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A Paris Get-away
Not that life was not completely full and with every range of emotion in Amsterdam, but Paris has been calling us since we were on other sides of the planet, and the week following Richard's birthday which we celebrated in number 33 we indulged in our hide-away hide-away: the Paris garret. This has been the only moment we could fit a French visit into the schedule, but the weather has been superb for the whole time we have been here – gloriously sunny days with the added luxury of empty skies overhead due to the airports closing for the first half of our stay following the Icelandic volcano eruption. On the ground, we were scarcely aware of any ash or dust if at all. But the aerial transport shutdown made everything, metropolitan Paris no less, seem all the more local and intimate. And we did little apart from walk and walk and walk, see films (The Ghost Writer; Sherlock Holmes; I Love You, Phillip Morris; Hurt Locker; and The Men Who Stare at Goats – with the Kathryn Bigelow work the only one I did not like thanks to the gratuitous and relentless handheld camera that makes me violently ill if I do not keep my eyes tightly shut, which I did after the first five minutes – rather not the point of going to the movies – even though by that point it was too late), and spend a lot of time writing (my paper for the upcoming poetry conference in Bruxelles; my manuscript on 'Divine Incest', and my paper for the AAR conference in Atlanta this coming October). We managed to have a lovely evening with Rachida and Thomas – both appearing healthy and happy – and a lovely luncheon with Françoise at her place – she struggling with the ongoing legal difficulties with her sister and still recovering from illnesses. Tried to reach David from Beirut but were unsuccessful, so everything else was relaxed and 'routine' as we traversed regular paths and encountered some new ones as well. For our final day – and the first following our April cleansing fast, we headed to the upstream tip of l'Île de Saint-Louis for a shamanic launch – arriving just as the police were in the process of busting people at that very spot. Talk about fortuitous timing. We quickly re-programmed our itinerary and eventually found ourselves in the enchanting Jardin des Plantes as a result. Once again another lovely Parisian surprise. A perfect idyll it has been in what is certainly one of the most spectacularly beautiful cities of the world. And now within the hour we get ourselves to the Gare du Nord for our train back to the Low Countries.