Does anyone else find that after reading or listening to English as structured by a native French speaker, you start structuring your phrases that way too? I seem to recall Matthew accidentally speaking to the FSHers in English and the UKGLBers in French, and more amusingly speaking English but with French grammar :-)

Anyway...

Thursday 14th: I met up with Gavin at the Eurostar terminal (London Waterloo end) around 9am, where Mr. Geek 2000 was showing off by checking his e-mail on his Psion via a wireless link to his mobile. The computer gods soon punished him for this unnecessary display of hardware, and crashed the Psion's web browser, so he couldn't surf unless he rebooted and erased all his settings.

We separated for the journey, I being but a penniless student having booked one of the cheap seats. I spent the journey reading a novel, and judging by his behaviour for the rest of the weekend Gavin probably spent it shagging one of the trolly dollies and just isn't telling us. We were met at Gare de Nord by Vincent, whose car had been conveniently totalled the day before, so we then took the Metro to the very nice Hotel Cosmo's. I quite liked the hotel, apart from a certain reluctance to provide complimentary soap and/or shampoo, and for having bath towels that I mistook initially for bath-mats: they were provided in groups of three, which is lucky since each one could only manage to dry about a third of your body each.

Having made absolutely no plans whatsoever for my Paris trip, I was then pretty much at a loss as to what to do when Gavin asked what I wanted to do. So we did some walking around Paris, seeing an impressive array of buildings, squares and parks with pretty-sounding French names which were gibberish to me and which I therefore cannot recall. I was picking up by this point that speaking a little French is an asset when coming to Paris.

We had dinner that evening with Vincent and in Chez Tsu (or something like that), which oddly enough for my first dinner in Paris was chinese food. It was excellent, however, even if I my hosts did quickly slip into French for most of the evening :-)

Friday 15th: My birthday, as well as Vincent's and Martin's. The morning was spent doing more wandering around Paris with Gavin, until we met Monsieur Malthouse around 3pm. With Matthew present, our walking grew somewhat more purposeful, as well as a hell of a lot faster; Matthew has some kind of objection in principle to taking the Metro, and insisted on walking really quite long distances that would have been easily covered by a brief and comfortable metro journey. But you *do* get to see a lot more of the city following Matthew around, and the weekend did a lot to regain for me the ability to enjoy the process of travelling itself, rather than merely being at either point on the journey. Also, Matthew was amusingly more knowledgeable about Paris than Gavin, who having lived there for four years should really have been an expert. A sample of the contrasting attitudes to life, compare the following replies to the frequent question "What's that?" from me, while pointing at some kind of landmark:

Matthew: "Well, the French erected it in 1600 to commemorate the battle of Blahgerldeblah, but the statue was replaced in 1730 by the Germans because of an excessive resemblance to the revolutionary leader Bing Le Bang. In 1800 they blew the whole thing up in a fireworks display, and in 1985 Chirac turned it into an ornamental fountain..."

Gavin: "Oh... er... hang on, I used to know... er... it's some kind of statue... commemorating something... or was it somebody... er... Oh! But there's this famous cruising spot round the back of it! And there's a sauna three blocks over in that direction, down the alleyway. And if you're cruising in the summer, there's a great place over there...."

While we're on that subject, the weekend has got somewhat confused in my mind, but I believe that this was the day of the Shop Assistant Case Study #1. Use these case studies as research material for comparing relative attitudes to life in myself and Mr. Wheeler.

We were shopping in and around Le Marais. Incidentally, the Marais is excellent; a gay ghetto without feeling *marginalized*, like a real ghetto. More like some kind of exclusive club for gay people, but several streets wide and long. The streets are full of stunningly gorgeous people -- France will have a major export industry in high cheekbones and smooth skin once gene-trading gets underway -- and shops are full of interesting clothes. In one such shop, I was considering the purchase of a pair of trousers. Having found a pair, I went to the changing room to try them on. The layout of the shop was unusual and such that the stairs leading to the storage-rooms overlooked the changing room. Coincidentally, the moment I walked into the changing room, the shop clerk found it necessary to head upstairs. The pair of trousers I had selected were, when I tried them on, far too tight. I struggled out of them, and as I was putting on my own trousers the clerk headed downstairs once more. Before I had even put my hand on the curtain to leave the changing room to find a larger pair, the clerk said "They're too small? Here's a larger pair," and said pair were duly thrust through the curtain towards me. And indeed, the pair supplied were in a nicer colour and were in fact exactly my size. How lucky that the clerk could tell my size without having to say so.

This *entirely* innocent incident was blown entirely out of proportion by Gavin and Matthew, who seemed to think the only logical behaviour was to return to the shop immediately and (a) ask him out to dinner, (b) take him home and shag him senseless (see previous comparisons to determine whose suggestion was whose).

