Return to Paris

We went back to Paris for a pitstop before heading to Belgium.

We stayed in a neighborhood called Le Marais. Paris has become so familiar that it feels like Washington, DC to me.

This time, I finally made it back to Versailles. Can't post pics because something about this internet in this hotel prohibits any type of upload behavior. Anyhow, it was an adventure. Went on a rowboat w/another singer, not really thinking about the fact that we don't really know how to row a boat, nor have I ever really rowed a boat now that I think about it. It was very Lucy and Ethel in the water. And she was dressed like a supermodel in a boat! Funny. I like Marie Antoinette's place and the adjoining properties better than the main house which is a little bit museum like at this point.

I'll have to update this more later...

More Lyon Traboule Photos

Lyon is a really neat little town. Here are some pictures I took mostly of the traboules. Old town Lyon is full of cobbled streets and cute shops. I had the best crepes I've had in France so far. Most of the crepes are just fast food junk and a lot of stands don't bother to cook them from batter anymore, so you get a reheated crepe with just one or two fillings. But at a restaurants called Le Bananas in Lyon, I had sit-down worthy, buckwheat crepes with Bechamel sauce, creme fraiche, cheese, ham, onion and mushrooms that were to die for! Since then I've learned
that those are usually called Crepes Breton or Galettes and are harder to find in Paris, but worth the energy. Hopefully I'll find some before we leave Paris tomorrow. We're here for a 2 and a half day layover, so it's been a blur. I think I have to waste today with laundry! Talk to you soon.

Traboules de Lyon

Today and yesterday I went off in search of something called Traboules, these tiny passageways or secret streets and courtyards in Lyon that were designed possibly to help the silk workers protect the silk from the elements while being transported through the city. I'm going to expand this tonight after the concert and post my own pics, but right now, I'm going to try to embed somebody else's traboule slideshow as an experiment here. Bye!



Lyon les traboules

Lyon

Back in Lyon again. My french parents are out of town (in Paris) so they come to our concert here, nor can I sup at their house, but they are going to try to come to a show in Geneva, where their son lives with his Caribbean wife. Do you think having a black girl living in his house for a month shaped any of that? My brother told me once that our white brother (as I call him - he lived in our house his senior year of high school - he was a next door neighbor/friend of the family/ex-babysittee) said he used to have some babysitter crush on me... Just kidding, the thought is too funny. If you saw how I looked in Lyon, it's amazing that he likes any black women! Half perm, half natural - it was a mess. Unfortunately though, the black women in Paris weren't faring much better last week. We saw a lot of glued-on looking weaves. It's as if the new immigrants from Africa just skipped the perm revolution and ran headfirst into weaves. Any half-rate American stylist could make a killing over here doing black hair. It's a severely underserved market, which is why I'm all weaved up by my bandmate.

Lyon is nice and the air is clean, but my memories are almost exactly opposite of my current reality. The fashion choices look a little better than Paris - strangely enough. It's as if they took out all of the trick choices that you might foolishly make and only left the good stuff here in Lyon. Does that mean I'm conservative? Nah. But I do think I'm classic enough that some of that trashy faux-American crap I saw in Paris stores turned me off a bit. But I'm discussing all the good stuff first before I go into the wow-I'm-surprised-I-don't-like-it-better-than-Paris spiel. Last time around, I hated Paris and loved Lyon. Then again I was living in somebody's house and being fed. And sure, the metro is still as cute as I remembered it, but that's because it's like a replica of Paris or DC. It doesn't go anywhere! There's nowhere to go. This is a pretty small town still, despite being one of the top 5 in France I believe. I think it strikes me like how I'd probably feel about Houston after having living in LA and DC.

And that's where the change in mood comes in. When I came to France, I was a kid from St. Louis. Paris was unwieldy and they put us in a dive neighborhood. Now I'm an adult. I've lived in two REAL cities, one with a great metro system. Lyon seems so small, sort of like entering your high school cafeteria or auditorium 10 years later. The ceilings seemed to have dropped. Everything's relative, and relatively speaking, I really like Paris. I even like quaint Limoges. Lyon now seems like this in-between teenager city with overly big teeth and ears. Too big to be cute, too small to be stately. It's only been a day and a half, so we'll see, but I'm diggin' it significantly less than last time.

