Me and my friend Carly


Me and my friend Coffee

Carly's mom is visiting her in Paris, so I took the two of them on a brief tour of Pigalle and Montmartre the other day. Carly has some more pictures from their visit to my neighborhood — and some much more interesting pictures from their time in Rome and Venice (sans moi, of course) — here. But anyway, the above photos are from when we stopped for coffee at a cafe on the Rues des Abbesses, a stone's throw from Van Gogh's apartment.

I never drank coffee in my life 'til about six months ago. Okay, well, that's not exactly accurate; I was never a coffee drinker 'til about six months ago. I had a sip of my mom's coffee once when I was about ten years old and totally freaked out at how gross it was. It tasted like getting punched in the spine. I vowed never to drink coffee again.

Fast forward about twenty years and I'm in Bosnia in August 2006. Normally I always drink tea to wake up in the morning, but every time I ordered tea in Sarajevo I was served some sort of bright red herbal tea without caffeine*. Turns out black tea is not at all popular and therefore non-existent (or at least somewhat rare) in that region. So I started drinking Bosnian coffee in the morning, which is a pretty neat experience. It's super strong and there's a semi-elaborate ritual to preparing/serving/drinking it. And best of all, it comes with candy! So I got used to coffee in Bosnia and drank it every day for the month or so that I was in the Balkans, but then I stopped drinking it when I returned to France.

Then I went back to America for the better part of a year, and then returned to France last year. For some reason I decided to start drinking normal French coffee this time, part of an effort to try to get used to more typical French stuff and let go of some of my American habits (although I suppose drinking tea is actually a very very English habit; no idea how that happened). I actually like coffee now, and that's great as I'm always happy to acquire a new taste and thereby expand the realm of things I enjoy. Wine was easy, coffee not too bad. Absinthe, now, that's been a tough one.


* Fun fact: The French call the stimulant in coffee (café) caféine and in tea (thé) it's théine. I have no idea why they make this distinction and we don't. Note: It does not follow that the stimulant in Coca-Cola is cocaine. Not these days, anyway.

Lada just returned to Paris after a week in Sarajevo bearing gifts for me! A Bosnian vampire/pulp/gore/sex comic and a Bosnian lollipop with Dracula on it! It's good to have friends who really understand you.

My friend and soon-to-be roommate Alexis (the French rockstar guy whose band I almost went on tour with in '05-'06) and his girlfriend Lada just got back to France after traveling around Bosnia again like we did a year ago. I sent Alexis an e-mail saying I was eager to hear his travel stories. He wrote back saying (in English):

"Oh lord I've got too much things to tell you.... I found 12 skeletons in Bosnia !! Can you believe this ?"

Then he immediately tells me about what books he's reading and what music he's listening to (Kerouac, Lou Reed). Not another word about the skeletons. Can you fucking believe this guy?!

The humbling/scary/depressing part is that I'm sure he's not talking about some cool ancient crumbling skeletons or whatever, but skeletons from the wars in the 90s, probably a mass grave, probably out in the same beautiful countryside that we traveled around in last year and picked flowers to make tea with and worried about landmines. Yeesh. Finding skeletons that are recent is a lot less cool than just plain finding skeletons. But I'm dying to hear the details.

My pictures from the Bosnian Pyramid are up!



I also finished off the remaining couple galleries from this trip. Go take a look at the whole thing! Newest stuff at the bottom. Whew. That's a lot of pictures.

Stop me if you've heard this one. Two Americans, a French guy, and a Bosnian lady walk into a bar festival in a tiny village in the mountains of Bosnia...



WARNING FOR HIPPIES: There is a picture of a sheep who ain't doin' so good. Like, at all.

Sadly, these are some of my least-satisfying pictures ever, taken at an event that's one of my most amazing memories from any trip. I was so much more of an outsider than usual at this particular event, I never felt comfortable enough to get any closer to the action or let anyone seeing me taking lots of pictures. But hey, they're still okay. Oh, and there's also a very brief video.

My pictures from Mostar, Bosnia are up!

I'm finally tackling the last of my big trip photo sets: Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro. The first few chapters are up!

I'm back in Paris. I have six types of currency in my wallet. Slovakian is the prettiest, with Croatian a close second. Bosnian gets the prize, though, for being the easiest to convert in my head; two Bosnian konvertible marks equals one Euro. In Croatia I had to multiply by seven-ish for their kuna to our Euro, in Slovakia it's like thirty-eight Slovakian whatevers to the Euro, and I don't even remember the conversion for Hungarian forints, except it's maybe worth mentioning that the guy on the 200-forint note looks a lot like my old boss. Montenegro, for some reason, uses the Euro, which is insane. I think they're trying to casually sneak into the European Union through the back door while no one's looking. Anyway, man, why am I talking about this? I didn't mean to talk about this.

What I meant to talk about was: Here's the finished art for the LYCOSIA — Apokalipstik promo cd I mentioned a few days ago! The promo cd just gets a two-sided sleeve; no booklet, no fold-out nothin', so this is everything. The digipack for the real release of the album will have the fold-out pages and lyrics and the pop-up rocket and everything. I have a whole lot of work to do.

Front

Back

Disk

( Click for bigger )

Dear diary,

Visited recently-discovered Bosnian pyramid today. Sometimes went over yellow tape and touched things I shouldn't have touched. Expect mummies and skeletons will kill me in my sleep.

Love,
- Manning

Did I mention I'm travelling? In the last week or so, I've been in Marseille (France), Budapest (Hungary), Sarajevo (Bosnia-Hercegovina), Debrovnik (Croatia), Kotor (Montenegro), and now Mostar (Bosnia-Hercegovina). Back to Sarajevo again tomorrow.

Croatia has the most consistently ugly cats I've ever seen.