That evening, we went to what was technically an "Irish pub". This turned out to mean a pub with the decor that some kind of diseased marketing mind who had never set foot in Ireland, far less one of its pubs, would have thought an Irish pub contained: "olde worlde" items of various descriptions, archaic farming implements, and Irish proverbs on the walls. A very high Twee-factor. This is not meant to be an insult to the French -- I'm sure American attempts at Irish pubs are similarly bad -- but it really was quite a ghastly idea.

There we met a large group of FSHers, whose names I would tell you except my brain doesn't "do" memory. Somebody send me a photo labelled with names; I'll recognize faces. It's really quite embarrassing, does anybody know a good technique for improving memory (other than "concentrate harder!")?

We left the pub in the rain, and Person X, who had been sitting on a stone bench, uttered the first of many memorable quotes for the trip: [of the meetup] "Well, that was fun, but now my arse is quite sore," which I thought would be a brilliant phrase to sum up the entire weekend :-). In case you're wondering, Person X is a really nice guy whose name I cannot spell, which is embarrassing since I spent the rest of the evening having an extremely pleasant conversation with him. Matthew, help me out here...

Dinner was good; once again it was not very typical French fare -- it seemed more like an American steakhouse -- but it was very good, although a mistake was made with my steak, and a "medium" steak came back even more raw than Matthew's "bleu" steak, which by reputation isn't actually put in the fire at all: they just get it to post in a foreign language to an English-language newsgroup for a few moments, until it's thoroughly flamed. "Bleu" is a description both of the colour of the meat and of the sound one makes when trying to chew it.

As I said, I spent the evening deep in coversation with Person X, and was actually provided with some excellent advice in terms of how to handle relationships. Thanks!

The next amusing incident was late drinks at , where Vincent performed the first of many miracles, the Parting of the Cute Sea. On arrival at an entirely packed bar full of attractive Parisians, Vincent spoke a few mystical words into the ear of the waiter (who wasn't quite a wooden staff -- he was quite animated -- but was certainly very thin), and magically there was space for 11 to sit. This was first pleasing, then embarrassing when we discovered that 6 or so of the 11 had decided to go home :-) But we had a good time anyway, and jogged home in persuit of Matthew's power-walk around 2am.

Saturday 16th: This began distressingly early for me; hoping to sleep until 11am as is my wont, I instead found myself woken long before, to meet Matthew for breakfast at a wonderful street cafe conveniently located just outside a Metro exit. Given the afore-mentioned attractively body-fascist-conforming nature of the average Parisian, this makes dining there a combination breakfast and fashion show, and all the more enjoyable as such.

We were joined by Gavin, and then went to meet members of FSH at near the Pompidou Centre (look! I remembered a place name!). Unfortunately, having broke the ice with my trouser-purchase of the previous day, I was into shopping mode, and I was soon toddling off down the street from the cafe to the soon-to-be-infamous Village Yoyo, a stupidly-named shop full of wonderful clothing. I had to make a mercy dash to a cash machine in order to secure a 10% discount on what was essentially a bulk purchase, but I returned in a new sweater with bulging bags and a lighter wallet, feeling quite pleased.

My memory has seen fit to insert a large grey area at this point, but after more walking around and lunch at yet another street cafe (with a bizarre system for purchasing: line up, order, go to another line behind the first line, pay, come back to the first line, collect your order) Matthew separated from us to meet up with Laurence. Despite the fact that Gavin had booked the ticket, he managed to get Laurence's arrival time wrong by a few hours, so Laurence was not actually greeted at Eurostar. An hour or so later, my bulging bags were weighing down my delicate / lazy bastard hands, so I magnanimously decided to return to the hotel to find Laurence and take him back to meet up with the group and incidentally drop off my shopping.

Arriving at my room, I began to feel my newly-increased age, and having laid down on my bed to read a book waiting for Laurence and Matthew to return, I closed my eyes for a second and woke up an hour later. By this time Laurence was more than ready to go, so off we went, supposedly to meet up with Gavin et al for the Techno parade.

That was always going to be an optimistic goal, and since the metro stop near where we were supposed to meet them was closed due to crowds, pretty much impossible. Laurence and I managed to console ourselves by following the legions of attractive techno-loving boys, and following along behind one of the music trucks (yes, Manu, "float" is an accurate translation) for an hour or two.

By the time we got back to the hotel, Martin had arrived and had even managed to become angry -- good going in such a short space of time -- since there turned out to be no record of his pre-booked room. This apparently led to Gavin (who had also made the booking) being uncharacteristically firm [0] with the hotelier, which resulted in Martin being provided with a room on the second floor twice the size of the one he had requested, for the same price. Nice.

