Paris

My stay to date in Paris consisted mostly of roaming around the city, so I cannot really give an account of everything that has happened. Here are some notes instead.


The city was made for roaming. In almost a week here I did not see practically any ugly or characterless buildings. The streets reminded me of rooms in an old and comfortably cluttered apartment. I now understand the people that claim it is the most beautiful city in the world.


Beauty seems to lead to expensiveness, as maybe should have been expected. A pint of Guiness will run up to over 7 Euros.


My two favorite places thus far: 
- as cheesy as this sounds, almost all of the embankments of the Seine at night
- Rue de Mouffetard, just a very nice street
- Rue Oberkampf, this is the street we walked the most as it takes us from our apartment on Bld Menimontant to the center. It has a couple of bars and clubs and a decently priced creperie, where we get Nutella crepes at early hours in the morning.


Famous places that I didn't find so impressive:
- Champs Elysee, because it was overrun by tourists and reeked of militant consumerism
- Top of Monmartre at 3pm. My complaint here is similar to the one mentioned above, namely, too many herds of tourists. I suspect, however, that if one were to show up there very late at night, the view would be worth it. After having visited Monmartre, I understood the mixed feelings locals usually have towards tourists. In massive quantities the latter are quite an unbearable lot with their constant aimless wandering, eating, picture taking, nonsense foreign speech, and uncontrollably loud children.


Hence here are some nice non-touristy places I've seen:
- The west side of Montmartre (Rue Chevalier de la Barre, Passage Cottin, Rue Ramey). The residential areas of the hill are actually quite empty and charming. One might even glimpse a bit of the past in the old men playing boules or a woman out for a walk with her three cats.
- The Parc André-Citroën. It was strange visiting this place in the winter, with all of the trees bare and grey and all of the grassy surfaces dead, but the place is nonetheless full of many nooks and quiet corners. 
- Another nice park is located in the yard of the Rodin Museum.

In the event that I would be presumptuous enough to write an autobiography I would title it, with appropriate presumptuousness, "Walking in a Dream".

Lately I have been getting the feeling that this is precisely what I have been doing. Life this past month consisted of a stream of events that swept a complacent me away in the direction of the next day. A stream of readings about medieval society, summaries of said readings, lunches at the cafeteria with friends, more readings and summaries, some simple finite-state networks followed by a stream of movies and unpredictable weekends... oh, and of course a very consistent stream of rain water falling on the city throughout the month.

Out of this stream of events I was only able to fish out the following (mostly mundane) observations and memories:

- Cream cheese, a loaf of bread and fruit make for impressively simple and effective travel food. One needs no utensils to consume this food (unless you take a pineapple or a pomegranate as fruit), it is filling and relatively healthy.

- Book tickets a month in advance: early enough to be cheap, late enough to procrastinate with plans.

- Young couples on park alleys are much more dangerous to cyclists than cars. They have a tendency to try to take up the whole path just at the moment you are about to pass them. That alone, however, is not dangerous, just a nuisance. The problem arises when one rings one's bike's bell, thus shocking the love birds into reality and as a result causing them to dart in unpredictable directions in the most uncoordinated manner. Beware of couples in park alleys!

- Eat more. Getting blown off of a bike by the wind is becoming slightly embarrassing.

- If one falls off a bike, one should get up and look for one's glasses. Once they have been found, one can continue on his or her way.

- Sleeping 8 or 9 hours a day does not make one less sleepy. The more you have, the more you want.

- Some knowledge of music theory greatly helps when composing music.

- Bridges have a tendency to freeze over when the temperature drops below zero Celsius. Beware of bridges in winter.


It seems that this year Christmas will be white only online on most major websites. Talk about virtual reality replacing the real one!
I nonetheless wish everyone and anyone reading happy Holidays, whatever they may be. Considering that I am supposed to be on break from academics, I should be posting some more entries fairly soon, perhaps even still in the old year.