France/Spain 2011 - Day 4, Part 1 - Strasbourg, Paris

"He talked with more claret than clarity." - Susan Ertz

***

France/Spain 2011
Day 4 - 20th March - Strasbourg, Paris (Part 1)

For some reason I'd only been getting 6 hours of sleep in the previous nights. Perhaps it was because I slept in the train to Strasbourg and had a pre-concert nap.

Before my TGV train back to Paris I had some time to walk around Strasbourg in the early morning, when no one was about. The city definitely had a different aspect. Hostel breakfast started at 730am but I left at 7am. In fact it'd been the second day I'd gone without breakfast, but this was better as I could have more interesting things to eat in my limited time there.


Expensive hair salon
They have student prices


Hôtel de Ville (Town Hall)
It was nicer from here


Side of cathedral


Looking up from the main portal to the cathedral


Garbage truck. Note that the URL on the side is "Strasbourg.eu" not "Strasbourg.fr". But after all they advertise themselves as "Capitale européenne"


Place Gutenberg


Inexplicably blur photo of Rue de l'Epine


Les Deux Gourmandes - the restaurant I'd had dinner the night before (and which I'm still the mayor of)


Menu of place


St Thomas Church, where the previous night's concert had been held


Rue des Cordonniers


L'Ill (river) near St Thomas


Off the Place Saint-Louis


House on the river


Lycée Professionnel, Quay Charles Frey


"The only way to pay in this car park is at the ticket machine. Any other method of collecting payment for parking is illegal"
Trilingual parking sign. Presumably there've been conmen around


Grande Rue (Major Street). Which is not Grande.


"A prix discount"
Franglais ! (it should be "A prix réduits") nemo informs us, in the comments, that this has become a bona fide anglicisme, rather than being Franglais


Another fraud doctor offering homeopathy. But then, they offer osteopathy too...


At first I mistakenly thought this was a fake Greek restaurant due to the font, but Avanos is in Turkey. Anyhow they advertise "Oriental" specialities, when really it's just Turkish food.


Recipes for local specialities


"Hotel Le Grillon"
Jimmy Cricket Hotel


Pastry shop window. Confusingly, they sold Macaroons as Macarons. Gah.

Boarding the train to Paris, I came across a weapon of great power:


I want to wield one of these in my next RPG!

"Marteau brise-vitre
Nothammer
Martello rompivetro
Window breaking hammer"

I'm quite sure the German and Italian are right.


Girl doing the "run with the train as it accelerates until it gets too fast" farewell

The TGV was really nice after Chinese trains. For one, no one spat on the floor. There was also a laptop charging station.


One breakfast pastry (Streussel)


My "macaron" (macaroon)
The top was crisp and it was bursting with coconut flavour. My camera thought the thing on the right in the second was a face.


I'm trying to figure out why I took this. Perhaps because of the laptop charging station, though I can't figure out which symbol this is.

We then reached Paris.

Grazia magazine's May cover: "Natalie Portman. Les françaises semblent être élegantes sans effort" ("French women seem effortlessly elegant")


"Il y a des pays qui font grandir l'âme. Maroc"
("There are countries which enlarge your soul. Morocoo")
Revolutions are good for the soul


"En Bourgogne il n'y a pas de touristes. Il y a des amoureux, des aventuriers, des randonneurs, des gourmets, des cyclistes, des mélomanes, des oenophiles, des marins d'eau douce..."
("In Burgundy there are no tourists. There are lovers, adventurers, hikers, gourmets, cyclists, music lovers, oenophiles, river boaters...")
Presumably no Americans. Curiously the last term is supposed to be perjorative.

I made my way to the Latin Quarter, to a hostel where I had stayed with the Cock on my first visit to Paris. It was "Young and Happy Hostel" - I was younger when I was first (and last) there, and probably happier too.

On coming out of the métro I got a pamphlet:


"Bateau Français Gaza"
("French Boat for Gaza")
It was supposed to leave in May, but turns out it left in July. And despite the claims about responding to the humanitarian crisis, in reality it "had no aid on board and that their mission was meant to make a “political statement” against the Israeli blockade".


Shy Pussy
I used "cat mode" on my camera for this. There was also a "dog mode".


Only in Paris: Sexy underwear in the street. A souvenir from a liaison the previous night? Hurr hurr.

At the hostel I used a terminal (on IE6 ugh) for the only time in my trip, since navigating websites was near impossible on mobile and I'd neglected to do this beforehand. On the same day there was Opera and Ballet... but at 2:30pm (it was 12pm); Bang Bang was plaing at the Salle Pleyel but of course tickets were gone. On the next day there was nothing from the French national opéra, so my options were reduced to:


"Les Solistes Francais (sic): The Four Seasons"
The programme also included Pachelbel's Canon and Albinoni's Adagio. Ugh.

