Fun for Strangers!

I'm all funned out.  So today I thought I'd do fun stuff for strangers for a change.

So I:

Number 28:  grinned like a lunatic at every person I passed in the street.  People tend not to smile much in Paris, so I made a concerted effort to go against the grain and switch my regular dour Parisian grimace for a big fat smile.  The sight of me prancing down the street, meeting people's eyes with a idiotic smile on my face, freaked some people out a bit I think.  I got a fair few double-takes and quizzical looks ('do I know you, crazy woman?'), but a fair few smiled back.  Hooray!

Number 29:  gave the regular busker at my metro stop a big tip.  The poor bugger is there everyday, usually playing the same mournful rendition of 'No Woman No Cry' on his gee-tar.  He had paused to scratch his bum and was looking a bit lost in life when I chucked the money in his case.  He perked up at the sight of the euros though and sent me on my way with a few peppy chords from "Buffalo Soldier".

Number 30:  decided to stop being mean/stingy/charity-fatigued and give everyone asking for money, money.  I am shocked every day by the number of people begging in the streets of Paris.  It is really sad!  Some days it is impossible to walk 10 metres without someone asking for money or food or cigarettes.  And it is easy to get sick of it all and just march on by or learn to avoid eye contact and pretend they are not there.  So today everyone who asked got money and I put something in every plastic cup I passed.

Number 31:  stuck a funny picture inside the toilet door at school - the bathrooms at Parsons are a pretty grim affair: boring beige walls with absolutely nothing on them - no pictures or anything to read to take your mind off how cold the toilet seats are this time of year!  C'mon people, it's an art school!

Number 32:  put a monster in all my neighbours' mailboxes telling them what a swell neighbour they are!

Number 33:  poked notes in the rafters of our apartment for future tenants to find.  Truth be told I pinched this idea from previous tenants, who had done the same.  Romain spotted both letters which were dated from September 2011 - the first one had tips on where to buy a good dessert in the neighbourhood and the second one was a bundle of metro tickets with a note saying 'enjoy Paris'.  How nice is that??  So I have replenished the metro ticket stash and poked a few notes of my own in the nooks and crannies.

The metro ticket letter we found from the mysterious M & Y!

And that's it.  33 fun things done.  Finally!  So now I can enjoy my birthday in peace without having to worry about having to do anything fun ;-)

Le Bougnat

Nice and Quiet

A quiet day today.

But I did enjoy -

Number 24:  staying in my pyjamas til midday and polishing off the great book I'm reading.

Number 25:  giving the apartment a thorough clean - dusting, washing, tidying and vacuuming.  I was kind of forced into it because of the polystyrene snowstorm, and while it may not have been exactly fun, it was nevertheless cathartic.  There was one really fun bit when I found my missing sock under the sofa!  hooray!

Number 26:  creating these two creatures from a Galleries Lafayette winter catalogue



Monsters in Love in the Snow

 



Number 27:  eating copious servings of tartiflette (good solid french winter comfort food) at a friend's place while trying to keep up with the extremely fast french that was flying around.

"I'm looking for a poof"

This is the sorry phrase I recently had to use with several shop assistants.

In French, beanbag is “pouf” – tricky to pronounce, not quite ‘poof’ but something like puf, using the ‘u’ sound from rubrix cube.

Anyway, I was determined to find one.  Our apartment has great big full length windows that let the sun stream in during the day, and that offer a great view over the street below with all the shoppers and tourists and fancy inhabitants of Le Marais going about their daily business.  I decided it would be ideal if I could plonk a beanbag next to one of the windows and while away the hours with a book and a cup of tea from my great people-viewing vantage point.

But to find a beanbag in Paris is impossible!  After learning the necessary vocabulary I set out on the streets in search of my pouf.  I tried all the likely spots – department stores and furniture stores, home-wear outlets and bedding places.  Nothing.  Not a pouf in sight!

After weeks of searching I decided I was destined to remain pouf-less.

But then an early birthday package arrived from Mum – a pouf!  Hooray!  A pouf sans filling of course (I can’t even imagine how many thousands of dollars it would cost to post a puffed pouf from Australia to France).

