Lucky, lucky

I've had a couple of really good days here. It gets rough sometimes, but I've been quite pleased to be here. We left Lille and are now in Rouen. By the time you read this, I'll most likely be back in Paris again for a petite respite before we head to Strasbourg.

Rouen feels like a village. It's the place where they burned Joan of Arc at the stake. For some reason, the building they built to commemorate this and I guess to honor her looks TOTALLY out of place. Here it is:



Not very french looking. My friend kept complaining about how modern it was. I keep forgetting what city we are in or what day of the week it is. It starts to run together. It's quite amusing to watch a group of adults discuss what day they THINK it is for 3 minutes, dead serious. We were standing in front of a french store that was closed in the middle of the day and we had to run through our list of why-the-french- don't- want- to- work- right- now excuses.

1) It's Sunday (sort of legit, but it's been so long in the US I've forgotten about Sundays off)
2) It's Monday and I already had to work on Saturday
3) It's Monday and it's a pharmacy before 3pm
4) It's a restaurant and it's after 2pm, but before 7pm
5) It's the weekend of Easter
6) The owner has a hangnail....

Okay, just joking about the hangnail, but there's lots of closures. And when we first saw a store closed we thought it was Sunday and then realized that it was Thursday and that individual store proprietor was closed for no predictable reason.

I try to figure out why I seem to have so little time here and it dawns on me that eating at restaurants every day for 2 meals takes a LOT of time, as does doing laundry and mundane tasks that you can't do easily without a car or a house. So, I get less done, but I've sort of come to expect less. A good day is one where I can call my husband, read and answer emails, update my blog, paint my nails, eat and get a decent amount of sleep. Anything above and beyond is just gravy.

Alright, more later.

Brussels to Lille

Brussels, Belgium photos:

Me in Brussels at midnight - this is all I got to see of it

We're in Lille now. It's a cute city - 4th largest in France. Small, when you hear those stats. Anyhow, it's fairly cute. They have a lot of creperies here. I haven't been very inspired with the photos here. I don't know if all the cities are starting to look alike, if I'm burned out or what, but after Brussels, I just sort of stopped taking 100 photos of the same thing.

What's happened to my art! :) Anyhow, we're in Lille. Back to toilets in the closet again. We got spoiled in Brussels - it was a one-off and we had the BEST hotel. Housekeeping in France is relentless! Yesterday I got 1 phone call, one question in the hallway and a knock on the door followed by a sliding of the door key while I was blow-drying my hair and doing naked leg lifts in the bathroom. Why do they want into our rooms so bad? We never use the mini-bar! I have a do not disturb sign on the door and I asked the lady outside why they bother to have the door hangers if they are going to double check 3 times. One of our bandmates suggested that he figre out when the maid comes and then he could perform a lascivious act, naked, at her exact arrival. That'd traumatize her enough to stay away. At our last hotel in Paris, this little women knocked on your door and when you opened it, she bulldozed in like a hungry stray and marched over to the window and opened the curtains. All the while uttering something about having to open your window. So I'm thinking there's a trick lock or something, and she grabs the curtain and opens it, as if I couldn't do that myself. All this with the curt tenacity of a German war nurse. I thought it odd but forgot about it until at lunch our bandleader said that he told the front desk that he never wanted to see "that woman" for the rest of his stay here. They are deep here with the hospitality, even if you don't want it. So funny.

Here's what I could muster for Lille:

Paris Versaille Pics

Pictures from Versailles

Inside the Versaille palace.

The site of our infamous stuck-in-a-rowboat-on-a-river-with-a-deadline adventure!

So Paris was cool. We stayed in a good hotel this time. The difference between hotels in the US and France are as follows:

US - many outlets
France - 1 outlet, none of which is in the bathroom

US - bed has a fitted sheet, flat sheet and then a quilt or bedspread
France - bed has a fitted sheet and then a quilt. No middle man here.

US - toilet and sink, reunited in 1 room
France - toilet in a closet, sink in another room w/tub

US - shower is permanent fixture w/a full door or curtain
France - shower is handheld, door is usually some 1/4 length deflector at the head of the tub (which equals water flooding your floor 98% of the time)

US - do not disturb means, don't enter, don't think about it
France - do not disturb means knock on the door and wake me up to ask if I'm really sure that I don't want my room done, ask me if I want anything, sometimes it means break in while I'm naked and try to have a conversation with me, nude, about why you're in my room - in another language, knock and don't wait for a response and just break in to check to see if I've bought any $10 potato chips from the vending fridge, etc.


This hotel was nice and we didn't have to endure much nonsense at all. There was actually a gym inside, maybe as many as 4 plugs spread around the room, etc. It was very nice. All I did in Paris was Versailles and just life administration and rest. I didn't do my normal running around like a tourist w/their head cut off act. We'll be back again and I don't want to wear Paris out so that when Mark comes, I'm all jaded and bored with it!

Alright, I've got to go eat. I slept in today for once - I'm on picture strike. And food in France is VERY regulated. You must eat lunch between 12 and 2, or else you can't eat again until 7:30. Everything closes. Imagine our chagrin on travel days where we're in a bus until AFTER lunch, arrive in a new city and we're screwed. So usually, we've started stopping in truck stops and having a little in between snack.

Let me run and eat! I'll write again soon - the internet is slightly less expensive in this hotel than some...

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!