The bad timing annoyed me. For Siegfried's Wagner I understood why they needed a break, as it was 5 hours long, but Coppélia was under 2 hours, and Verdi's Luisa Miller was under 3. On the other hand, when I'd been in Milan La Scala had had daily performances.

I found an option for the night, and possibly one for the next but was still a little disappointed. Then I left to do other things.


Market at Place Monge


Lebanese specialities


"Coup du Monde Gymnastique"
("Gymnastics World Cup")


King's Speech poster. It translates as "A King's speech" oddly.
In the Bon Marché ad beside, presumably TBM translates as "Très Bon Marché" ("Very Cheap")


"Couscous aux Lardons"
("Couscous with Bacon")
Haram!


"après ma lobotomie, je vous aimerai davantage"
("After my lobotomy, I will love you more")
I'm trying to figure out the link to the theatre advertised below

Dr Oetker has a "Pizza Tonne" with tons of ingredients. Ugh.

I thought I was the only one to take pictures of ads in the métro but this tall girl was doing so too.


The joys of a First World country: you can drink the tap water!

There seems to be a law on food ads requiring them to exhort you about eating fruit and vegetables, not snacking and eating less fat. These warnings were not just on junk food ads.

Links - 14th August 2011

"I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible." - Oscar Wilde

***

photoshoplooter

The Patent System Is The World's Biggest Threat To Innovation Today - "Ultimately, you bear the burden of these lawsuits, patent acquisitions, and protection kickbacks in the form of higher device prices. Even worse, you lose your freedom of choice as smaller players are forced out of the market and larger players are discouraged from innovating. If you’re an entrepreneur that has dreams about building a better mousetrap on your own, forget about it. Someone else has probably already patented the idea of “mousetraps that are better than previous ones”"

Illusio: Bringing the gavel down on Workers Party I - "There is an unfolding situation over at Aljunied-Hougang Town Council. No doubt it's been angled ever so subtly by the government-owned media in Singapore as the B plot and convenient distraction to its presidential election due to take place on 27 August. Like a carefully plotted campaign, Singapore's news media is content to put its citizens on a drip on this story, calibrating the slow release of information that may build up to an implied allegation of mismanagement or corruption in the AHTC as well as the original HTC"

The Butterfly Tales...: The Caveman Tactic - "If you’ve actually forced yourself on any women enough, you’ll know that persistence is a virtue that is sometimes rewarded. You can turn most ‘no’ into a ‘yes’ if you try hard enough, long enough or have enough alcohol or chloroform with you. Maybe she relented because she was playing hard to get, or maybe you irritated her enough, or maybe it was even sympathy, but when a woman really means ‘No’, you’ll know it because she won’t be around long enough for you to try again. Punching you in the face is also a way of telling you she’s serious about saying ‘No’. I’m pretty sure about that... When a girl you don’t know agrees to come up to your place in the middle of the night, after a clubbing session, she is not there to just have a conversation with you"
Cue the moralistic fallacy

The Power of Free Tattoos « - "When we asked the people in line for the free tattoos if they would get the tattoo if it were not free, 68% said they would not. They were only getting it because it was free... when you are facing a decision about a “free” offer, my suggestion would be to imagine what you would do if the price was not free and instead it was very cheap (maybe $1) — and ask yourself if this would change your behavior. And if you would make a different decision if free was not involved, maybe this is a good sigh that the decision was not that good to start with?"

My Little Pony attracts Brony fans - YouTube

Amazon.com: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification - "Working in the naturalist's tradition, the photographs depict the diversity of the phenomenon and carry a surprising emotional charge; readers inevitably begin to see these carts as human, at times poignant in their abandoned, decrepit state, hilariously incapacitated, or ingeniously co-opted. The result is at once rigorous and absurd, enabling the layperson to identify and classify their own cart spottings based on the situation in which they were found"

Even the Tooth Fairy Pinches Pennies During a Recession - "Kids today receive an average of $2.60 per lost baby tooth, down from $3.00 in 2010. That's a relatively substantial 14 percent drop"

When the rapist is a she - "Female rapists "are most likely to use psychological pressure such as verbal pleading and arguments, emotional blackmail, and deception." Also common among cases of female-on-male sexual assault is taking advantage of an intoxicated man... Just as with prison rape, female-on-male rape gets the comedic treatment"
NoToFemaleRape blithely ignores this issue

cyberpioneer: Top 5 myths about the SAF's latest weapon - the iPad! - "5. Join military, get an iPad 2!
Seriously, if you're joining the Army just to get an iPad 2, I don't know what to say.
Since we're at this, you should check out Mr Brown's take on iPads in the SAF."
Whoever wrote this deserves props

Ashes to bullets: a different way to spend eternity - "Closer to home, there are teddy bears designed with a cavity to hold a container of ashes, so that the dearly departed can still be hugged"

Dead Bodies On Mount Everest - "Unlike a fictional killing by Freddy Krueger, the summit of Mt. Everest is a dream that can truly end in death. Here are the horrific photographs of a failed common goal to achieve Himalayan greatness"
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."