Dinner that evening was (for me at least) my first really excellent French cuisine in Paris. Although my memory refuses to inform me what I ate, I recall enjoying it. Once again, after-dinner drinks were at the scene of the Parting of the Cute Sea, and we once again left in the early hours of the morning, by which point my inadvisedly light clothing had my teeth chattering from cold. And despite much semi-demi-pseudo-obvious prompting, no one offerred to warm me up :-/

Well, *I* thought I was being obvious.

Sunday 17th

Another morning, another excellent breakfast of hot chocolate and 'pain au chocolat' with Matthew, another succession of attractive Parisian men exiting the Metro. We met up with Gregoire and a selection of people whose faces are crystal-clear in my mind (I hope) but whose names I won't be able to recall, for the purposes of seeing the catacombs.

After spending some time in a queue idly rating the attractiveness of the other members of the queue on a body-fascist scale of 1 to 10 (a game we'd invented the previous day: "look, there's a 7... ooh, an 8, an 8!"), we entered the catacombs. I spent the next hour and a half getting progressively more spooked-out by a continuous succession of solid walls composed of the mortal remains of... people. This was what had me spooked. If you look at the catacombs objectively, it's just an interesting excavation with often quite attractive structures and decorations made of a calcium-based material mixed with stone and the occasional morbid inscription (in French, so not really very frightening for me). However, I couldn't help thinking of every skull as a birth, a life, and a death, celebrated, enjoyed and mourned by friends and family; I kept wondering about the relationships between people and what their lives were like. Does their family know they're here? Are these two skulls related? Would they have met when they were alive? Was that crack a previous injury? Was that hole accidental when building the wall, or was that what killed them? Would they be upset, knowing the box that held all their hopes, thoughts and dreams for 60 years is now just one element of a crude heart-shaped pattern on a wall? Is the entire purpose of life merely to end up as a funny-shaped brick?

If I wasn't convinced before, I'm now even more certain that I wish to be cremated.

Following the catacombs, with ancient grey mud on our shoes, we found a restaurant open late and had an excellent light lunch, heavy on the cheese in honour of Gregoire :-)

In our visit to the catacombs, we had been unaccompanied by Mr. Wheeler, who had gone shopping instead. Upon regrouping, some prompting revealed the details of Shop Assistant Case Study #2, in which a certain individual

1. Went shopping
2. Found a top
3. Found a shopkeeper
4. Got the top
5. Got the shopkeeper (half an hour later)
6. Wore out the shopkeeper (and then took a shower).
7. Wore the top out (being a different "top" to that described in #6)

As Martin said, compare and contrast with Shop Assistant Case Study #1.

Dinner that night was yet another excellent affair with excellent company, and then it was off to my natural habitat: a club! The queen turned out to be great; big and well laid-out, and with a clientele who were attractive to the point where you found yourself looking for people *without* great cheekbones and without attractive jawlines, just for the rarity value. At this point any coherent narrative on my part must cease, since I heard a Whitney Houston song followed by a Madonna song, and it's well known that this combination knocks my already-dicey mental faculties completely offline for several hours while I enjoy myself. Hopefully I wasn't the only one :-)

I got chatting to a very attractive young man (in English) for a large part of the evening. I learnt a great deal during the conversation, namely that The Queen's highly-attractive clientele are supposedly vetted at the door for general attractiveness by a certain woman, and also for sexuality -- Lotharre (the young man) complained of being unable to enter with his fag hag since they were taken for a straight couple. Incidentally, if you begin to hear the phrase "scene queen" being used in Paris, I may be to blame, since I spent quite a lot of time describing the concept and Lotharre seemed to think it a very useful phrase.

I got back to the hotel sometime around 8am... alone...

Monday 18th

So I had an as-late-as-humanly-possible, dear-god-just-let-me-sleep morning, and awoke just in time to check out. We probably did something interesting that day -- walking around, seeing sights, I believe I may even have done yet more shopping -- but I certainly don't recall it with any clarity.

SUMMARY (just to be tidy)

Between good food, good company, a beautiful city full of even more beautiful people, interesting history, good shopping AND excellent dance music, I think I have found my third home (after Trinidad and London) in Paris. Its ranking, should I learn enough French, is likely to improve. Thanks to everyone on FSH, if you are reading, for a great time -- I would have cross-posted this, but I fear the flames would be far too much and I am completely incapable of tranlating :-)

Now, invite me back!

Seldo.

[0] Yes, the opportunities for fnarrs are endless. Let's get a fnarr-count for this message.