Paris, Barcelona and Nice

Paris has approximately three pickpockets per tourist.  When you arrive they assign you a number, and each of your pickpockets works an eight-hour shift.

Look for the one with a broken jaw.  I lost my temper once.

Pedestrian crossings are a perpetual game of chicken.  Drivers try to intimidate pedestrians by their sheer numbers as they go through red lights at 45 m.p.h.  Pedestrians have to insert themselves in large numbers into the crosswalk so that the drivers screech to a halt six inches from their knees.  The drivers do this because having to explain why you have just killed six income-generating tourists can make you late for work.

Everyone in Paris smokes.  When a baby is born in the United States, the obstetrician swats it on the tushie to make sure it cries and clears its lungs for breathing.  When a baby is born in Paris, the father hands it a cigarette for the opposite reason.

There are only four public restrooms in Paris, and they require exact change in units unavailable in France since the Napoleonic Wars–two and three-eighths francs or something.  You see a lot of people jumping up and down on one foot.

French computer keyboards were devised by the same people who developed The German Enigma code machines during the war.  The chance of ever hitting the letter you want is approximately one in 63 million.

The architect Ieoh Ming Pei claimed that his glass-and-aluminum pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre tied in that end of the complex with the Egyptian theme at the other end.  In reality it has about the same effect as a pair of Reeboks on the Venus de Milo.

If Pei’s first name is pronounced “Ee-yow,” I know why.

French cuisine is as great as advertised, but generally speaking, the Middle Easterners may be getting the best of them.  I would walk on my hands across half of Europe to get back to a certain Lebanese restaurant in Paris.  French pastries are also great, but the Lebanese ones speak in soothing yet obsessive tones to those who need to control their intake of sugar, inviting them to partake and die in ecstasy.

Getting a real American-style pizza in Paris is impossible.  Their Italian restaurants feature designer pizzas with frog legs and live bait on them.  You know—Hercule’s Discount Bait Shop and Pizzeria.  The cheese on them is tasty, but it’s spread thinner than a micrometer can measure.  A Parisian pizza looks and tastes like the cardboard under one from Pizza Hut.

Europeans do not do maps well.  In Barcelona I walked from where I was staying to a nearby major intersection where six streets came together.  Not one of them corresponded to any of the six shown on the map.  This was probably done to keep the Nazis from finding their way around.  Arrows on street signs are no better.  In Chartres, Jean-Louis and I found a sign with two arrows telling us the train station was in one direction, and a third pointing in the opposite direction.  We went with the majority and eventually found it.

Unfortunately, so did the Nazis, who came in from that other direction.

On Las Ramblas, the famous pedestrian walkway in Barcelona, 11:00 a.m. is freak show time.  If space aliens ever decide to infiltrate earth society, this is the time and place to do it, because they’ll never be noticed.  This place makes the bar scene in Star Wars look like a Presbyterian potluck.   The older women are especially striking, with their hair dyed to look like multicolored snow cones.  The younger people have so much metal hanging from their body piercing that they can’t ride the Metro.  They keep flying up and being electrocuted on the wires.  At about noon it becomes safe for normal people to come out.

Or maybe those others are the normal people these days.

The Catalan language sounds like Spanish spoken by a Frenchman after a hard night on the town.

There seems to be an unspoken agreement that eventually every vertical surface is Europe is to be covered with graffiti.  At this writing the project is nearing completion.  Probably the perpetrators aren’t bright enough to realize that soon there won’t be any more places left to deface.  Maybe when it dawns on them they’ll start using rollers and paint over the old stuff so they can get a fresh start.

The walls in Barcelona are covered with red hammer-and-sickle signs. Think we should tell them?

I just wish I had a monopoly on spray paint sales in Europe.

In the Austerlitz train station in Paris, all signs lead back to the long-distance tracks.  Maybe they just want people to go away.  After all, some German seems to have arrived there and left his name on the place.

If you order coffee in Paris it will cost $3.00 and arrive not quite covering the bottom of an espresso cup.  Unit pricing makes it about $100.00 per ounce.  I’ve never been able to get enough of it to tell whether it’s any good.

The first time I heard someone yell “Chocolat!,” I looked around for a chocolate shop.  Then I stepped in it.  In Paris, “Chocolat” is code for doggie doodoo on the sidewalk.  I don’t know what they call real chocolate.  One day I saw some gruesome pornography in a shop window and yelled “Chocolat!” to some of our students, but they didn’t get it.

When will European chambermaids learn not to tuck in top sheets?  When you attempt to draw them back, the bottom sheets come out with them and you have to make your bed all over again.  Then there are the pillows, which are five feet long and a millimeter thick.  Not even a garter snake could sleep on its side on one of those.

The maids never did sweep under our dresser.  By the time we left, there were life forms under there that glowed in the dark and made threatening gestures whenever anyone approached.

To some people, a sign asking them to close their door quietly is an express invitation to knock it off the hinges.  Sometimes the wind did it, but that excuse is good only once.  Each time after that, I hoped the person had been hurled into the hall and locked out.

Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that our hotel seemed to exist in some sort of Escherian space.  When we first arrived we had to climb six flights of stairs to get to our room, but I noticed near the end of the three weeks that each flight I went up seemed to be taking me back down a couple.

Motorcyclists in Europe treat the streets like those video games where the road keeps coming at you with a lot of twists, turns and obstacles, and you have to react quickly or crash.  The only difference is that in real life fast motorcyclists often end up in slow hearses.

One of the favorite sports in Nice is riding a large motorcycle at 35 m.p.h. along a crowded sidewalk and watching the pedestrians dive for cover.

Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to tell anyone you are going to Nice, because you will end up in an Abbot and Costello routine:  “That’s nice.”  “No, that’s Neece.”  And so on.

It really is true that the women in Paris, while not the most beautiful in the world (those are the Swedes, those are the Swedes, those are . . . ), have a charm that reaches out and ropes you like a bewildered calf in a rodeo.  My eyes blurred over a lot.

A lot of people in Europe have those tiny, silvery-haired dogs that could fit in a coin purse, so I was startled one evening in that Lebanese restaurant when I realized a white dog the size of a Volvo  tour bus was looming over my right shoulder.  He could have inhaled a couple of those little ones.  Judging by his breath, I think he may have done so.