Divorcee wins £4.3m of ex-husband's inheritance despite judge saying 'she did not work for it'
"A Man Is Not a Financial Plan" "No, but a Divorce is"

Intelligence : Sex differences in general knowledge - "A general information or knowledge test, which was shown to measure 19 domains of general knowledge... males obtained significantly higher means than females on the second-order general factor and on four of the six first-order factors identified as information about Current Affairs, Physical Health and Recreation, Arts and Science. Females obtained a significantly higher mean than males on the first-order factor identified as Family. There was no sex difference on the remaining first-order factor identified as Fashion. The results confirm the findings in a number of standardisation samples of the Wechsler tests that males obtain higher average scores than females on the Information subtests and that this is not attributable to a bias in favor of males on these tests"
Men know more General Knowledge than women, not least in Current Affairs. It is also interesting that "Arts" in "Arts and Science" didn't balance out the disparities

mental_floss Blog » 15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent - "13. Bakku-shan (Japanese)
The experience of seeing a woman who appears pretty from behind but not from the front."

Spoiler Alert: Stories Are Not Spoiled by ‘Spoilers’ - "Spoilers don’t spoil stories. Contrary to popular wisdom, they actually seem to enhance enjoyment. Even ironic-twist and mystery stories – which you’d be forgiven for assuming absolutely depend on suspense or surprise for success – aren’t spoiled by spoilers... “Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing”"

How youth-led revolts shook elites around the world - "Of all the millions of words expended in the global media on this year's rash of youth-led revolts across the globe, none are more relevant than those penned by Alex Andreou, a Greek-born blogger who now lives in Britain. "You have run out of ideas," he wrote in June, echoing the message of Greek protesters to their country's political and economic elites. "Wherever in the world you are, that statement applies.""
It's not like they have any better ideas than the "elites" themselves

What are the world’s best free attractions?

Jonathan Kay: Take it from me — ‘gender-free’ parenting doesn’t work - "My motives were purely selfish: I wanted my daughters to become racquet addicts, like me, so I could combine my sporting and family loves in the same weekend activities. The project was a total failure... this is like dealing with an overweight kid by telling everyone that we live in a world without gravity. Or telling a very tall child that we live in a world without doorways. Or telling an albino child we live in a world without sun. It is correct and admirable to grant a child unconditional love even if he or she has trouble fitting into the two clubs — straight boys and straight girls — that arithmetically dominate all societies. But it is a species of lie — and a damaging one, at that — to pretend that those clubs are illusory"

City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co. - "To accept Richmond's claim that past societal discrimination alone can serve as the basis for rigid racial preferences would be to open the door to competing claims for "remedial relief" for every disadvantaged group. The dream of a Nation of equal citizens in a society where race is irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs."

Little girl found - "As my daughters grow up I become more aware that vague generalisations about the one-child policy are not the same as concrete facts about where they were born, and when, and to whom – and the real reasons why their parents could not keep them... She was eight then, and not long after our visit she challenged my version of her abandonment myth: “She could have paid the fine,” she said to me one night... She wanted me to stop making her abandonment story into a fairy tale about the good parent and the evil one-child policy: maybe her mother was a businesswoman who was just too busy to have a baby. Maybe she could have paid the fine"

Thrill of the chaste: The truth about Gandhi's sex life - "Was the Mahatma, in fact, as the pre-independence prime minister of the Indian state of Travancore called him, "a most dangerous, semi-repressed sex maniac"?... Gandhi found it easy to embrace poverty. It was chastity that eluded him. So he worked out a series of complex rules which meant he could say he was chaste while still engaging in the most explicit sexual conversation, letters and behaviour"

Gay man marries transexual woman in Cuban first
Is this a transphobic or homophobic act, given that he is not supposed to be interested in her?

BBC edits out the word terrorist - "Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC's website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as "bombers"... "the word 'terrorist' itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding" and its use should be "avoided", the guidelines say. Rod Liddle, a former editor of the Today programme, has accused the BBC of "institutionalised political correctness" in its coverage of British Muslims"

Porn, Privacy, and BitTorrent: the case of a legally blind man accused of illegally downloading adult flicks

STOMP - Singapore Seen - TV celeb Patricia Mok slams NDP as 'stupid' and 'waste of time' - "As a Singaporean who does she think she is to say this year's NDP is stupid and a waste of time? Singaporeans agree?"
Presumably only Malaysians can criticise NDP

"Why I am vegetarian"

"I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants"

The Morality of Suicide

"People say suicide is selfish. I think it’s selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won’t feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it’s also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day."

--- Bill Zeller (Suicide Note)