Saturday past (passed? Who's checking grammer for me?) I went yet again to Paris to join an old friend of my mom's - Proma. She used to work at Logotex years back, so I saw her last when I was only 10 years old! She now works for a very haute-couture (Canadian started!) fashion house called Ports (those of you from Vancouver may know it from their Ports store downtown)
Anyway, she is now head designer with this company and was in Paris for fashion week to do some work with a few of her colleagues. (The other chief- and senior- designers plus the creative director....basically the most important people in the company so they claimed!)
I joined in on their Saturday outing, perusing the markets, museums and major designer boutiques for a 'research' day, if you will. Basically a day for you Emily...
It consisted of us shopping at boutiques such as Miu Miu, Lanvin, Comme des Garçons, and many other famous designers that are so famous I don't even know who they are....what I do know is that I couldn't even afford the shoelace from their haute couture designer runners....
The girls more than made up for it though, as they easily dropped about 3-4000€ that day. No big deal.
I tried so hard to get pictures of all the 'gay Pahree' designer freaks surrounding me that day, what with their tight jeans, perfectly coiffed hair, shiny shoes, pretty scarves and bells and tassles to boot.....and that was just the boys! The girls were less flashy but equally as snooty looking....
One woman in a boutique where the designer was so famous I still don't recognize his name, well she was all dressed in a white lab coat (?! i know but thats high fashion for ya...) dark black short hair, a beret, shiny jewels hanging from her ears, high heels and bright red lips on an otherwise nude face....god did she ever look Parisienne! I really wanted a photo of her but I was afraid of her....what with my blue jeans and all, she would barely look at me. HA!
None of the boutiques would let you take pictures in fact, and they made that loud and clear! but I managed to sneak the few just to spite them. Take that Pahree!
The girls and I (minus Tia and with Proma on the left) ended our day at a wonderful French restaurant that night, all thanks to Ports! (and look mom, gran and grampa - she looks wonderfully the same as always!)
Back at home Monday night, after we finished dinner around 9pm, which was early for us, we apparantly were all going booling! And no thats not a spelling error. All day Véronique is telling me this and that about 'se soir quand on va au booling....' and I kinda just nodded my head, thinking 'Whatever the hell she's talking about, I guess we're going to some other town tonight for dinner??! Not sure what's going on...' I find out as we all pile into the car as one big happy family, that we were driving to Chantilly, just north of Paris, about 45 mintues from here. And we pulled into the parking lot of the enormous bowling alley! Ohhhhhhh BOOLING I said! Of course!
How bizarre it was to be in a big bowling facility that looks just like this one I remember in Richmond - the loud obnoxious music, teens who aren't old enough to drink yet, and black lights and neon lights everywhere.....ya that kinda place! But take that environment, and turn it all into loud obnoxious teen-oriented FRENCH music! ohh la la! Très cool! I can't even begin to describe the way they say cool here but I love it! It's too funny.
Gran this one's for you, notice the empty lane behind me? I was showing them all how to get multiple strikes in a row! Très cool...
"à votre santé...and to some fine french bière!
Yesterday was back to Paris, this time with Véro and the boys to see a play by Molière. Now, please, mother....tell me why I led such a sheltered life and I don't seem to know who Molière was? Cuz this guy is apparantly pretty damn known!
It was a very lovely afternoon. We walked the streets of Paris, arriving just in time to have lunch in a typical Parisien café...looks like nothing from the street, but inside you go to the back, up a teeny tiny narrow circular staircase to the upstairs where there are a few teeny tiny tables crammed in and a big chalkboard with todays choices on them...tarte this and jus de this.
Afterwards we arrived at the theatre, spectacular no less from the outside already (there isnt a building in Paris that ain't magnifique!) and took our seats soon after.
Le Maladie Imaginaire.The play was lovely, the children in the audience were quite bemused throughout, I chuckled a few times, and understood this: some old man in old fashioned bed clothes thinks he's sick. I'm sure the 2nd girl on stage was his daughter cuz she was a young pretty thang...the one with the fancier black and white dress, coiffed hair, and diamonds hanging from her ears was his wife cuz she kissed him lots and called him 'cherie'. Um....there were at one point 3 characters dressed in crow-looking masks that came and cut his wrist in the middle of the night and held up the vial of blood for all to see....it was red so I knew it to be blood.
Later on, some nerdy boy comes out with his dad and the boy is not impressing the pretty young thang cuz she gets weird expressions on her face when he gets too close to her. Then the man with the curly brown locks looks at her with stars in his eyes and I think they're in love...
At the very end, they sing a pretty song together that makes us laugh cuz he cant actually sing all that well, but nonetheless, for some reason out marches all of them now dressed in black robes and parading the old man on a throne of sorts and they all do a big diddy and bow at least 5 separate times; my hands hurt from clapping, isnt 1 or 2 bows sufficient?
I truly understood about 10% of the play.
....And finishing off the afternoon with a promenade through the streets of Paris, stopping at this big garish building that I deliberately avoided my first day in Paris but Véro wanted to bring me to, because it's one of her faves in the city:
"Le Centre Pompidou was the brainchild of President Georges Pompidou who wanted to create an
original cultural institution in the heart of Paris completely focused on modern and contemporary creation, where the visual arts would rub shoulders with theatre, music, cinema, literature and the spoken word."
Le Centre Pompidou belongs in a North American city, not beautiful historic Paris. I think it's an eye sore, but then....that's the beauty of art isn't it?? To each their own.
(check out the picture on the homepage of http://www.centrepompidou.fr/ to see the building, though there they seem to make it look somewhat more visually appealing...not on a gray wet day pounding concrete in Paris though...)
The boys and I at the fountain of Le Centre Pompidou...that's Edouard on the left, he's not smiling - he 's a grumpy 12year old, and that's Victor on the left, he still has that innocence of childhood thing going on still...he amuses me.
Au revoir from Paris! Sorry for the lack of french this time around....je n'ais pas l'envie!
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