Strike: The Pause

Strike is our national hobby and the laughing stock of foreigners. But you are so wrong, ‘cos strike days are fun! A little bit of organized drama in our lives and great reasons to get to work late with a legitimate reason, a welcome pause in our hectic lives. For some reason, people get less aggressive than usual and support strikers, as strikers are always right in a country where we were all programmed to switch to the strike mode as soon as a rabbit farts. Most people would happily go on strike too if only they understood what the strikes are usually about.

My métro line was closed this morning so I walked. Typically, I had to travel to various locations within the city today and ended up taking the métro for just a short trip. The rest was covered on foot or vélib’. A total of three hours of motion, which is more exercise than I’ve done in the past 2 years. By the way, I thought you might want to join me on my way to work, so I took you along this morning. Next time, I promise I’ll take you to a demonstration, among the barricades as I know how some of you are eager to show some boobs too.

Henry Who?

It is important to always watch my silly videos till the very end.

Ce soir, au supermarché

Rayon des fruits et légumes, Ed l’Epicier, Paris 11éme,vendredi 19 heures. Une bande de jeunes de toutes les couleurs et moi qui pèse mes tomates.

Jeune n°1 (très fort pour que tout le monde entende): Monsieur Kärcher est demandé à la caisse centrale, Monsieur Kärcher.

(fou rire dans tout le magasin)

Jeune n°2: Ah ouais, trop fort, z’y va, ta mère, on va passer tout Ed l’Epicier au Kärcher! Ca va oilper!

Jeune n°1: Le petit Nicolas attend sa reumeu à la caisse centrale. Le petit Nicolas.

Jeune n°2: Ah ouais trop fort, sa mère Ségo, va lui fout’ une vieille raclée auP’tit Nicolas!

Agent de sécurité: Arrêtez les jeunes, c’est plus drôle maintenant.

Jeune n°1 (à l’agent): Woooo! Tu votes pour Sarko toi ou quoi, j’y crois pas!

Jeune n°2: Waaaa, il est black et y vote Sarko, va s’prendre des coups de matraque dans la gueule pendant 5 ans.

Jeune n°1 (quitte le magasin mais crie  avant de partir): T’es con paskeu Ségo elle a dit qu’elle voulait que d’l’amour.

Métro Impro

Happy Labor Day  from Line 1 of the Paris Métro.

Found on this fabulous blog. 

Flat Stan is in Paris

This is what Sam de Bretagne wrote a few weeks ago:

“This is my friend Flat Stanley. Flat Stanley is a little boy who was flattened when a bulletin board fell on him. Once he was flattened paper-thin, he went on many adventures. One of those adventures led him to climb into an envelope and mail himself to a friend in California. And now he is doing le tour du monde.

My friend’s nephew’s class is tracking Flat Stanley’s adventures, and will be excited to learn he is now in France. I am looking for some other exciting destinations across the world. If you are willing to welcome Flat Stanley into your home and send a postcard to the class to let them know where he is, and then send him off on his merry way, please contact me by email.

This is a great way for kids to expose kids to the rest of the world out there, so I’d really like to see Flat Stanley go to some cool destinations, instead of hanging around North America like he normally does.”

Well, after a trip to exotic Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Flat Stan made his way back to France and is now in the risky hands of Frog with a Blog. Today, Stan insisted he wanted to see the Eiffel Tower, so I took him there.

Stan taking the Métro

Stan was starving plus he got sick and tired of sightseeing and therefore begged me to take him to some unusual Parisian destination. So I took him to China Town in the 13th arrondissement.

Here’s Flat Stan enjoying Vietnamese food at Pho 14 on Avenue de Choisy.

 

Then we came back home and I decided to take a nap.

 

I wasn’t happy when I woke up as I realized Stanley had taken the liberty to enjoy France a bit more than I thought.

I can’t believe he even used the Internet!

(rest assured Sam, the last two pictures will not be sent to your nephew!)

It’s time to go to bed Stanley, we need some sleep before following Frog to Spain in a few days…

Le Piéton de Charonne

I know how you are all DYING to discover the daily environment of your favorite frog. I know, I know. ahem. Where was I? … Oh yes, me!

So after seeing how I get to work, clean my apartment, what I look like when I’m sick, and soon what I look like in the shower at 7 am, you thought you had seen it all and that it couldn’t get more boring and self-centered? Well now, here is your favorite frog’s neighborhood. But this time, you’ll get to see the work of a real artist, a real photographer, not a bad pixelized video with a tacky soundtrack and cheap special effects and for once, the frog is nowhere to be seen on these pictures. So, feeling relieved?