J'ai deux amours, California et Paris. Time's moving fast. I'll be home soon enough. We've got 9 cities to go and then it's breaktime. All the cities on the second half are decidedly sexier than this first route. But I'll be excited to see Brussels and Geneva. Technically, I've been IN Switzerland before, but I've never really been TO Switzerland, so it'll be cool to see another country. All we did was ski for a day in the Swiss Alps in high school, so that barely counts.

PS - There's killer American-style mall next to our hotel this time!

Past Paris Photos not posted

Denfert Rochereau Metro Stop (I had a deja vu here)

Restaurant in Pigalle or Montmartre

Hallway outside of Sacre Coeur

FDR Metro Stop

Louvre

Eglise Saint Germain Des Pres

Musee Dorsay
Luxembourg Gardens
Sacre Coeur

Quaint street leading to Place de la Victoire and Cathedral in Clermont Ferrand (not Paris)

We're off to Lyon. I hope to update again soon.
Love ya!

Clermont Ferrand

We're indeed in Clermont Ferrand. It's so boring that I actually miss Limoges. There's a weird tram system that me and Judith took today like big girls. It was fun. We had no idea what we were doing and it worked out fine. However, we starved and had to resort to MacDOUGH, as the french call it, because everything was closed for midday siesta. Paris had us spoiled. We could actually eat at almost any hour of the day, and sometimes buy stuff on Sundays. I forgot we're back in Whoville again. Our tour manager says that Clermont-Ferrand is the Detroit of France, which seems pretty accurate since Michelin(the tire manufacturer) has it's headquarters here.

People aren't quite as friendly as Limoges. At least the youngsters aren't. But the older people were good at giving directions etc. I'm in a Holiday Inn now, so that means the following changes:

1. Lots of English-speaking guests
2. Better variety at the breakfast - bacon doesn't seem to be steamed or boiled as much as it was in Paris
   
3. the toilet and the sink are REUNITED! My sink is actually next to my toilet in a unified bathroom instead of the ol' water closet thing.
4. An Ice Machine! I miss ice.
5. Hot Chocolate mix in my room - I had to search for awhile with a skeptical grocery store worker to find hot chocolate mix that didn't require milk in the store back in Paris. Here, it's just in your room!

The show itself is a lot of fun. Being in France is great. But living out of tour buses and hotel rooms, eating dinners that are prepicked for you in a cafeteria with your coworkers gets old sort of quickly. So does French language television. Their version of Ugly Betty, Le Destin de Lisa, is a dubbed version of a Swiss remake of a German remake, I believe. So it looks weird to watch it with all the mouth action going on. I thought Switzerland mostly spoke French, but I guess not since this is clearly dubbed. I understand my friend Shauney's comments about touring. It's a double-edged sword. Thrilling and annoying all at once. Luckily for me, it's annoying in my favorite country in the whole world, so you do the math.

So I amuse myself by taking pictures. All the time. I even had a french friend of a friend take some photos of me. Here's one:

Fan (provided) photos

2^nd to last show, I was greeted by some fans, for whom I’d signed autographs the night before, who had a small bouquet of yellow roses and a cd of pictures of me from the show, neatly labeled with my name. How sweet? It was humbling. I went home and checked them out and they were nice, you’ll see one here of me and the guy who made me the disc and one of me signing the program.

We had a couple more sightings in the street. One man insisted upon showing me where Le Printemps department store was. I guess I get why Johnny Depp lives here. You can be famous and recognized but not harassed too badly.

Did I tell you that the restaurant across the street renamed the menu and signage after Michel? All the dishes were names of his songs. They gave some band members the laminated menus after it was done.

You learn a lot about yourself on the road. Not that I was terribly unacquainted with me beforehand, but you come across a variety of weird situations in a relatively short time period. Right now I’m going through high school again in about a month. Crazy. Advanced time travel. Your sense of time is totally screwed up anyhow. Everyday is Thursday, there is no such thing as the weekend. Everyday is the same. Groundhog day. We just had two days off. It was too short – I didn’t get as much accomplished as I’d hope, but we come back to Paris several times, so I can make up for lost time. Plus I can’t do everything without Mark, gotta save some stuff for him. He’s coming sort of soon. See, what’d I tell you about my sense of time.

I heard that we’re driving into snow. Wow!