Futility Now

More graveyard photos:

(Those cookies were SO terrible.)

Here are some dudes in old-timey diving suits attending a crypt:

Here’s some stuff around Belleville:

Here is some delicious food that we ate:

Here are some pictures from out second trip to the Marche au Puce:

Here’s me looking maudlin:

And all you can hear is a radio somewhere, playing a pig of a song:

You can go to Pere Lachaise with a plan to visit all of the important dead people, or you can show up with Vittel, cookies, some Orangina, and two mini-pitchers of chilled wine, and have yourself a picnic.

Then you can wander around looking for shadowy corners in which to exchange kisses, since cemeteries are sort of sexy. In an admittedly weird way.

The crumbly stone! The rusty metal! The fonts! The dead!

Unlike Notre Dame and The Centre de Pompidou, I didn’t cry at Pere Lachaise, but I think I still managed to have a religious experience.

Note: Yes, I realize the video is sideways. Shrug.

Here are some photos presented in a less verbose context.

Hazel and I took a day trip to Arles, which is a pretty cool town. Here is a picture of a cat who hangs out at a cafe in Arles.

Here is a forlorn-looking infants shoe stuck on a tree in the square of Saint Chinian.

Here are some prawns we ate on our last night in Saint Chinian

Here are Hazel and Zia in Beziers, where Hazel and I caught the train back to Paris.

Here is a rather handsome metal door in Beziers.

Last Beziers photo: For various reasons that we don’t really need to go into detail about, Hazel and I were sort of exhausted by the time my mom drove on with Zia. Rather than wait in the train station, we went to a rawther rustic bar and drank Ricard.

Then we went back to Paris, where we belong. Here is the sky from our hotel window.

Here is Hazel drinking wine by the Canal Saint-Martin while we wait for pizza from Pink Flamingo.

Here are the pizzas for which we waited. The one on the left is called L’Obama, and it’s ham and pineapple chutney. Verdict: amazing!

Here is some rubble we saw after eating pizza and before we got on the metro for further adventures.

Last stop in Toulouse? Coffee drinks with Nutella!

We met up with Kate and Zia in Beziers and headed to St. Chinian in a gigantic fancy midnight blue Citroen. Kate is an. . . exciting driver. Whew!

We could see why Kate felt guilty with just the two of them at the house initially.  It is four stories tall.

J and I stayed on the fourth floor, where everything was butter yellows and smooth terrazzo tiles and gigantic bathtub. Ooh la la.

I haven’t done nearly as much traveling as J, and I’m sure it’s come up somewhere already that this is my first time abroad. What I will say is that the few times I have traveled have been longer trips that have allowed me to do things like grocery shop and cook and get a general sense of what daily life is like. It was great fun, then, to go to the supermarche and pick up some cured meats and pasta and veg, and then (over a gas stove, le sigh) throw something together with the sound of cicadas and the long sharp shadows of early evening in the background.

Rather unfairly, the next morning J had to report to work; Kate and Zia and I went off into the mountains, more specifically to St. Pons and Fraisse-sur-Agout.

It was very pretty, and hot. We wandered down to the source of the Jaur, under a rocky outcropping. The air was positively chilling, it was so strange compared to the direct environs. I find nature totally bewildering, in this case it was in a nice way.

On Monday we started out by heading back to Gare de Lyone to book our tickets back to Paris from Bezier. Despite getting there fairly early, there was an incredibly long line, something that is basically the most consistent aspect of our trip. Luckily things were fairly brisk, and we were able to obtain the things that we needed. On our way out I took this picture of Gare de Lyon’s tower.

After that, we went to the universe-famous Louvre, where the fact that we had bought museum passes payed off in spades, because there were about a bajillion people waiting around in the already-90-plus-degree heat to get in, and we got to waltz down and alternate route and the whole thing took us about 10 minutes rather than the hour and a half or so the line would have demanded.

The only thing that I find genuinely moving in The Louvre is The Raft of the Medusa (with its keen observations about man’s inhumanity to man), but there’s plenty that’s at least worth a look. On our way up the stairs to look at The Winged Victory of Samothrace (a silent, eternal treatise on man’s inhumanity to man) we noticed an area under construction to our right. It was pretty cool.

Here is a hilarious but symbolically-rich (on the topic of Hazel’s anxieties and man’s inhumanity to man) picture of Hazel next to a horse’s head.

Here, as a parting shot from The Louvre, is a baby wrestling a goose. Like all great art, it speaks to man’s inhumanity to man. Once again, the mysteries of the universe are illuminated in timeless marble.