre behind me.

ANYWAY, my point here is that I woke up in the middle of the night on the train from Barcelona to Paris last week, and I didn’t have my contacts in this time, but my eyes were burning something fierce, and it was exactly like I remembered it…without the contacts and the corneal scarring.

Suspicious.

Otherwise, Paris was lovely. I like to just walk the streets and take it all in. Except when there are monsoon-like torrential rains, which there were, so that’s too bad.

As always, I struggled with the language. I took four years of French in high school and some overachieving part of my brain believes that I should still remember all that stuff, but the bulk of my gray matter will not cooperate with this aspiration. 

One night I had a dream that I remembered everything I’d ever learned and spoke with a spot-on accent, and when I woke up I was super disappointed to to realize it wasn’t actually real.

Did I mention it rained?

By and large we could get by, and what I do remember was enough. More accurately, it had to be enough, so I made it work, but I find it very frustrating to be unable to effectively communicate. The major hardship came in with the handwritten menus  scrawled in white on black chalkboards at pretty much every brasserie in town.

This is charming in theory, but in reality it’s like taking an eye exam and a foreign language test at the same time. Minus a few key items (pommes frites, names of known pastas like penne or linguine, and escargots), what was delivered to me was often not exactly what I was expecting.

Sometimes it was completely left field of what I was expecting in a “oh. So THAT’s what ballotine or rissole or soissons means…”

Oh well.

A brief but glorious parting of the clouds at Sacre Coeur.

To ease the foreign-ness and take a break from the rain, we went and saw Angels and Devils in its unaltered form. The movie itself was all right – not great, not terrible. Tom Hanks is looking good. He’s seen doing laps in the Harvard swimming pool early in the morning, and he looked so fit I would’ve bet money that wasn’t him. Actually, now that I type those words, maybe it wasn’t him? Maybe it was a much more buff body double? Who would ever know? Except me and my eagle eye (once outfitted with corrective lenses, of course).

Anyway, the movie was mostly a welcome dose of American English, but specific to the situation, everything said in Italian (which was a fifteen minute chunk of talking, all told) was translated into French, so I found it something of a double whammy for my saturated brain (which still furiously tried to translate despite the futility of the effort.)

Me at Sacre Coeur.

Otherwise, I saw through the plot almost immediately. I’m a bad person to go to the movies with. Within the first twenty minutes I identified the ‘real’ bad guy, and  announced my theory. Due to the filmmakers need for an onslaught of unfathomable and unbelievable twists and turns, for a long time going there, it looked like I was wrong, but in the end I was oh so right.  As always.

So there you have it: food, movies, and rain. The rains in Spain may fall mainly on the plains, but the rains in France dump all over Paris. And then some.

The first day, while walking back to the apartment from the Eiffel tower we got caught in a torrential downpour. It was the kind of rain so ferocious you’re confident it’s going to back off at any second. But it didn’t.

It just got worse and worse, and I seriously started to wonder if I might get struck by lightening channeled through my cheap H&M umbrella which would blow inside out at the first sign of the slightest breeze. But after a while, you realize you’re so wet that you’re committed, and you’re pressing on even if an ark comes floating down the road.

That’s how I found myself totally drenched up to my BUTT (seriously, my jeans soaked up so much water that even my underwear was wet) and neither the denim nor my shoes would dry out the entire time despite the fact that they were lying over a heater. In fact, I had had to pack them up wet.

Thank you, Paris, for making my brand new sneakers smell like mildew.

I’ll remember you fondly each time I catch a whiff.

I’m back! Back in the US, back home, and back in an electronically connected kind of way. At least for now.

Highlighting the smallness of the train compartment...and the greasiness of my forehead. (Seriously, what is up with my forehead? It's like the Exxon Valdez spill up there.)

Through the magic of pushing ‘F12′ and some other brief keystrokes and about an hour of white text running across a black screen, the computer somehow miraculously looks like it did last week.  I in no way trust that this a permanent situation, but while it is actually working, I’m willing to run with it.

That stated, below is a post I wrote for you on Wednesday morning in a cafe on the Left Bank. I’ll also add some pictures you missed out on due to the unexpected technical difficulties. Anticipate a few days of back posts, and we can talk again ‘real time’ on Wednesday or Thursday.

French Rip Van Winkle

Actually, thanks to the rocking and rolling train from Barcelona to Paris, this is not at all true. Rather, I slept crappy, and although I don’t remember my dreams very clearly, I can only imagine they involved being out on rough seas or on a nauseating ride at an amusement park.

Rather, this title refers to my (henceforth unnoticed) title gaffe the other day. My first instinct was to call it ‘Spanish Sleeping Sickness’ and maybe mention tsetse flies – and you know what they say about trusting your first instincts – but clearly I didn’t, and instead made a reference that I now realize makes no sense.

Day one in Paris, and already the weather is turning foul. Happily, I was having a good hair day.

I was lying there in my train bed last night, mentally reviewing the message Shelley left me that (in essence) ‘Rip Van Winkle is the one who slept forever, and Rumplestiltskin something about taking or killing the lady’s baby,” and maybe she mentioned this (most likely) or maybe I remembered (less likely) but didn’t he also have something to do with spinning golden thread? Or a loom that made golden thread?

 And isn’t there also a weird booze called Rumplemint? What is that? Is it minty? Does it have anything to do with Rumplestiltskin? Two days ago I would’ve suggested it would make you sleep, but now I know that’s wrong. Does it help you make gold? Or is that Goldschlager?

Meanwhile, I started thinking about how it would be nice – but also slow going – to be able to make golden thread. And how do you sell it? By the ounce, I guess, because probably it takes a lot to amount to any kind of weight. Or maybe not. I’ve never handled the thread that goes into making brocade, but the finished product is damn heavy. Perhaps gold thread would be really heavy too?

The Louvre.

Anyway, now it’s clarified: Rip Van Winkle slept a long time, and Rumplestiltskin has something to do with gold thread (maybe) and infanticide (maybe).

So, from there, I started to get confused: What is the story where the parents steal cabbages and vegetables from some lady’s yard? I think she’s a witch? Is that Rapunzel? Curse you, Into the Woods and your musical storyline of mixing together a dozen or more fairytales. Now I’m all confused, and I can’t keep anything straight or remember the details anymore.

Or maybe it’s not Into the Woods fault? Maybe it was all the years I spent touring with the Rolling Stones and the hardcore rock and roll lifestyle? Enough years of heavy drugs and nameless, faceless groupies will do that to a person.

Oh wait. That didn’t actually happen.

Hmmmm….

It takes a serious hike to get to the Eiffel Tower.

In other news, I am now in a very quaint Paris bistro eating a croissant and drinking café au lait and listening to Snoop Doggy Dogg and Eminem. Not a total ambience killer, but definitely an unexpected juxtaposition.

Earlier in the week, I could have sworn the forecast was sunny and low 60s/high 70s…but now it’s low 60’s and rain every day, which fits in with my impressions of Paris. I’ve never been here when it wasn’t raining. On the other hand, maybe I looked up Paris, Texas by accident?

So anyway, we’re killing time because it’s only 10:30am, and we can’t check into the studio apartment we rented until around noon. So there you have it. There’s probably other stuff I meant to tell you, but I can’t think of it right now, largely because I’m tired due to the aforementioned restless night and the drug-induced brain damage that didn’t happen, so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Or never. Either way.

Bernard Réquichot's 'Episode de la guerre des nerfs' at the Pompidou.