Tomorrow Elephant

Things I saw in Paris.

Chinese haute couture pirates on Champs-Elysee — two dainty little ladies with overcoats, faux-tourist look, fake accents and too much kow-towing, oversized sunglasses and yellow teeth. Spinning an unlikely story of rare limited edition Louis Vuitton bags, they want us to go down Franklin D. Roosevelt and buy some for them. They toss 1200 euros at us without blinking, and, smelling something funny but strange and wanting to at least pretend to be boho millionaires, we play along. In the store, they treat us coldly; against the gleaming marble and glass, I feel like some sort of brown stain. A female manager in a pinstripe suit and a budding moustache explains condescendingly that their security saw us talking to suspicious people (a good ten minute walk from the store — the Panopticon is getting close!). The cute Chinese ladies are evil and giving us dirty drug money so that their employers can rip off Louis Vuitton’s designs. She is happy to show us anything we want to buy for ourselves, however.

We give the ladies their money back and walk back towards the Seine, chastened. And then we see an another Chinese pirate fembot, coming straight at us.

We run.

The Eiffel tower is hazy in the silver sunlight. It looks like it’s painted in the sky. For a moment I think it’s some sort of Truman Show Paris, made just for us.

A little sausage dog dives into the Seine.

Broad-arsed riverboats bristle with flowers and deck chairs.

Balzac said Paris is an ocean, and it is, an ocean where stone ships sail, emerging out of the mist without warning as we walk towards Place de la Concorde. You turn a corner and suddenly there they are, shattering the intimate scale of winding Left Bank streets. Their skin is tattooed with statues, gold and reliefs, gleaming galeons of old.

The city makes us feel like we’re in a Richard Linklater movie, walking and walking and walking and talking. “Even when we talk about the same thing, we’re not talking about the same thing.”

Rollerblade acrobatics outside Louvre.

Sausage smells on Rue Montegrueil.

A forest of rooptops from Jelena’s balcony, the vertical realm where parkouristas and thieves dwell.

Panu on friendly Parisian nightlife: “In Paris, you can go out at five in the morning and have the most wonderful conversations with people, until they see a nice car; then they excuse themselves and steal the stereo.”

Louvre, just before sunset. The air is hazy, sky somewhere between blue and silver. The light pours through the glass pyramids; they look like angular soap bubbles, fragile and insubstantial against the baroque facades around them.

I want to go back.