I live in the 11th district of Paris, a little neighborhood squeezed between Bastille and the Père Lachaise cemetery. A district where artists, wannabe artists, old grannies who mourn in black clothes, Edith Piafs look-alikes, families with annoying children, Arabs, Jews, gays, straights, bag ladies all live. On Saturday I do my grocery shopping at Mahmoud’s from Algeria, on Sunday I shop at Shlomo’s, the Eastern European Jew. A mix of trendy cafés and dodgy bitrots. It’s all a big mess of old and new, safe and scary, fab and tacky.

Apart from the amazing Père Lachaise cemetery, there is not much to see in my neighborhood. No tourist attraction. No majestic architecture. Just people. That is to say, people who really live here and have done so for several generations. You can still hear a few older people speak with that nasty nasal Parisian accent that you only hear in black & white movies nowadays.

So, I hope you’ll like this guy’s awesome pictures. Enjoy.

I just had this urge to go and see her

Parisians never look at her, never think about her and most of them have actually never visited her. However, she stands still there, through winds and rainstorms and looks at us constantly. When you look at her, you realize she’s not very pretty, her brownish raincoat scares some and her height seems useless. “Her” because she is a she in French. The Eiffel Tower is a woman. La Dame de Fer.

Like all Parisians, I never think about – The Iron Lady – I know she’s there, but she feels more like an old grandmother put there for the pleasure of tour buses. But sometimes, I don’t know why, I get this urge to go and see her. And I just have to go right-away! I don’t do anything when I visit her, I just look at how ugly she is from a distance but how gorgeous and refined she actually is when you stand underneath her with her lace-work dress on. Nobody really knows what she’s doing there, she just is there. Not seeing her anymore would make Paris look like a flat pancake deprived of its only phallic symbol.
Yesterday was a bank holiday (some obscure religious Holy Mary event) and I benefitted from the rain to go and shelter under her dress and take a few obscene pictures.

Insulated picnic bags and ugly cunts

Streets and Metro stations do have weird names in this city and one often wonders how people could come up with these names, such as Glacière (Insulated Picninc Bag), Filles du Calvaire (Agony Girls), Bonne Nouvelle (Good news) or Penis street (see my previous post about that street). Enter Jack Jack is a friend of mine. He’s from the U.K, has been living in Paris for more than a year and his French really sucks! (am talking about the language here, of course!) Jack lives in the 18th arrondissement near the Porte de la Chapelle (Door of the Chapel) Métro station. For a year now, Jack has been commuting on the Metro and has been hearing the names of these stations on the PA system with the sexy voice without really paying attention to how those names were spelt an what they meant. Near Porte de la Chapelle, Jack usually travels through a station named Marx-Dormoy believing the name of the station was Marx Dors-moi, which in turn meant in Jack’s slow-French-learning-brain: Marx sleep with me. Well, with some imagination and an extra preposition, it does mean Marx sleep with me. However, what scared me the most was what never occurred to Jack: Why the F-#£% would anybody name a métro station Marx sleep with me??? Well, no, Jack thought “why not”. The French are weird and they only think about sex and politics so why not, and after all, let’s face it, France is a totally centralized totalitarian state… hence its passion for Marx…

After going through various stages of disbelief, panic, laughter and Roast beef animosity, I started thinking like Jack:

actually why not?

That’s when I took my little subway map, read a few of those names and realized that by just reading the names out loud, some of them could actually sound weird and DO mean crazy stuff to the poor foreigners based in this city…

So many stations and so many names, so let’s put them in different categories:

1) The sad stations, like how depressing is it to live there? Ternes: dull, Concorde: Stupid rope, Saint-Maur: Saint Dead, Sully-Morland: Slow-Death-on-bed.

2) The stations where animals have turned mad: Charenton: the Cat-Gives-Back-the-Tuna, Lamarck-Caulaincourt: The Brand-of-the running cod, Poissonnière: The female fish seller, Faidherbe-Chaligny: Made of grass, the cat reads and denies

3) The Communism nostalgia stations: Stalingrad: Stalin City, Marx Dormoy: Marx sleep with me

4) The “like, hello!” category: Maison Blanche: White House, Franklin D. Roosevelt: like HELLO!, Villejuif: Jewish city

5) The “like hello, what the hell?” category: Rue du bac: High-school Exam street, Monceau: My bucket

6) The intimate ones Bourg la Reine: Fuck the Queen, Choisy le Roi: Choose the king , Bourse: Scrotum, Châtelet: Ugly Cunt, Saint-Cloud: The-Holy-Nail, Rue de la Pompe: Fellatio-Street

7) The gross ones: Saint-Sulpice: Saint piss-on-it, Charonne: Dead meat, Rambuteau: Vomit-Drunk-Early

8) The appetizing stations:
Gobelins: Gulp-the-linen, Parmentier: Mash-Potatoes-and-Minced-Meat

Welcome to Paris…