And so began my next quest – with an equally unfortunate phrase to ask the bewildered shop assistants

“I’m looking for balls for my pouf”.

"J'ai besoin de billes pour remplir mon pouf".

The search took me across three Quartiers and finally to the fabric district near Montmartre.  It is a great area packed with dozens of fabric or ‘tissue’ outlets, the biggest and grandest and most famous of which is the Marche Saint Pierre:  like a giant Frenchy-fied Spotlight, with a long and glorious history and oodles of charm.  Creaky wooden staircases, a big clunky elevator, ream upon ream of fabric and everything to fulfil your wildest haberdashery dreams.

So the quest, which ended with a nice fat pouf in my lounge room and a floor covered with a million white polystyrene billes produced many fun moments:

Number 20:  going on a crazy chase all over Paris, haranguing stressed shop assistants with my nonsensical requests.

Number 21:  finding my beloved billes!  A great mountain of them – proudly on display between reams of red and black sequinned material (the Moulin rouge is just around the corner!) and shiny leopard print velvet.

Number 22:  going home and filling my poof with billes – who doesn’t like the feeling of digging your hands into a mass of beanbag balls?

Number 23:  flopping down on my lovely fat pouf.  Aahh.

 

 

St Martin's Day

Fun Thing Number Seventeen:  Followed crazy-man's advice (see previous post) and ordered the 'daily special' at the Mozart Cafe - which was roasted goose with red cabbage and dumplings - in honour of St Martin's Day.  It was seriously, seriously, lip-smackingly good!

Hooray (again) for crazy-man!

Sorry goosey.

I went on to Wikipedia to have a gander about all the goose-i-ness.  I couldn't really find anything about eating geese on St Martin's Day though.  I was starting to lose faith in crazy-man but then I found this article on a restaurant website:

"We have known for decades that St. Martin’s Day (11 November) means goose. We eat goose in any form and any quantity. But why exactly goose? There is a wide range of legends and traditions in connection with St. Martin’s Day. According to the original legend Martin was a medieval saint who later became the patron saint of beggars and soldiers. Because of his good deeds e.g. once he offered his cloak to a beggar, Martin was appointed to be bishop. However, he was so humbled by this honour that he hid in a stable full of geese. The geese with their loud honking made so much noise that his whereabouts were soon uncovered and he was ordained as bishop."

At least it is along the same path.  But really, it seems to be an equally unlikely version of events to me. 

Number 18:  Bought an excessive amount of chocolate at the duty free shop at Vienna airport - because it was called the Heinemann Duty Free Shop.

How could I not buy 4 boxes of Mozart Herzl?  The really funny bit was explaining to the cash register dude why I was so excited to be buying all the chocolates - it's me! it's my name!  I even had my passport out to prove that I wasn't crazy.  Or maybe that's exactly what did make me look crazy:  Heinemann is probably the most common surname in Austria for all I know.

This is the reception I got when I arrived in the store - they really lay it on for their brethren.

Wilkommen Frau Heinemann!


Number 19:  Ate too many of my duty free chocolates while watching Sissi - the film about the last Austrian Empress.  It was all a bit sickly.

Sucker Love

Fun Thing Number Fifteen:  ate a slice of sachertorte (which sounds a lot like 'sucker-tort' to my un-Austrian ears) at the Hotel Sacher - home of the original sachertorte...

Fun Thing Number Sixteen:  took a crazy-man's advice and got $4 back-door tickets to the Viennese Opera to see La Traviata.

We were accosted by said crazy-man as we stood on a windy footpath yesterday evening, grappling with an oversized street map.  He was about 60 with a white beard (no moustache) and was decently dressed, if not a little bit scruffy and eccentric-looking:  maybe something like a once-famed Viennese bassoon player who had fallen on hard times.

