Spooky Scary

Happy Halloween!

Photos taken on this hallowed eve at Cimetiere Pere Lachaise.

Including this photograph of a black cat who crossed our path.....

Kava Naet

We recently invited a few friends over to our little apartment for a kava night.  About half the people we invited we had met in Vanuatu, so they knew what to expect.  The other half had come along ready to give it a go.  What troopers!
 

A fifth floor Parisian apartment doesn’t quite have the same ambience as a Port Vila nakamal – but we did our best to channel some Vanuatu vibes by putting out on display every Vanuatu relic we’d brought over with us in our luggage – baskets, tamtams, posters, plastic flower leis and flags a-plenty.  We had Vanuatu tunes playing at an appropriately muted and tinny level in the background and, of course, we also had our lovely big kava bowl and coconut shell drinking cups which kept it pretty authentic. 

 

 

For the ‘washem maot’ (the food you stuff in your mouth after kava to wash out the foul taste) we had peanuts and mango (as Pacific as we could find at the bobo market around the corner) and some other fruity offerings.

 

The kava was ‘hariap kava’ or instant kava powder that you mix with water.  We bought it just before leaving Vanautu.  At $60 for 100g it was ‘sas lelbet’ (a bit expensive) so we were expecting it to offer a reasonable kick.

 

 

We mixed it up until it looked about right and then starting handing the shells around.  The biggest problem was spitting.  After a shell of kava it is a necessary custom to have a big hocking spit, to get the sediment and taste out of your maot.  Of course, a regular Vanuatu nakamal offers plenty of dark corners and tramped-earth nooks to do this.  We didn’t really want big globs of spit in the corners of our living room, so after each shell everyone traipsed off to the bathroom for a bit of a spit in the sink.  Yum.

Romain gives hariap kava a big thumbs up

Kala sharing a shell with one Man Ambrym

 For seasoned kava drinkers, the verdict was that it was ‘olraet’ but no where near as good as the fresh stuff.  For the newbies, they all reckoned they felt the kick, especially one friend who kind of quietly rolled up into a ball in the corner and didn’t say much for the rest of the night.
 

Storian i swit tumas

 

 

Inside 46 rue de Poitou

But Will My Shoes Catch Rabies??

French sales assistants have an undeserved reputation of being rude and unhelpful.  All sales assistants I have come across in the past couple of months have been extremely pleasant and abiding.  That might be because they sensed my desire to part with copious amounts of money to re-wardrobe myself after three years of grotty pacific living (see earlier entry). 

All assistants that is, except shoe sales assistants.  What a breed of discourteous yobs!  Amazingly unhelpful, all of them!, no matter which shop I’ve been into.  One particularly revolting sort roused on us the other day for trying on shoes (in a shoe shop!).  Apparently he had expected us to wait for him to deign to approach us and offer his assistance.  We had, in fact, been standing practically under his nose for 10 minutes waiting for him to wrap-up the great time he was having with his friends who had come to visit him at work. 

Then in another shop we were in, a gang of shoe sales assistants yelled at some poor hapless shopper because he was wearing his hood in their shop.  He scampered out of the shop, not sure what had just happened.

Unfortunately I have had too many dealings with shoe sales assistants of late because I really need a new pair of shoes, or ‘baskets’ as they call them in France.  Today I found a pair I liked the look of in a shop outside the Georges Pompidou centre.  I asked the pretty surly sales assistant if she would mind please bringing me a pair in my size.  With a slight eye-roll she sauntered off and returned with a pair.  I tried them on, but they felt a bit tight.  I thought they might stretch a bit with wear so I asked her in French:

“Will my shoes catch rabies?”

“Huh??”  she said.

“They are a bit small now.  But will they catch rabies??” I insisted.

Romain was dying of laughter.  “Will they get bigger?”  He asked her.

Of course, that is what I thought I’d asked but got it totally wrong. 

The answer was no (to both!) so I went a size up.  She softened up a bit after my bizarre enquiry and I decided she was alright afterall, and worth my euros.

My shoes!

Hightop Golas in 'ox blood'.
So hot right now.

 

 

Exactement Commes Les Autres

Against our better judgement, we ate dinner in the back of a parked kombi van the other night.  It was the ‘gimmick’ at a pizza restaurant in our neighbourhood called the Pink Flamingo.

 

We have passed the van many times over the past couple of weeks, tsk-tsking the silly tourists all crammed in there.  But all it took was a few bottles of wine at our place on Saturday night and we became those people!

 

 

Eight people trying to eat eight enormous pizzas in a tiny kombi van was as squishy and impractical as we had expected.

 

It was all jolly good fun though.

 

 

 

 

 

The Lives of Others

We all live on top of each other in Paris.  Romain and I are crawling around together in apartment of 33 square metres – which was about half the size of our living room in Port Vila.  There are 6 like ours stacked on top of each other in this building.  Our friend who share-houses in the next quartier has lived in a room for 4 years that is not even big enough for his bed.  The sides of the mattress curl up the walls.  Not surprisingly he is craving his own space and is trawling the market for an apartment.  He’s found one for 15 square metres (that’s the whole apartment – not the bedroom) that he’s seriously considering buying.

Paris is packed with people.  In fact, it is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet – comparable to Hong Kong and New York – with some really squishy areas cramming 100 000 people into each square kilometre.  By comparison, the population density of Sydney is 2000 people/ km²  and Canberra:  400/km²

With all the closeness, you become acutely aware of your neighbours’ habits.  We are very aware that our neighbours above us like to stay up late, tap-dancing on the hard wood floors in stilettos and giving piano recitals to their drunken friends at 1 am.   The people who share our bedroom wall laugh a lot (at us?).  We have two loud but lovable Americans living in the building who haven’t quite figured out that the conversations they have in the stairwell are clearly audible to everyone.  We’ve recently carved out an identity for ourselves as ‘the leaky dudes’ as our shower has been leaking directly into the apartment below, instigating a lot of visits where we stand around together in our neighbour's living room watching water fall from their light fittings.  It has been a great bonding experience.

But even more interesting than guessing at people’s lifestyles based on the noises coming from their apartments or brief glimpses into their soggy lounge rooms, is actually watching people in their apartments.  Which we do a lot.  It’s great!  Directly facing us are dozens of great big windows full of people living their lives.  And everyone leaves their curtains wide open as a tacit invitation to look on.  It is so much more interesting than television – especially at night time where everyone turns their lights on.

The old man across from us pretty much passes his whole day in a flannelette shirt at the kitchen table doing crosswords.  There is a gay couple next door to him who spend a lot of time cooking together in their undies.   The apartment above them is full of piles of clothes and one tired looking house maid in a proper maid uniform who seems to wander around amongst the stacks not achieving a great deal.  There is another apartment on the top floor that looks to be at least 10 times the size of ours.  It has an awesome floor to ceiling book case, great big paintings and fancy lights.  The very groomed and coiffed middle-aged lady who lives there often comes to peer (a bit forlornly) out the window or water her geraniums.  Above her in the attic is a creepy dude who often sits, slack-jawed with his head pressed against the window, watching something further down the street.  We suspect he might be the posh lady’s son who she has kept locked in the attic since he was a kid.  In another attic window there is a tiny apartment with an old grandfather clock and canvasses stacked up everywhere.  A youngish student-type girl lives there – probably with her mattress curling up the wall too.

It's all very entertaining.  IAnd in an act of generous reciprocity, we also leave our curtains wide open.  To keep things interesting for our neighbours, I occasionally moon the crossword man and Romain has taken up nude break-dancing.