He came up to us, tried on a few languages until realising English was the best fit and then proceeded to berate us in his very thick and bitey Austrian accent.  His particular vexation was the fact that we were trying to read a map (?).  'You tourists!'  he said.  'You're all the same!  You stand there with your big maps flapping about.  Look!'  he said as he wrenched the map from me and jabbed his finger at the middle.  'This is where you are - the city centre.  But don't you see!!??'  'See what (you crazy old bugger)?'  I asked.  'There is a square around this part.  You must know that when you see a square on a map it means that there will be a magnified version of that part somewhere else.  Now look!!!'  he exclaimed with great theatrics as he turned the map over.  'Here in the middle of all these terrible adwertisements is a clearer version of that map!'.  'Um thanks' we got out, before he continued his tirade 'I see every day tourists standing around with these big maps.  Lost!  All of them lost!'  'It must really annoy you, then?' I offered.  He thought for a bit.  '...Yes.  It does'.  'Ok, thanks for the tip' we said and started to leave. 

But oh no!  We weren't going anywhere just yet.  He fixed us with a chubby-cheeked grin.  'Where are you going?'.  We weren't going anywhere in particular, we had become a bit disoriented in the maze of grandiose buildings around town, and we just wanted to get our bearings.  So we told him so. 'Well there are many wery interesting things to see around here'  and so began crazy-man's rambling overview of Vienna's tourist attractions.  He was a little hard to follow but anytime that he saw us giving each other a side-ways, let's-get-the-hell-out-of-here glance he'd change the topic to something completely different, in a hope to retain our attention and company for a little bit longer.  I felt sorry for him.  And deciding he wasn't about to slit our throats and ge-schnitzel our livers, we humoured him for a while.  He was telling us about some Russian tsar who had visited Vienna but couldn't find accommodation to his liking, so had bought and renovated a massive building to stay in during his Viennese jaunts.  Deciding he liked the neighbourhood, he then bought another enormous hotel across the road.  According to crazy-man, both these extremely exclusive hotels are now filled with Russians, up to no good.  'But if you can speak a bit of Russian, you can join them at their tables and drink very good wodka at their invitation'.

He then jumped to a story about St Martin's Day (which we were in trouble for not knowing about).  Apparently Martin was a Viennese priest who was posted to the city Tours in France.  Martin didn't want to go to Tours so he hid in the church grounds.  Or it could have been the palace grounds, I can't remember.  Anyway he was rooted out of his hidey hole by a flock of geese, who honked and squawked and alerted his church superiors to his whereabouts.  And then he was sainted because of his love for Vienna and hatred for France (?).  I can't be sure this is the correct version.  Besides, I've been to Tours and it's really not that bad.  Anyway, according to crazy-man, now on St Martin's Day - the 11th of November - everyone in Austria eats roasted goose.  This then led to a long-winded and very imprecise story about how he had once travelled 40 km south of Vienna just to eat a goose.  But when he was there his family drove off and left him behind (I'm not surprised!). 

And then, finally, he dropped this gem of wisdom (with no obvious link to the previous tale):  'go to the Opera House just before the show begins, and head around to the back door.  You can buy standing-only tickets for the price of a Coca-Cola.  Forget the Coke!  He cried  'Go to the Opera!'  And with that he burst into a puff of smoke and glitter and disappeared.

Or rather we decided we'd had enough, and so smiled and thanked him and scurried off.

We did, however, go to the Opera House and we did get standing-only tickets for the price of a Coke and saw La Traviata.  The seats ranged from around $50 - $250 each and were all sold out anyway.  It was really truly amazing.  If not a bit leg-numbing. 

Hooray for crazy-man!

 

 

Freitag Fun

Fun Thing Number Twelve:  I learnt the days of the week in German.  Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag, Sonntag.  Mittwoch is definitately my favourite.

Fun Thing Number 13: Created this couple of loved-up beasts out of Austrian tourist brochures:

Fun Thing Number 14:  Hung out in the foyer of the Hofburg Palace, watching all the fancy people in their fancy clothes filing past on their way to some Friday night soiree upstairs in one of the many massive rooms.  The foyer was full of towers of champagne bottles and ridiculously shiny sports cars, with price tags on them, so they were presumably for sale.  I imagine this conversation between two posh rich people:

Posh rich lady:  "Great waltz darling! thanks for the invitation"

Posh rich man:  "You're welcome dear!"

Posh rich lady:  "Oh rats, looks like we've missed the last tram home."

Posh rich man:  "Nevermind, I'll just pop downstairs and buy one of those lamborginis.  That'll do the trick!"

Posh rich lady:  "Rah!  Jolly good then. Let's be off."